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  • 12 Years a Slave as a Neo-Slave Narrative
  • Stephanie Li (bio)

Film adaptations of historical texts inevitably raise questions about how true they are to their original sources. What has been lost or gained in the translation to the big screen? Steve McQueen’s powerful 12 Years as Slave, based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 account of his abduction into slavery, has drawn the scrutiny of historians and literary critics as well as other more vocal detractors who in dismissing it as “torture porn” presume that it privileges sadism over realism.1 McQueen insists that 80% of the film’s dialogue comes directly from the book, and in fact many of the most horrific scenes have direct textual corollaries (“Where It Hurts”). When Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, first finds himself in chains, he insists that he is a freeman, drawing the wrath of his captor who beats him with a paddle until it breaks. Similarly, the film’s most harrowing scene, the brutal whipping of Patsey, a slave owned by the vicious Edwin Epps, for visiting a neighboring plantation to obtain the soap that her own mistress refuses to give her, is described in painful detail in Northup’s narrative. Such parallels demonstrate that the film takes seriously its source material though inevitably there are discontinuities between the two works. These discontinuities are not, as some have suggested, disavowals or trivializations of the historical record that exploit those who suffered in bondage.2 Rather, these differences and cinematic embellishments highlight McQueen’s unique vision and his notable concern for exploring the experiences of black women.

12 Years a Slave is best understood through one of the most important African-American literary genres of the past 50 years: the neo-slave narrative. First identified by Bernard Bell as “residually [End Page 326] oral, modern narratives of escape from bondage to freedom” (289), neo-slave narratives have become most closely identified with texts like Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976) that feature enslaved protagonists and which, as Ashraf H. A. Rushdy explains, interrogate the “relationship between the history of slavery and the social significance of contemporary racial identity” (22). Though she does not use the term neo-slave narrative, Morrison provides especially insightful commentary on the evolution from texts written by antebellum slaves to her own literary project. She observes how the autobiographical accounts of former slaves were subject to editorial pressures, their urgent political mission as well as the social conventions of nineteenth-century white readers. By necessity, Morrison notes, in these texts “there was no mention of their interior life.” This critical absence becomes for Morrison a call to literary action as she states, “My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’” (2293). Her task is thus to speak the unspeakable: to describe both the violence that is sublimated or ignored in slave narratives as well as to articulate the silenced interior life of enslaved men and women.

From its opening scene, 12 Years a Slave dares to rip back the veil Morrison speaks of, but the veil that most concerns McQueen is not the one involving the interior life of Solomon Northup; rather McQueen’s real focus is on the interior life of enslaved women. The film begins with a nighttime encounter between Solomon and an unnamed female slave who lies beside him. She guides his hand to her vagina, and in a wordless exchange he brings her to orgasm. The woman then turns away, crying. Importantly, she never appears again in the film. McQueen has said of this striking scene, “Slaves are working all day. Their lives are owned, but those moments, they have to themselves. I just wanted a bit of tenderness—the idea of this woman reaching out for sexual healing in a way, to quote Marvin Gaye. She takes control of her own body. Then after she’s climaxed, she’s back where she was. She’s back in hell, and that’s when she turns and cries” (George). As McQueen explains, the scene is fundamentally not about Northup but instead about this woman “tak[ing] control of her...

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