.Barracoon: wider lens, bigger picture.
i read Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracon yesterday. the book, as we are informed by its subtitle, tells “the story of the last black cargo.” cargo. and yet we’re not referring to microwaves or drinking glasses or worn clothesor some such lifeless object being shipped into africa. neither are we talking about timber or oil or any kind of natural resource being siphoned, by water, out of the continent. cargo. for that is how the enslavers regarded the enslaved human beings — as goods.
two months prior to the books publication, i read the forward on the blog of the writer that wrote it, Alice Walker. “I’m not sure,” she writes in her foreword, “there was ever a harder read than this.” and when i read that in march, i was daunted., considering who was saying that. and then there were the one, two comments i read from readers, after the book came out, about the story being, essentially, a harrowing, tear-jerking one.
these remarks engendered expectations and ideas in me, of Barracoon: another story about slavery and enslavement; but from the lion’s own mouth this time around; with more violence and gore; so heart-shattering it would make me cry and cry till some of my tears become phlegm and flow through my nostrils. i shouldn’t have allowed myself to do that. what’s more, i shouldn’t have taken those notions with me when i went reading Barracoon. but i did. and that was how come that halfway through the book, i was most probably thinking, in the manner and language of a recently famous twitter meme, appropriated from the black panther movie: IS THIS YOUR MOST HARROWING, MOST TEAR-JERKING STORY?
not to be mistaken, Barracoon is, to a significant extent, all that (and more): a narrative of slavery like i’d never read before (a direct account, given by someone who actually lived it, relayed in his own vernacular, about his own experiences pre, during, and post slavery…); there is violence and gore too, here; & as for the tear-jerking stuff…i’ll be honest and say that i was wide-eyed in disbelief at some of the gruesomeness, my tear ducts were totally try till, like, the last third of the book. then the protagonist Oluale Kossola (Cudjo Lewis) was a free man — after close to six years of working as a white man’s slave.
rewind to the violence and gore in the book: much of it happens in Oluale’s homeland of takkoi, on the continent of africa. intra-ethnically. cross-ethnically. the insidious patriarchy. classic ruling class callousness. capital punishment — head-chopping as an acknowledged part of the social order. and still, when the white man comes into the picture, there are africans — the kings, the chiefs, their courtiers…
if you are one of those africans who is bothered by the news of african involvement in the still unbelievable calamity known rather benignly as the slave trade, then Barracoon is not your bottle of sobolo. like, listen to Oluale, talking about the king of dahomey: “he got very rich ketching slaves. he keep his army all the time making raids to grabee people to sell…”
the dahomean army Oluale refers to here, consists of the mino, now more popularly known by the name given to them by white people, the dahimey amazons. of them, Oluale says: “no man kin be so strong lak de woman soldiers from dahomey…” (it is advisable here to hold our feminist horses yet.) it just so happens that it was a dahomean raid on the takkoi community that landed |Oluale in the barracoons of dahomey, and finally on a white man’s plantation in america.
the dahomean slave raiders included the mino who were actively capturing people to be enslaved, and according to the narrative, chopping of the heads of children, women, men. i have a question: do these women pass, testing with an intersectional feminist lens, as models of african feminism?
Barracoon’s epigraph is quoted from Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. the quotation was arrived upon while she unpacked her “three months of association” with Oluale Kossola: “but the inescapable fact that stuck in my crow, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me…it impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory.” perhaps a tad simplistic, but in essence, it it what it is. the quote provides, as epigraphs typically do, a frame for the Barracoon picture. which leads to my curiosities: how much was this picture edited to fit into this frame? what cropping was done, what filter was applied to get this desired image?
to put it simply: it felt to me that when it came to the circumstances in the so-called new world, Oluale, according to this picture given us, merely waffled; as compared to his detailing of the goriness that he related of ‘Afficka’ where he came from. and therefore this “universal picture…” that Zora Neale Hurston (and the editor) aimed to capture was rather skewed.
if i were ending this here, i would end like this: if there is only one picture you or your child should see about slavery, it is adviceable to not let it be this one. it is a good picture alright, but not the best. and there’s better.
but. i am not ending here. and thankfully so. there’s another but. but. how erroneous and limiting my thinking to have read, in the subtitle, “the story of…..”, and reduced the narrative to that of slavery. (as though any human beings story can be solely about one thing, enslavement no less.)
in my favourite third of the book, the last, Oluale is a free man, a church sexton, a tender, caring old man, eloquent in speech, who was also a loving husband and (grand) parent. who suffers heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak: insults instead of reparations from a former slave-owner, duped out of insurance money, losing child after child, and then, wife. so painful the experience, so gnawing his longing and loneliness, he made a parable of it:
“den i axed dem, “how many limbs God give de body so it kin be active?” “Dey say six; two arms two feet two eyes” “I say dey cut off de feet, he got hands to ‘fend hisself. Dey cut off de hands he wiggle out de way when he see danger come. But when he lose de eye, den he can’t see nothin’ come upon him. He finish. My boys is my feet. My daughter is my hands. My wife she my eye. She left,Cudjo finish”
and yet Oluale Kossola gesticulates with animation, and laughs with heart, as he tells stories to Zora. and yet still, he has so much soul and life left to love gardening, to tend to his plants.
how amazing!, and how dare me reduce “the story of Oluale Kossola,” a whole life, to one of slavery.
