Creative Challenges to Captivity: Slave Authorship in Black British Neo-Slave Narratives

ABSTRACT

Two centuries after the first autobiography by an enslaved African was published in London, black British authors revisit the historical issue of slavery by imagining the life stories of (former) slaves. They develop the African American genre of the neo-slave narrative by focusing on Britain’s involvement in slavery as well as on the importance of slave authorship to the historical emancipation process and the present-day ‘rememory’ of slavery. Framed by a synoptic review of the politics and aesthetics of the slave and neo-slave narrative and a preamble discussion of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, this article discusses the metafictional emphasis on slave authorship in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, one of Britain’s pioneering neo-slave narratives, and in two more recent examples produced in the context of the 2007 commemorations of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade: Jackie Kay’s poetical radio-play The Lamplighter and Andrea Levy’s metafictional novel The Long Song. These three black British neo-slave narratives do not just grant (formerly) enslaved men and women the opportunity to narrate their own life stories but also take an increasingly overt interest in their narrators’ autobiographical endeavours, and thus highlight the creative challenges that this genre of fictional life writing may present to literal and figurative modes of captivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Authorship
• neo-slave narrative
• black British fiction
• historical fiction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Elisabeth Bekers is senior lecturer of British & postcolonial literature at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research focuses on literature from the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in image and knowledge production, canon formation and intersectionality. Currently she is working on neo-slave narratives by black British women writers and, as part of an international network, on the ways in which Europe has been imagined by authors from afar. She is the author of Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010) and has co-edited several volumes and special issues, including Brussel schrijven/Écrire Bruxelles (ASP-Vrije Universiteit Brussel Press, 2016), Imaginary Europes (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Taylor and Francis, 2015), Imaginary Europes: Literary and Filmic Representations of Europe from Afar (Routledge, 2017), and Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (Matatu, Rodopi 2009). She is member of the steering committee of the international Transnational Life Writing Network, co-director of the international Platform for Postcolonial Readings for junior researchers in the field, and editor of an academic website with biographical and bibliographical information on Black British Women Writers (www.vub.ac.be/TALK/BBWW).

Notes

1. In this article, I respect Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's (2001) preference for the broader term ‘life writing.’ Firstly, in comparison with the more loaded term ‘autobiography’, it is ‘more inclusive of the heterogeneity of self-referential practices’ and comprises also forms of life writing that were historically assumed to ‘have lesser value and were not [regarded as] “true” autobiography’, the slave narrative quite tellingly being the first example listed by Smith and Watson (4; 3). Secondly, the term's inclusion of all writing that ‘takes a life, one's own or another's, as its subject’, whether this writing is ‘biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential and therefore autobiographical’ (4) supports my own discussion of slave life writing across the fiction/non-fiction continuum.

2. Notable exceptions are Ledent (1997); Ward (2011); Muñoz-Valdivieso (2010, 2012). Nevertheless, writers like Dabydeen, D’Aguiar and Phillips have written multiple texts that can be qualified as neo-slave narratives.

3. The African-born and London-based former slave Olaudah Equiano actively supported the British abolitionist movement, informing the readers of his first-hand account as well as the audiences he visited on his book tour across Britain of the plight of millions of fellow Africans. Some critics (most notably Vincent Carretta) question the authenticity of certain passages of Equiano's narrative, in particular his African childhood and his brutal abduction from his home village in the African hinterland to a European slave fort at the coast and across the Atlantic. Even if Equiano was indeed born in the US and drew on the experiences of other slaves rather than his own to describe the horrors of the trans-Atlantic trade triangle's Middle Passage, the text remains a successful indictment against the enslavement of Africans and a powerful early example of black self-expression in English.

4. In the course of my discussion, I will justify this relatively broad definition; in particular notes 8 and 11 elucidate how my understanding of the genre relates to existing definitions.

5. Anglophone neo-slave narratives generally are produced in the English-speaking African diaspora which has emerged in North America, the (Anglophone) Caribbean and Britain as a result of the triangular trans-Atlantic trade and subsequent migrations of black population groups within the (former) British Empire. The genre has also appeared in other European languages (including Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish). Most neo-slave narratives are written by authors of African descent, but examples by white authors include J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), to which I return below, and more recently Joseph Knight (2003) by Scottish author James Robertson and Property (2003) by American author Valerie Martin. Although white American authors William Styron and Daniel Panger adopt the slave's point of view in their respective novels The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Ol Prophet Nat (1967), Rushdy (1999) pointedly refrains from labelling them as neo-slave narratives; instead, he clarifies (3–95) how the questionable politics of Styron's popular novel, in particular the author's appropriation of the slave's voice, contributed to the ensuing boom in African-American neo-slave narratives, which ‘return to and reassess the cultural moment behind the production of [Styron's novel]’ (18) at a time when historians too are ‘[beginning] to take a revisionary look at slavery’ (Beaulieu 1999, 5).

6. Some neo-slave narratives are inspired by the lives of actual slaves, such as Morrison's earlier-mentioned novel Beloved and De zwarte messias, the 2013 Dutch translation of the yet to be published novel The Black Messiah, in which Nigerian-born author Chika Unigwe recreates Equiano's life. For some British examples, see note 9.

7. The conventions of the slave narrative are so well-established that Olney (1984) is able to draft a ‘Master Plan for Slave Narratives’ that lists essential textual and paratextual elements, from the requisite opening sentence to the obligatory appendices (50–51). The intertextual references to the slave narrative render the neo-slave narrative highly conscious of its generic roots and its own fictionality, endowing these narratives with a metafictional dimension that is made more explicit in the texts under review than it generally is, as I will show in my discussion.

8. It is therefore not entirely surprising that most encyclopaedia entries, surveys and comparative studies, even though they recognise that the genre, in terms of temporal setting, ‘has evolved to include texts set at any time from the era of Reconstruction until the present’ (Smith 2007, 168), (implicitly) restrict their scope to narratives set in the Americas or even in antebellum America (e.g., Aljoe 2006; Beaulieu 1999; Bell 1987; Rushdy 1999; Smith 2007).

9. The lives of historical slaves in Britain are reimagined in British fiction, but also in theatrical and poetical genres, including in Phillips's Cambridge (1991), D’Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts (1997), Dabydeen's A Harlot's Progress (1999), Dorothea Smartt's Ship Shape (2008) and Robertson's Joseph Knight (2013). Other British neo-slave narratives rewrite the lives of slave characters from British canonical literature, e.g., Joan Anim-Addo's Imoinda (2008) and Laura Fish's Strange Music (2008). For American examples see Smith (2007).

10. For instance, in Sherley Anne Williams’s 1986 novel, a white author working on an instruction guide for slave masters is keen to take down Dessa Rose's story of rebellion; in David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981) a black history professor investigates his own slave ancestors.

11. This emphasis on the slave's self-expression is suggested in Bell's original definition of neo-slave narratives as ‘residually oral, modern narratives of escape from bondage to freedom’ (1987, 289). A decade later, it is the only characteristic of the genre that Rushdy makes explicit when he speaks of ‘contemporary novels that assume the form, adopt the conventions, and take on the first-person voice of the antebellum slave narrative’ (1999, 3). However, since many neo-slave narratives radically complicate the linear plot and single, fixed narrative situation of the historical slave narrative, recent definitions (e.g., Aljoe 2006, 673, Smith 2007, 168, and my own in the present article) have tended to follow Beaulieu's thematic focus on ‘[c]ontemporary fictional works which take slavery as their subject matter and usually feature enslaved protagonists’ (1999, xiii). The genre's formal diversification, also noted by Aljoe (2006) and especially by Smith (2007), appears to render Rushdy's restriction to prose fiction untenable and warrants a broadening of the existing definitions to narrative art in general, so that also dramatic, poetic, and filmic imaginations of slavery as well as generically hybrid and intermedial approaches to slavery and its legacy may be included in the genre. I hope to demonstrate he pertinence of such a generic amplification by including in my present discussion of black British neo-slave narratives Kay's The Lamplighter, a dramatic poem that is not explicitly labelled a neo-slave narrative in existing discussions by Angeletti (2013), Nadalini (2011) and Tournay-Theodotou (2014), even though they implicitly or explicitly acknowledge it is ‘in dialogue with [the genre]’ (Nadalini 2011, 52).

12. All references are to the 1986 Penguin edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

13. Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1993) pleads for a contrapuntal reading of the literary classics, by which he means a way of reading canonised literary texts that would reveal their deep implication in imperialism and the colonial process and that would expose the consolidated vision that justified Western imperialism (78).

14. All references are to the 2008 Vintage edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

15. Emily's experiential report evokes the style and content of historical West Indian travel journals, including the accounts of Lady Nugent (1834) and Mrs Carmichael (1833); Cambridge's life narrative borrows its direct style and vivid experiential descriptions from historical slave narratives; his refined speech and experiences bear a stark resemblance with Olaudah Equiano's. See O’Callaghan (1993), and especially Eckstein (2006) in his chapter ‘Caryl Phillips, Cambridge’ (63–115), for the juxtaposed discussion of novel and source fragments and detailed discussions of Phillips's combined technique of montage and pastiche.

16. All references are to the 2008 Bloodaxe edition and appear in parentheses in the text.

17. Throughout her play, the Scottish-born Kay specifically implicates Scotland in Britain's history of slavery (see also Angeletti 2013).

18. Robinson Crusoe is presented as a genuine autobiography and draws on existing travel and captivity narratives. One can even speak of a generic cross-pollination between fictional and non-fictional life writing when Equiano, several decades later, models his autobiography on Defoe's popular novel (see Ogude 1984).

19. All references are to the 2010 Headline Review edition and appear in parentheses in the text.