CAPTIVITY, ENSLAVEMENT, RESISTANCE
The roots of African American literature lie across the Atlantic Ocean on the continent bearing traditions in word, song, and cultural aesthetics. African culture richly rooted and intellectually vested in language, music, religions, art, architecture, agriculture and aquaculture, storytelling, foodways, healing, and textiles which survived and continue to inspire literary genres and texts to this day. The result is a shore-to-shore phenomenon. To be clear, African voices started a rough draft of this literary collection during all stages of a complex journey that began in freedom and happiness in Africa and ended in a transatlantic nightmare. The first section of this text introduces those literary creations curated to represent Africans brought to the Eastern shores of the American colonies and traces the lived experiences of captivity, enslavement, and resistance in a variety of genres such as slave narratives, essays, and speeches.
In the category of the slave narrative, there are several widely known and accepted such as the confessional, the fugitive, and more recently from the contemporary period, the re-visioned slave narrative. An overall impression of slave narratives points to the form of autobiography or memoir using a variety of rhetorical strategies such as description, formal and informal register English, allusions, a record of the real time period or a re-visioning from a current perspective imagination, incidents of travel trauma, the use of writing to recover and heal, and a recounting of adventures of capture, escape, and survival as common characteristics.
To begin, the opening chapters of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano published in 1789 chronicles a pre-enslavement captivity experience of Equiano and his sister which allows readers to identify the characteristics of the captivity narrative. Much like its colonial American cousin, the African American captivity narrative shares the same elements of capture by a foreign or unknown identity, separation from family and culture, imprisonment, fear, and the struggle to survive physically and psychologically. Equiano makes effective use of thick description and interior monologue to relate the experience of kidnapping, physical and cultural stripping with the loss of language, traditions, and family. Additional titles illustrate this genre. The Confessions of Nat Turner; The Narrative of Frederick Douglas; Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs; Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson; Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by Ellen and William Craft; and The Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave round out a variety of selections for reading and analysis.
In other titles, we find authors who provide a show-and-tell of the experience of enslavement directly from their own feathered quill and ink pens or those who dictated to a sponsor. From the poetry and recitations of Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), and George Moses Horton (1798-1884), nicknamed “The Slave Poet of North Carolina” (1798-1880) we learn of the desires for freedom, attitudes towards the urban and plantation slave owners, and expressions of protest and resistance in overt and subverted forms. As a sidenote, Jarena Lee (1783-1864), is regarded as the first black female minister in the African American Episcopal Church denomination founded by its leader Richard R. Allen. To her we owe development of the spiritual autobiography characterized by the use of personal anecdotes, biblical scriptures, meditation, and criticism of unjust social and religious acts. To further look beyond Sojourner Truth, readers may also look outside this publication at the speeches and editorials written by Maria W. Stewart, a free black woman, (1803-1879) for William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. These voices are among the earliest who expressed in their own way that the lives of 18th and 19th century Africans in America mattered in terms of gender equality and social, cultural, and political justice.
The work of Jupiter Hammon (1711-1806) which must be recognized for its historical contribution to African American literature as the first published in America (Wheatley was published abroad in England). Equally noteworthy is James Monroe Whitfield (1822-1871) who is recognized as a major voice for civil and natural rights and the first to call for the formerly enslaved to emigrate from the United States. To learn more about the spirit of resistance and radicalism , readers may seek out David Walker’s Appeal (1829) and Martin R. Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852).
Though limited as enslaved persons, some literate and some not, Africans in America produced an abundance of texts that have survived the centuries. Among the gifts left to us and growing out of the need to use the power of words for liberation are rhetorical strategies best suited to resist the vile institution of slavery. The various forms of the slave narrative help to tell the stories in autobiographical and memoir. Those early orators such as Sojourner Truth provide a feminist and abolitionist stance. Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton provide a brief glimpse into the poetry genre. While all cannot be represented in one section, these selections provide a few examples of captivity, enslavement, and the spirit of resistance.