The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

The Reemergence of the Slave Narrative Tradition and the Search for a New Frederick Douglass

Laura T. Murphy

Though he had publicly condemned the injustice of slavery in black communities and churches, Frederick Douglass had no idea when he attended an antislavery convention in Nantucket in the summer of 1841 that he would soon find himself standing on stage, stammering nervously, as he recalled his experience of enslavement in the South (Douglass [1855] 1969: 358). Following Douglass’s testimony, William Lloyd Garrison, by then a widely known abolitionist, rose to the podium and used Douglass’s experience “as his text” (Douglass [1855] 1969: 358). Garrison stood before a “choice collection of friends of human rights” (Garrison 1841: 3) and argued that Douglass was clearly “‘every inch a man,’ ay, a man of no uncommon power, who had yet been held at the South as a piece of property, a chattel, and had been treated as if he were a domesticated brute” (May 1869: 294). Garrison saw Douglass as the human face of all that he had been asserting in his abolitionist work: that people of African descent were indeed human and that the institution of slavery was nonetheless a legal system intent on dehumanizing those very same people. Douglass was soon convinced to join Garrison and his colleagues in the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society on a lecture circuit traveling around the US, where his narrative provided the living substantiation of his own political claims, as well as those of other abolitionists.

Douglass, of course, was not alone. Many fugitives from slavery made the courageous choice to tell their stories publicly and publish written narratives for the cause of abolition. At least 65 slave narratives were published in the United States between 1760 and 1865 (Andrews 1993: 78; Foster 1979: 21–22), and if we count shorter antebellum narratives published in journals and magazines and the Works Progress Administration narratives collected in the 1930s, perhaps as many as 6,000 first-person testimonies reveal the intimate experience of enslavement in the US (Foster 1979: 21). In England, a similar narrative tradition developed, represented most famously by Olaudah Equiano, whose narrative was employed by Thomas Clarkson in his pleas to abolish the slave trade at the turn of the nineteenth century. As Lynn Hunt argues in Inventing Human Rights,

Capitalizing on the success of the novel in calling forth new forms of psychological identification, early abolitionists encouraged freed slaves to write their own novelistic autobiographies, sometimes partially fictionalized, to gain adherents to the budding movement. The evils of slavery came to life when described first-hand by men such as Olaudah Equiano.

(2007: 66)

Narratives were also written about enslavement in South America and the Caribbean.

The slave narrative tradition, which is experiencing a renaissance in antitrafficking circles today, is a rich and compelling case study for the way first-person testimony can have significant impact on global politics and international law. Like antislavery activism, the slave narrative tradition developed alongside rights discourses, finding its roots in petitions for rights inspired by the revolutions of the late eighteenth century (Davis 2014: 63–65) and enduring as a popular genre throughout the nineteenth century until the goal of slavery’s legal abolition was accomplished one country at a time. Indeed, the first-person narration of the individual’s experience of violence, crisis, or injustice is “one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims” (Schaffer and Smith 2004: 1). Experiential narratives provide the evidentiary testimony that supports challenges to institutionalized and systemic inequalities. Whether on the public lecture circuit or in written narratives, the slave narrative allowed the fugitive to “write himself into the human community through the action of first-person narration” (emphasis in original, Davis and Gates 1985: xiii). The act of narration, then, is a form of human rights activism, asserting both the humanity of the enslaved and their rights as humans.

The abolitionist movement is often credited with igniting a global commitment to human rights. “It is hardly surprising,” suggests Paul Gordon Lauren (2011: 44) in The Evolution of International Human Rights, “that the first systematic efforts to realize visions of human rights should focus on the tragic fate of those condemned to slavery.” Jenny Martinez (2012: 13) argues that the abolitionist movement was the “first successful international human rights campaign,” which announced both the possibility and necessity of international human rights law. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (now known by the name Anti-Slavery International), which fought to eradicate the transatlantic trade, is considered the first organization dedicated to human rights and remains “the most durable human rights organization in human history” (Drescher 2009: 267). As the transatlantic slave trade provided the foundational legal testing ground for international human rights law, the first-person slave narrative represented the material evidence that “friends of human rights” like William Lloyd Garrison needed to expose the utter brutality of slavery because, as Garrison put it in the very first issue of his Liberator newspaper, abolitionists were tasked with “defending the great cause of human rights” itself (1831: 1).

Though the slave narrative tradition largely disappeared as the last living survivors of the institution passed away in the first half of the twentieth century, the representation of slavery through first-person rights-based narratives gained renewed political traction in the 1990s and 2000s, as what had been called “forced labor” or “human trafficking” became defined in sociological and political circles as “modern slavery.” International conventions against slavery existed as early as 1926, when the League of Nations Temporary Slavery Commission defined “slavery” as the “status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised” (League of Nations 1926). By the time the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ratified in 1948, the condition of ownership had disappeared from Article 4, which simply states that “no one should be held in slavery or servitude” (United Nations 1948). In 1956, the definition of slavery was altered in the United Nations’ Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery, which reasserted freedom as a “birthright of every human being” and, as such, included as slavery or “slave-like conditions” the practices of debt bondage, serfdom, forced marriage, and forced child labor (United Nations General Assembly 1956). In 2000, as awareness of modern forms of noninstitutionalized and nonstate sanctioned forced labor increased, the U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children restated its commitment to prevent trafficking and included “slavery and slave-like conditions” under the umbrella of trafficking (United Nations General Assembly 2000).

Kevin Bales’ Disposable People suggests that slavery is characterized not by legal ownership, which is merely a characteristic of some forms of slavery, but by the “total control of one person by another for the purpose of economic exploitation” (1999: 6). Though contractual ownership of humans as property is outlawed in all countries in the world, approximately 35.8 million people are still enslaved (Walk Free Foundation 2014) – forced to work, without pay, under threat of violence, without the means to escape.

When Bales first investigated slavery as a late-twentieth-century phenomenon, very few people had articulated their experiences of bondage and captivity in terms of “slavery.” Though many autobiographies document suffering under exploitative labor conditions, the articulation of exploitation as “slavery” remained rare in first-person narration after the publication of the Works Progress Administration slave narratives. Zana Muhsen’s Sold: One Woman’s True Account of Modern Slavery (1991) and Jean-Robert Cadet’s Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American (1998) likely represent the earliest memoirs to evoke slavery as a conceptual framework for comprehending forced labor in the late twentieth century. Both consciously mobilize the word “slave” or “slavery” in their titles, and they also draw a lineage of suffering and agency from experiences of transatlantic slavery and the slave narrative tradition. Muhsen, a child bride in Yemen, compared her experience to Kunta Kinte’s in Alex Haley’s Roots (1991: 7, 50); while Cadet, a fostered child laborer in Haiti, celebrated enslaved revolutionaries like Toussaint Louverture and Nat Turner in his autobiography (1998: 174).

The renewed interest in slavery that was marked by the shifts in international and US law and by Bales’ and others’ research on modern slavery, encouraged the rapid growth of organizations devoted to addressing the issue. Soon thereafter people who were survivors of forced labor were urged to write their life stories, much as Douglass was emboldened by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Francis Bok, a former child laborer from Sudan, announces proudly in his Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity – and My Journey to Freedom in America (2003) that he was personally persuaded to write and tell his life story by the founder of an antitrafficking nonprofit because it would put “a human face on slavery in Sudan,” and he was motivated as well by the coincidence that he had moved to a Sudanese community in Lynn, Massachusetts, where Douglass “wrote his life story” (Bok 2003: 271, 255). First-person narratives of slavery were so sought after that the 2000s saw the development of a new abolitionist lecture circuit mainly focused on college campuses and churches, and some survivors centered their careers on paid speaking engagements and consulting for government agencies and nonprofit organizations.

Diverse narratives of forced labor – in sex work, child labor, agricultural labor, domestic labor, forced marriage, military conscription – begin to cohere as the “new slave narrative,” as forced laborers from all over the world mobilize the word “slavery” to name their experience of labor exploitation (Murphy 2014: 5–9; Murphy 2015b; Johnson 2013: 242–58). Since 1991, when the first “new slave narrative” emerged, more than 20 single-authored book-length narratives have been published by formerly enslaved people, and at least 3 collections of shorter narratives have been published (Sage and Kasten 2006; Bales and Trodd 2008; Murphy 2014). Organizations have also formed speakers’ bureaus that function to put survivors of slavery on the platform to work toward abolition, much as the lecture circuits did in the nineteenth century. For instance, the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, founded by the descendants of both Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, hosts “The Truth Panel,” a speaker’s bureau for human trafficking survivors, modeled on the speaking career of Sojourner Truth (“The Truth Panel” 2014). With new media came innovations in the slave narrative as well; narratives of modern slavery proliferate through web-based blogs, social media, and video interviews.

The narratives former slaves tell in published memoirs and on lecture circuits in the twenty-first century tend to follow many of the plot conventions familiar to us from historic slave narratives. The narrators often depict their familial origins in an effort to undergird their insistence on their human right to freedom (Olney 1984: 48–49). They paint portraits of cruel slaveholders and the corrupt officials who assist captors in maintaining power. They often deflect attention to the suffering of others who are enslaved as a way of deferring their own suffering while nonetheless conveying the horrors of slavery. They condemn their lack of access to education and religion while enslaved. Today’s slave narrators, much like nineteenth-century slave narrators, spend a great deal of time depicting their paths to freedom and their commitment to activism after emancipation. The texts are typically structured to emphasize their agency and inherent freedom, even as they depict their subordination and oppression (Murphy 2014: 10–12; Johnson 2013: 253–54).

However, in terms of their political emphasis, the new slave narrator is no longer beholden to the same concerns that Douglass and his companions were before slavery was outlawed around the world. Certainly, narrators are typically committed activists who seek the eradication of slavery. Nonetheless, the establishment of the narrator’s very humanity, so central to the nineteenth-century American slave narrative, is no longer the political aim in the new slave narrative. While Minh Dang, a survivor of child sex trafficking, indicates that her experience was “like that of being a caged animal at a zoo” and that she had to “learn (or relearn) that I am human, that I always was human, and that people out there … are also human” (2014: xiii), the question of her humanity is largely taken for granted by her lecture audiences and activist partners, even if her captors (and even she) believed otherwise. She and most others who are enslaved around the world today are no longer considered slaves in essence by mere dint of race or birth. Instead, slavery is largely maintained extrajudicially through physical and psychological violence. Slave narrators also avoid the burden of proving that enslaving another person is itself inhumane, immoral, or unethical, as there is practically universal consensus on this point.

Instead of establishing the humanity of a race or class of people, the political project of the new slave narrator is largely that of “legibility.” Since forced laborers are a hidden population in the twenty-first century, the practices that constitute slavery remain undetected by most citizens. Slave narrators have to articulate their experiences within the definitions of slavery that have been established by international conventions in order to convince readers that their experiences constitute the worst forms of rights violations. The use of the word “slave” on the cover of some of the narratives marks a first attempt at forging a connection to earlier accounts of slavery, but the narrators are nonetheless compelled to establish the very existence of slavery before they can assert their own claims to rights. The act of writing a first-person slave narrative in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century, then, is no longer an act of writing oneself into humanity’s narrative but one of writing slavery’s continued presence into the narrative of global history (Murphy 2015b).

If the new slave narrative escapes the question of the “human,” it does not escape foundational questions regarding rights. Narrators must address the question that arises in the case of labor rights, for instance, of what constitutes excessive force or compulsory conditions, especially in places where work is scarce (Davidson 2012). Many of the narrators were enslaved as children, and they confront a lack of a clear consensus on standards for child labor and parental or guardian abuse, particularly in settings where children are culturally encouraged to work (Cadet 1998: 4). Sex trafficking survivors are compelled to engage in a philosophical approach to choice, especially when they may have chosen sex work as a profession before they were compelled to work for a pimp under threat of violence or in cases where psychological abuse was the means by which they were controlled (Lloyd 2011: 152–64). Conscripted military personnel walk a fine line between perpetrator and victim, producing a publishing environment that largely limits the narratives we receive to those in which the narrator is a seemingly innocent child soldier (Beah 2007: 22–25; Coundouriotis 2010: 192–93; Schultheis 2008: 32). Definitional debates regarding universality, choice, complicity, and force determine to a great extent how formerly enslaved people shape their life narratives for public consumption.

These debates at the foundation of rights discourse have encouraged some critics and readers to doubt both the gravity and the very veracity of the claims slave narrators and antitrafficking activists make. Jo Doezema (2010: 9), for instance, argues that the anxiety regarding “sex slavery” is inflated, as it was during the “white slavery” scares of the early twentieth century. Asserting the agency of sex workers who have been erased in human rights discourse, she interrogates the spectacular narratives of sex slavery that are distributed by media and the human rights industry (Doezema 2010: 133–38). Narratives that focus on sex trafficking are indeed much more likely to be published when they meet the voyeuristic demands of reading audiences, so sensationalized third-person narratives (often on film instead of print) often find more traction among the public. The often spare and nonmelodramatic first-person narratives of slavery (such as those of labor trafficking victims) intervene in those discourses of victimhood and sensationalization, but they gain less of a popular audience.

Some critics question the veracity of the narratives, locating in Ishmael Beah’s narrative, for instance, inaccuracies in the dates and locations of events he records, and thus calling into question his experience of forced military service altogether (Sherman 2008). In part, attacks on the truthfulness of these narratives stem from the way they are structured more than from the details. Eleni Coundouriotis argues that child soldier narratives are structured as therapy or recovery narratives, which reinforces the notion of the innocent soldier as victim, and thereby plays into Makau Mutua’s notion of the “savage, victim, savior” metaphor that is a common essentializing complex of tropes featured in narratives depicting African conflict (Coundouriotis 2010: 193; Mutua 2001: 202–4). This therapeutic narrative structure pervades many slave narratives, in fact, underscoring the Freudian “talking cure” healing process that shapes the structure of many human rights narratives and that provides the explicit impetus for some authors. When victimhood is featured in such a way as to obscure the complexity of wartime violence, however, the very facts of the experience are sometimes called into question. More concerning for the antislavery movement, however, is the case of Somaly Mam, whose narrative is the target of increasing scrutiny. Mam’s resignation from her eponymous foundation after evidence was found that refuted her claims of forced sex work threatened to shake the foundations of the movement that survivors had built alongside her (Mam 2008; Marks 2014; Mullany 2014). Whether doubt arises as a result of genre conventions or legitimate fraud, questions of authenticity haunt the narratives and provoke the writers to include testimonies to their accuracy and other legitimizing documents, in much the same way as narrators did in the nineteenth century.

To some extent, concerns regarding authenticity stem from the mediation of the narratives by activists and organizations, who often shape the narratives either through their editorial advice, speech coaching, or through ghost writers. Many of these more mediated narratives reveal that less explicit forces also shape the new slave narrative, including veiled political and religious agendas. The collection of slave narratives titled Enslaved: True Stories of Modern Day Slavery, for instance, was edited by American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) employees Jesse Sage and Liora Kasten. In that collection, narratives that were originally drawn from survivors’ own stories were actively embellished (“guided,” “polished,” and “masterfully edited” according to the acknowledgments) by creative writers employed by the organization to add drama and fill silences (Sage and Kasten 2006: vi–vii), and those changes also often highlighted the political claims of the organization. In their advocacy, the AASG intentionally highlights slavery perpetrated by people of color, as their mission is explicitly driven by a program to defeat what their founder Charles Jacobs calls “the human rights complex” of western complacency toward nonwestern atrocities. He positions his work as being at the forefront of condemning “dictators and others who are ‘not like us’” in terms of race, ethnicity, and religion (Sage and Kasten 2006: 209–10). Grace Akallo’s child soldier narrative Girl Soldier was actually coauthored by Faith McDonnell of the neoliberal think tank the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD) (McDonnell and Akallo 2007). As IRD’s director responsible for addressing Christian persecution in the West and globally, McDonnell largely focuses her sections on condemnation of the Islamic influence on Ugandan politics, though Akallo’s first-person narration does not engage with Islam as a central facet of her experience (Murphy 2015a). As a result, McDonnell employs Akallo’s life experience as a “text” for her own political agenda. These hidden political forces shape both the way the experience of slavery is narrated and the politics the narratives promote.

Survivors of slavery are becoming increasingly aware of the way their narratives are altered by the organizations with which they work and of the political uses to which their life stories are put once their experiences are available for public consumption and use. They are increasingly wary of the fact that they are considered the “face” of the movement and asked to tell their stories, but they are not valued for their expertise or allowed to shape their own political agendas. Rachel Lloyd, author of Girls Like Us, protests:

I feel like I’ve fought very hard to be taken seriously outside of my story, and to be seen as an executive director and an advocate and somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about from a larger systemic perspective and psychological perspectives. It’s very easy as a survivor to get reduced to your story over and over again.

(quoted in Greicius 2012)

In response to the reductive representations of their experiences, survivors have created networks that help them address the difficulties of publicly sharing their stories and that promote more complexity in the representation of modern slavery (Chan 2013). They collectively promote survivor-centered discourse that allows them to be “thought leaders” in the movement, whether through their narratives or through their opinions as experts in the field.

As was the case in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the slave narrative can be utilized as a window into the current human rights landscape and the politics of self-representation. As more organizations look to survivors to provide the experience that would serve as the text for their rights advocacy, they shape the platforms on which formerly enslaved people can make their experiences known and effect change. They shape the form and content of the first-person stories that inform a largely unaware world of the forced labor that takes place in the twenty-first century. At the same time, with an ever-expanding terrain for publication in both print and digital media, survivors have begun to shape their own potential markets and are increasingly shaping the genre of the slave narrative to their own ends. The first 20 years of new slave narrative production has imitated the contours of the historical genre in many ways. However, just as Frederick Douglass broke away from William Lloyd Garrison because the white abolitionist sought to control the form and content of his message, slave narrators today are innovating in such a way that soon we will likely understand these trends in the new slave narrative to be characteristic of a first phase in the development of the genre as it has reemerged.