The Power of the Neo-Slave Narrative Genre

One of the many reasons and necessities for the mass movements of peoples, war leads them all. It is estimated that when the final numbers of the displaced come out—those running from persecution, conflict, and generalized violence in today's world (including refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons)—the number will far surpass sixty million. Sixty million. And half of all refugees are children. I don't know the number of the dead.

—Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others

Do the slave narratives in fact represent a distinct literary genre? If not, why not? If so, what are its distinguishing characteristics? Are these characteristics relatively uniform throughout its history? What are the sources of variation and change? Is change great or small during that history? Are the narratives a popular or an elite literary form? Do they represent a species of autobiography? Why (and how) do they begin? Why (and how) do they come to an end? Such questions converge in the cluster of meanings implicit in the term authority: the condition of begetting, beginning, continuing, and controlling a written text. In Hegelian terms, the issues are parentage, propriety, property, and possession.

—John Sekora, "Black Message/White Envelope"

Since the last decades of the twentieth century, writers across the Black Atlantic have attempted to recover elements of the narrative structure and thematic configuration of slave narratives. The main reasons for this seemingly widespread desire to rewrite a genre that officially lost its usefulness with the abolition of slavery are the will to re-affirm the historical value of the original slave narrative and to reclaim the humanity of the enslaved by (re)imagining their subjectivity. While the initial questions John Sekora asks of antebellum slave narratives (our second epigraph) can be starting points in the exploration of almost any literary genre, he identifies the issues of authority and property as applying mostly to the writing that had freedom as its immediate telos. Indeed, slave narrators often took great liberties in the telling of their presumably distinct and peculiar stories of bondage and escape, shaping their narratives in such a manner as to produce the greatest political and emotional effect. Even if some of the antebellum narrators did not own their own bodies, they managed to have some authority in constructing the version of their lives they wished known. Because of such silences in slave narratives due to authorial compromises to white audiences and to self-masking from a painful past, the neo-slave narrative works as "a kind of literary archeology," as Toni Morrison describes it, a need to access the interior life of slaves via her imagination to bear witness to "the interior life of people who didn't write [their history] (which doesn't mean that they didn't have it)" and to "fill in the blanks that the slave narrative left" ("Site of Memory" 192, 193).

Writing about neo-slave narratives, Ashraf Rushdy defines such "palimpsest narratives" as fiction in which a contemporary African American character is "forced to adopt a bi-temporal perspective that shows the continuity and discontinuities from the period of slavery" (5). In these narratives, "the present is always written against a background where the past is erased but still legible" (Rushdy 8). The genre has been deployed to redress the gaps and misrepresentations of dominant history through narrative to fulfill what Clarisse Zimra describes as "the ethical imperative of inventing a past that would otherwise disappear" (60). These gaps and silences reflect the fact that part of the history of slavery is irretrievable. In such an approach to retelling history, one is forced to relive the past by becoming immersed in it. Rememory, as Morrison defines it, is an active process of reconstitution that involves passing on the story in such a way that it becomes real, embodied, lived through the storyteller's mediation. Attempting to differentiate the slave narrative from autobiography, James Olney identifies symbolic memory as the process by which people not only repeat their past experience but also reconstruct that experience, imagination becoming a necessary element of...