Sunday, August 31, 2014
These 12 years of horror also have their beauty
STEVE McQUEEN –
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH – BRAD PITT – LUPITA NYONG’O – 12 YEARS A SLAVE - 2013
This
book has just been adapted into a film. In fact it is the second time.
The
first time was in 1984 under the title “Twelve Years a Slave Solomon Northup's Odyssey.”
The more recent adaptation, “12 Years A Slave,” kept the title of the book and
is based or connected to this present edition of the book.
This fact brings a question to mind that is more
and more asked among people: is that interest for the past of African Americans
in the recent period the sign of a deep change in the cultural and mental
approach of the Blacks and slavery in the United States, or is it only a fad
reflecting the fact that the President of the United States has been black since
2008 and will be till 2016? I do not have an answer to that question and I lean
towards a twofold approach: the fact that the President of the United States is
a black man has some influence on the United States as a whole and every
American in particular, and on the other hand Americans have always cultivated
their historical dimension probably because they are all of them, except
American Indians, uprooted immigrants who were transplanted into a new
continent, by force or by choice. All Americans have thus to face this
important period in their past: slavery that started for the English colonists
in 1619 and ended for the Americans in 1865, though it continued in some form
of apartheid or other till the end of the 20th century if not till
today.
There could be a third side to the question
reflecting a change among the Blacks themselves. Since the beginning of this
century the Blacks influenced by the mostly Christian NAACP and those
influenced by the Nation of Islam have developed an approach of their heritage
as Post Traumatic Stress. They have two names for this. The First group calls
it Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome and they are essentially centered on the
concept of reparations, hence a collective approach, neglecting the
psychological individual problem and hence admitting more or less, like Booker
T. Washington, that they have no knowledge of their ancestry. The second group
calls it Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder and they are centering their approach
on an individual procedure within group processing to help each individual and
his group to understand and step out of the problem by re-assessing and
revalorizing their past generations and their heritage going as far as possible
within slavery itself.
The recent adaptation of the book (first
published in 1853) is outstanding in spite of the fact that it cuts a lot of
stuff from it. It shortens the legal battle at the end for example but it gives
a clear vision of what the Trauma of slavery was and how the Blacks managed to
go through it. Never did they really drop their belief that surviving was not
worth suffering for. The film gives some fundamental elements that enabled the
Black to survive under the worst possible duress and violence. First of all the
very planters and slave owners for reasons that have not yet been explained on
the Anglo-Saxon side of slavery actually preached their slaves the Bible and
Christianity. In the film one planter uses it to elevate their morals and
ethical vision, and another uses it to justify his violence against them. But
in a way or another they transmitted to them, more nilly than willy, willy-nilly
anyway a religious vision that claimed hope and that eternal life was won by
suffering in this world. The slaves turned this belief around into a
clandestine and underground call for rebellion (openly stated in the next
world) in the name of freedom doubled with a tremendous patience in front of
the real situation that was a sign of some complicity with God himself. One
song, in front of the grave of an old slave, is just that double message.
Booker T. Washington explains in his autobiography Up From Slavery:
“Most of the verses of the plantation songs had
some reference to freedom. True, they had sung those same verses before
[emancipation and the end of the Civil War], but they had been careful to
explain that the “freedom” in these songs referred to the next world, and had
no connection with this life in the world. Now [after the full emancipation
after the Civil War] they gradually threw off the mask, and were not afraid to
let it be known that the “freedom” in their songs meant freedom of the body in
this world.” (p. 21-22)
The other elements that enabled the slaves to
keep their sanity for one and their dignity in their survival for two is the
direct negation of what Willie Lynch had said: deprive them of their language,
deprive them of their culture, deprive them of their religion. He thought that
by doing that he would be able to negate their humanity. The Slaves just had to
learn another language (the interest of their own masters), English, French or
Spanish, and then this new language enabled them to retain and develop their
mental power and intelligence. They replaced their old religions with
Christianity though they often invested in this Christianity some old beliefs
and myths producing Voodoo, for example and other local Africanized version of
Christianity. They retained their rhythmic culture and nature and they transformed
any task performed on the plantation under duress and violent overseeing into a
singing class, a rhythmic experience, a unique cultural survival (enabling them
to keep the rhythm of the work, hence satisfying the interest of the planter
and escaping whipping in the evening). Actually it is this cultural survival
that has produced the music of the Blacks in America
The film shows that mental survival, at the cost
of psychological trauma, and we can thus understand that even when a slave
wanted to die in order to escape his or her suffering, the survival instinct,
multiplied by their own survival experience, will be stronger and will take
over and enable him or her to go on one more step or two. The main character,
Solomon Northup, is the acme of that survival attitude in how he manages to
never forget who he was and still is, in spite of his having to hide his real
nature and identity behind the imposed name and identity of Platt.
After the lethal selection of the Middle Passage,
the Africans who had survived crossing the Atlantic
had managed to develop this survival stance that will enable them to enrich our
world today with one of the greatest African heritage we all share in music.
But that has not erased the Post Traumatic
Slave/Slavery Syndrome/Disorder because this PTSS/D is individual and has to be
treated individually. Their survival stance is collective but the consequences
of slavery are essentially psychological and individual. This will explain why
Black education advocated by Booker T. Washington and some others did not solve
the PTSS/D problem: it did not even address the question. Neither did Marcus
Garvey succeed because he only considered the collective level of the problem.
In fact NAACP is not the best approach for the problem and it is among the
Muslims of the Nation of Islam that today we find the most realistic and effective
cure for that PTSS/D. Strangely enough this film, more than the book, does not
really cover the Post Traumatic Stress of Slavery, even for Solomon Northup who
yet manages to ask for forgiveness from his wife and children, though he did
not do anything wrong: his twelve years as a slave have transformed him into a
humble fault-carrying individual instead of standing like a liberated and hence
regenerated victim.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 7:56 AM 
