Prof. Drd. Daniela DorobanţuThe migration of blacks to America that began with the transatlantic slave trade, a forced journey of savage horrors is being understood in new ways. If it brought an unwilling people to a strange land, it also initiated the transformation of an African cultural consciousness into an African American one. This forced migration created the contradictory experience of neither being in one world nor welcomed in another. Migration and exile, crossing and even transgressing boundaries has become a natural arena for exploration by the novelists.
These black Africans sold into slavery, nevertheless, carried within them to the New World aspects of their culture that were meaningful and which could not be obliterated in any way. After all, the African was a real traveler through space and time and became the permanent link between Africa and the Americas.
They brought with them a particular topos that recurs throughout black oral narrative traditions and which can be traced ultimately to the Fon and Yoruba cultures of Benin and Nigeria.
The absence of writing among the Africans and its presence among the Europeans is explained by a myth which William Bosman claims to be an answer to the situations.
Thus, it is told that God created the races, but he created the African first. Because of his priority, the African had the first election between knowledge of arts and sciences or writing and all the gold in the world. Because of his avarice, he chose the gold. That is why he was punished by a curse: never would Africans master the fine art of reading and writing.
However, the ex-slave who managed “to steal” some learning from his master was bent on demonstrating to a skeptical public that he could read and write and, by doing this, he was able to transgress the realm of liminality imposed by the white culture hegemony. His text is an answer to the master’s attempt to transform a human being into a commodity. It is obvious that the only way that responded to this abuse was the production of literature. His text becomes the central arena in which persons of African descent could establish and redefine their status within the human community.
James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative is the first text to use this trope of the Talking Book:
“My master used to read prayers in public to the ship’s crew every Sabbath day; when I first saw him read, I was never so surprised in my life, as when I saw the book talk to my master, for I thought it did, as I observed him to look upon it, and move his lips. I wished it would do so with me. As soon as my master had done reading, I followed him to the place where he put the book, being mightly delighted with it, and when nobody saw me, I opened it, and put my ear down close upon it, in great hopes that it would say something to me; but I was very sorry, and greatly disappointed, when I found that it would no speak. This thought immediately presented itself to me, that every body and every thing despised me because I was black.”
This is a compelling anectode, but with a very profound meaning. The book had no voice for Gronniosaw and it simply refused to speak to him or with him.
Why? Well, probably, I should say, because the book constituted a text in which the black man found no echo of his own voice. After all, a more “natural” explanation might have been that the book refused to speak to him because he could not speak Dutch, the language of the enslaver on the ship that transports the newly captured slave to Barbados, the ship’s destination.
What remains consistent is that black people realized they could become speaking subjects only by inscribing their voices in the written word. The trope of the Talking Book became the first revised. It was the first step to turn the oral black culture into a written culture. The main challenge was to make the book finally speak, but speak with a black voice this time.
These black Africans sold into slavery, nevertheless, carried within them to the New World aspects of their culture that were meaningful and which could not be obliterated in any way. After all, the African was a real traveler through space and time and became the permanent link between Africa and the Americas.
They brought with them a particular topos that recurs throughout black oral narrative traditions and which can be traced ultimately to the Fon and Yoruba cultures of Benin and Nigeria.
The absence of writing among the Africans and its presence among the Europeans is explained by a myth which William Bosman claims to be an answer to the situations.
Thus, it is told that God created the races, but he created the African first. Because of his priority, the African had the first election between knowledge of arts and sciences or writing and all the gold in the world. Because of his avarice, he chose the gold. That is why he was punished by a curse: never would Africans master the fine art of reading and writing.
However, the ex-slave who managed “to steal” some learning from his master was bent on demonstrating to a skeptical public that he could read and write and, by doing this, he was able to transgress the realm of liminality imposed by the white culture hegemony. His text is an answer to the master’s attempt to transform a human being into a commodity. It is obvious that the only way that responded to this abuse was the production of literature. His text becomes the central arena in which persons of African descent could establish and redefine their status within the human community.
James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s Narrative is the first text to use this trope of the Talking Book:
“My master used to read prayers in public to the ship’s crew every Sabbath day; when I first saw him read, I was never so surprised in my life, as when I saw the book talk to my master, for I thought it did, as I observed him to look upon it, and move his lips. I wished it would do so with me. As soon as my master had done reading, I followed him to the place where he put the book, being mightly delighted with it, and when nobody saw me, I opened it, and put my ear down close upon it, in great hopes that it would say something to me; but I was very sorry, and greatly disappointed, when I found that it would no speak. This thought immediately presented itself to me, that every body and every thing despised me because I was black.”
This is a compelling anectode, but with a very profound meaning. The book had no voice for Gronniosaw and it simply refused to speak to him or with him.
Why? Well, probably, I should say, because the book constituted a text in which the black man found no echo of his own voice. After all, a more “natural” explanation might have been that the book refused to speak to him because he could not speak Dutch, the language of the enslaver on the ship that transports the newly captured slave to Barbados, the ship’s destination.
What remains consistent is that black people realized they could become speaking subjects only by inscribing their voices in the written word. The trope of the Talking Book became the first revised. It was the first step to turn the oral black culture into a written culture. The main challenge was to make the book finally speak, but speak with a black voice this time.
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