Slave Trader's Ledger. Special Collections at Wofford College//flickr.cc(by-nc-nd)
How can we know what it was like to be enslaved? When it comes to the transatlantic slave trade, there is no simple or straightforward answer. Historical documentation is dominated by the perspectives of slave owners and colonisers, the experience and voice of the enslaved sometimes glimpsed through court proceedings or oral history. We might turn to slave narratives – autobiographical accounts that slaves gave of their experience – some of which have been dramatised for film or television, such as 12 Years a Slave. However the novelist Toni Morrison cautions against an unquestioning acceptance of these accounts in her essay The Site of Memory.
Morrison argues that slaves’ interior lives were excised from the stories they told, their narratives having had their objective and emotionally restrained style dictated by the popular taste of a slave society that did not wish to read of the horrors of slavery: “In shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it”, she writes, “they were silent about many things”. Morrison views her task, as a contemporary writer, as being to access that interior life, “to rip the veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate’”. She describes her approach to this task as “a kind of literary archaeology”, an imaginative excavation of the past and a reconstruction of past lives from what remains.
