Persons of Colour and the Travel: 12 Years a Slave as the Travel of Blacks

Abstract

Every travel is a search for the exploration of the self. And black travels are no different. The paper is an attempt to explore the agonizing and tormenting journey of the blacks from Africa to the American mainland, where the effect of the travel on the blacks are given an extra emphasis. The historical taintedness of travel writing genre along with the intensity and the challenges of the black travel are deliberated here. The much celebrated slave narrative 12 Years a Slave cannot be just limited as slave narrative. There is a catalyzed orientation and disorientation of the body and the self in these travel writings. It is in fact the life journey of every black in America. More than the struggles the book opens up a strong cultural and political discourse, which defines and re -defines the self and identity of the blacks. Keywords— Black travel, discourse, identity, self, slave narrative, travel. “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page” Saint Augustine With the emergence of Black Travel Movement and Travel Noire, the black travel has become an act to satisfy the wanderlust. And thus, it reflects the shared interest, the stories of new friendships, the community feeling among them and above all the epic experiences of the new liberated international travel. From being the vulnerable, they were slowly moving towards the limelight. And everything turned out to be more and more of “blacks friendly”. Then on, the ‘black travel’ has become a matter of serious study by all section of academicians, especially with the emergence of these black travels. Prior to these celebrated travels of the Blacks, there were instances of excruciating, tedious and inhumane transportation of Blacks as commodities and goods from the African mainland to various parts of the world. For so long the major themes around which black travels revolved were that of the racial discrimination, the social reproduction of the fear of racism even in the story telling and the safety instructions, race-related travel choices and above all the concerns of racism. Thus, through the repeated occurrences of many typecast images, the theme of racism has become a cliché in most of the black writings, especially in the travel writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The brutally simple and subtly complex concept called slavery is all-pervasive in these writings. But, from the immovable socio-political positions, the blacks slowly moved to the contours of creative mobility. Slave narratives are normally considered as a social document about the oppressive condition of slavery and were the first occasion to voice the concerns of the blacks. Pumla Dineo Gqola, in the book What is Slavery to Me? says about the slave narrative that “we place the slave at the centre of modernity and produce our histories and philosophies from the vantage point, relocating the figure of the slave from silent victim to eloquent critic” [1]. Most of the slave narratives are inevitably the narrative of their travel. Slave narrative has even generated its own subgenre of travel narrative. In 12 Years a Slave, a memoir of Solomon Northup, he explains how the slaveholding institution limits the life of the black slaves and the resilience and the determination of the black slave to live the life to the fullest possible extent. The acts of self-protection by Northup is not just an attempt for the survival rather it also points to his realization of the real march on to his own self. The life depicted here is the journey of the soul, from freedom to shackles and then to the real freedom of the soul and the self. International Journal of English, Literature and Social Science (IJELS) Vol-4, Issue-4, Jul – Aug 2019 https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.4416 ISSN: 2456-7620 www.ijels.com Page | 1033 The agonizing and tormenting journey of the blacks from Africa to the American mainland is an oft discussed area in literature, especially through the prior mentioned slave narratives. But the journey of the blacks does not end there. It was just the beginning. They were relentlessly on the move. In a recent account, critics discussed extensively about the black travel after the traumatic American slavery, especially their wanderings after the famous Emancipation Proclamation. For them like Coles , “after the holocaust of American slavery, racism, and the postReconstruction terror against African Americans , many African American writers, artists and activists were forced to leave the United States”[2]. In his opinion, it is the prominence of the lifethreatening conditions in the United States that became the catalyst of the migrations to African countries, Canada and Europe. Thus, before celebrating the much welcoming “Travel Noire” and similar movements, it is an imperative to study the black travel or the ‘coloured travel’ during the slavery and afterwards. In the studies related to the travel writings of the blacks, one of the oft repeated themes is their search for the self, though knowingly or unwittingly. This search for the self, likens to their life struggle. The plight of the blacks of the duality of their African American experiences is incessantly deliberated in this context. The present discourses on the black travels are associated with concepts like emancipation of the enslaved community, reidentification of the self and worth of the blacks and even the regeneration or selfreliance of them. According to W. E. B. Du Bois, in his book The Souls of Black Folks: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with secondsight in this American world, a world which yields him no true selfconsciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the outer world.... One ever feels his two-ness an American, a Negro... two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, this longing to attain selfconscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.[3] The cultural discourses of the black travel so far engraved with the tales of captivity and the acts of the dehumanization of the coloured by the whites. The travel here is an attempt to explore the selves of the blacks. The black travel is an invisible genre in travel literature as they do not necessarily confine to the constraints and the conventions of the genre. And also the travel writings of the white men observed a racial insensitivity. The travel’s “historical taintedness”, as said by James Clifford along with the “unequal encounters, overdetermined routes, contested frontiers, bureaucratic regulations” got an inevitable turn with the emergence of the black writings [4]. These slave travel narratives were the meaningful representation of the blacks as against the whites. It encompassed the intensity and challenges of the black travel. Just like the ripening process of the anti-colonial resistance, as said by Franz Fanon[5] ; here it was a work that came out during the ripening process of the peak of abolitionist movement in United States of America. And the interpretation and ‘gaze’ of the blacks to it was much different from that of the writings of the whites. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote, “it is a singular coincidence that Solomon Northup was carried to a plantation in the Red [R]iver countrythe same region where the scene of Uncle Tom’s captivity was laidand where [Northup’s] accounts... form a striking parallel” [6]. The 1789 book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African Written by Himself, “the prototype of all subsequent slave narratives” as called by Henry Louis Gates Jr.[7], is a firstperson testimony yet he considers himself as an accidental tourist. But for many critics including Cathy N. Davidson, “there is no more trenchant eyewitness account of late eighteenthcentury slavery than the work of Equiano”[8]. It is an intersection of slave narrative and travelogue. Though the discourse is that of a free man, and that the narrator considers himself a tourist, it least limits us from considering the work as merely one that of the struggles of the blacks. The rhetorical deliberations are inexorably defining the embodied discourse. The recurrent images of the slave narratives or their memoirs are getting its shape here. The images of the slave ship, the concept of hole, the growing relevance of that imagery of hole, image of a trickster figure getting appropriated to the later discourses from this work; and that is the significance of the work. Solomon Northup, a freed man of New York, finds himself in a symbolic “hole” after he travels by ship to Washington DC for a fiddling engagement and is then captured and sold into slavery for twelve years. The “hole” image also changes into a “womb/tomb” symbol on landing International Journal of English, Literature and Social Science (IJELS) Vol-4, Issue-4, Jul – Aug 2019 https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.4416 ISSN: 2456-7620 www.ijels.com Page | 1034 the 1851 Narrative by Henry Box Brown. Thus, the black narratives deliberate on its own symbols and imagery which clearly reflects the challenges and the temperament of the black writings. Just like the other travel narratives or slave narratives in 12 Years A Slave, he discusses about the disorderly mobility of the blacks, especially at the time of enslavement, and also about the mundane realities of their travel and life. They are compelled to drench into the path and ways that they dislike or hate. They are clueless about the places to which they are taken to. The uncertainty and insecure nature of their life is well reflected in such travels. The same is the case with Northup, especially during his time as slave. The major theme in slave narratives and in 12 Years a Slave is tha