neo-slave narratives

Last night I finished reading Octavian Nothing; it’s a compelling read, and I certainly recommend it, though I suspect most young adult readers will miss much of the subtle critique of Enlightenment-era thinking.  As I’ve stated before, I have no problem with authors writing outside their race; I often find it doesn’t work out well, but people should still give it a try because sometimes the results are indeed “astonishing.”  I didn’t care for Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (also an award winner), because the black female character didn’t seem genuine or three-dimensional to me; I felt she existed only to serve whites and eavesdrop on their conversations–she had no close friends, no family, no community.  The key to writing a strong neo-slave narrative, I think, is to achieve what authors of the original slave narratives described as the debilitating, precarious position of the slave as witness AND participant.  I just taught Octavia Butler’s Kindred last week, and still marvel at her ability to expose the complex relationships among the enslaved.  Many today still reduce the slave experience to simple binaries: white versus black, house slave versus field slave, Nat versus Uncle Tom.  If you were a cook and you didn’t try to poison the master, then you’re a mammy, a sellout, a happy negress…of course, it was much more complicated than that.  MT Anderson does an outstanding job of letting us inside his character’s head; Octavian has depth, we see him grappling with his own education–and we know, if we’ve read Frederick Douglass’s narrative, that education was both desired and hated by the slave.  Slaveholders denied the enslaved the right to read and write, knowing literacy would lead to dissatisfaction and potential rebellion.  Knowledge “unfits” the slave for his or her position in life–how cruel to teach a mind to soar and then shackle the limbs–and then claim the entire being is subhuman!  Octavian does resist his enslavement and efforts to dehumanize him; with the aid of sympathetic whites, he fights to gain his own liberty at the moment of revolution in the colonies.  My main critique of the book is that at the moment of Octavian’s most intense distress–the death of his mother–the author silences him.  I admired the way MT Anderson showed this break in the narrative–the reader confronts several pages blotted with ink where Octavian apparently blacked out the words he wrote upon her death.  But then the narrative voice shifts entirely, and we learn of Octavian only through the letters of white observers/friends.  Octavian’s voice is restored by the book’s end, but still–it gave me pause.  Did MT Anderson feel unable to capture this black boy’s grief?  I hope not, since Anderson proved to me he is more than capable of speaking for/speaking through/speaking AS an enslaved boy.  I want boys in particular to have more models of grief, loss, and vulnerability, so I wish Anderson had persisted and shown Octavian at his lowest, rather than having us witness this through others, most of whom are oblivious to the cause of his suffering (or even his humanity).  At any rate, overall it’s an outstanding book that deserved its many awards, and I’d definitely recommend it!   I’ll write more later on the representation of black womanhood in this novel; I’ve got a deadline to meet today, and another article due next week, so will use this space to flesh out my ideas of the black female body as spectacle…