The Slave’s Rebellion: A Review
Sam Omatseye
Words and images can lie or tell us grand truths, depending on who we are and from what angle we view them.
In his new book, The Slave’s Rebellion: Fiction, History and Orature, Adeleke Adeeko examines how history and literature about the Black experience have suffered distortions over generations. Highlighting the urgency to always free the Black past from the prejudice of writers, he examines some iconic stories of the slavery era and tells us how a tale written by a master can distort what the slave did.
Professor Adeeko, who teaches African literature at the University of Colorado, does not focus on the African American experience alone, but sweeps across the entire Black world, including Africa and the Caribbean. He identifies certain personalities in history and tries to demonstrate how their portrayal by Caucasian authors may contradict how Black writers may view them.
By the same token, it raises question as to how contemporary heroes may be examined three or four generations from now, both in history and literary mediums.
One of the historical figures Adeeko probes is Nat Turner, the slave who tormented his masters by fomenting a rebellion for which he paid the ultimate price. In The Confessions of Nat Turner, a writer known as Thomas Gray claimed to have collected verbatim accounts from the rebel as to why he carried out the rebellion. In a novel of the same title, William Styron insinuates himself into the psyche of Turner.
In the both examples, Turner comes across as an obsessed messianic figure taking his cue from the book of Revelations. He sees himself as fomenting the rebellion to save the slaves because that’s what the Lord asked of him. In Styron’s novel, he is portrayed as a having an erotic obsession with a white female.
Adeeko is asking in his book, what story shall we believe? What historical material shall we latch onto since Turner did not write down his impressions himself? Styron’s book drew tremendous flap from African American critics who saw it as a projection of a stereotype. Yet a prominent African American writer, James Baldwin, approved of Styron’s book.
Such portrayals of historical figures compel us to wonder how contemporary events and personages will be projected in the future. How, for instance, will history view the feud among Martin Luther King’s children over how to run the King’s Center in Atlanta? How will a biographer depict the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, or Reverend Al Sharpton three generations from now?
How will the response to Katrina be characterized by historians and playwrights? Will they be sympathetic to the Bush administration or to the local authorities? Will they see it as another example of the impotence of the welfare system, or will it come across as a revelation of the social and racial inequities of the American society?
Adeeko also examines African American experience after the Emancipation through Charles W. Chesnutt's novel, The Marrow of Tradition. Here he demonstrates how whites, unhappy with the new-found status of Blacks, began to see themselves as the oppressed. One tool they deployed was language.
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They began to use the kind of language Blacks used in antebellum America to describe their own fates. He noted that “well-placed white men plot, without any self-conscious sense of irony, to free their city by destroying Black professionals and by compelling working-class Blacks to end their unbecoming arrogance.” It was a sort of reverse abolitionism.
This kind of story resonates in today’s world. For instance, the recent race riots in France were presented differently by those who live in the underbelly of Paris’s slums and the mainstream society. The media both in France and U.S. saw it as the outburst of fanatics, while the immigrants saw it as a protest for equality and social justice.
Feminism within the African American experience also enjoys some searchlight. Adeeko looks at Dessa Rose, a novel that excavates for us the often ignored role of Black women in the age of slavery. The novel, written by Sherley Anne Williams, focuses on a female slave rebel. But the author wrote the book to remind contemporary readers that the civil rights struggle is not only a male preoccupation. Williams shows that Black women were the moral mainstays of the slave community and also the source of continuity.
In the Caribbean, the book looks at prominent Marxist CLR James, who tried to draw a parallel between the slave rebellion in Haiti and the nation’s war of independence. He also relates the slave rebellion to contemporary struggles against oppression of various types.
The book goes to Africa too, using the Yoruba society in southwestern Nigeria as an example. Adeeko also ponders why African literature has shied away from examining the experience of slavery. He notes that when the trans-Atlantic slave trade was going on, Africans also had a tradition of slavery. But the tradition was different from what existed in North America.
Part of the reason that Africa seems to shy from the topic may be a sense of guilt. Africans as well as Americans and Europeans participated in the slave trade; it would not have succeeded without local connivance. Adeeko refers to a local Yoruba poetry called Oriki, which tends to dig deep into local history and lore to tell the story of the people.
In the later chapters, Adeeko looks at a character known as Efunsetan Aniwura, who has been savaged as a childless tyrant and oppressor of her slaves. Another account presents her in more humane terms, attributing the negative picture to men who had cast lecherous eyes on slaves she protected from them.
The Slave’s Rebellion is a book that tells a story of the Black world trying to tell its own story. The drawback of a book like this arises from its essential strength. By taking a broad look at the Black world, it offers a variety of points of views from the U.S to the Caribbean to Africa. But it may not be as deep as a book that looks at Haiti, or Mississippi, or the Yorubas alone. But in The Slave's Rebellion, variety is its own sufficient spice. |
