Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature

Laura T. Murphy

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780821444122
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Metaphor and the Slave Trade provides compelling evidence of the hidden but unmistakable traces of the transatlantic slave trade that persist in West African discourse. Through an examination of metaphors that describe the trauma, loss, and suffering associated with the commerce in human lives, this book shows how the horrors of slavery are communicated from generation to generation.

Laura T. Murphy's insightful new readings of canonical West African fiction, autobiography, drama, and poetry explore the relationship between memory and metaphor and emphasize how repressed or otherwise marginalized memories can be transmitted through images, tropes, rumors, and fears. By analyzing the unique codes through which West Africans have represented the slave trade, this work foregrounds African literary contributions to Black Atlantic discourse and draws attention to the archive that metaphor unlocks for scholars of all disciplines and fields of study.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org.

2. Ibid.

3. For extended discussions of the significance as well as the limitations of demographic calculations of the slave trade, see David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, introduction to The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-Rom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–40; David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Martin A. Klein, “The Impact of the Atlantic Trade on the Societies of the Western Sudan,” in The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, ed. Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 25–48.

4. Carolyn A. Brown, “Epilogue: Memory as Resistance: Identity and the Contested History of Slavery in Southeastern Nigeria, an Oral History Project,” in Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, ed. Sylviane A. Diouf (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2003), 220.

5. William H. Clarke, Travels and Explorations in Yorubaland, 1854–1858 (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1972), 6.

6. Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2.

7. Joseph E. Inikori, “Changing Commodity Composition of Imports into West Africa, 1650–1850,” in The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Landmarks, Legacies, Expectations, ed. James Kwesi Anquandah (Accra, Ghana: Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2007), 75.

8. See, for instance, Elisée Soumonni, “Lacustrine Villages in South Benin as Refuges from the Slave Trade,” in Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, ed. Sylviane A. Diouf (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 3–14.

9. Inikori and Engerman, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 3.

CHAPTER 1: AGAINST AMNESIA

1. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 16–17.

2. Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

3. Nicolas Argenti, The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence, and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

4. Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

5. Kwesi J. Anquandah, Castles and Forts of Ghana (Atalante: Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, 1999), 24.

6. Kufuor’s commissioning speech for Golden Jubilee House describes the taint of the slave trade on the president’s residence. For a full recording of the speech, see “Kufuor Commissions Golden Jubilee House,” ModernGhana.com, November 11, 2008, http://www.modernghana.com/news/190243/1/kufuor-commissions-golden-jubilee-house.html. See also the newspaper debates about the building of the Golden Jubilee House: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong, “The Golden Jubilee House, A Spiritual Relief,” ModernGhana.com, November 26, 2008, http://www.modernghana.com/news/192256/50/the-golden-jubilee-house-a-spiritual-relief.html.

7. See Anquandah, Castles and Forts; and Godwin K. Agbodza and Raymond O. Agbo, Monuments and Historical Landmarks Along the Coast (Cape Coast: Nyakod, 2006). Recently, however, many of these buildings have been turned over to the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board and are being renovated, largely with UNESCO support. Others are ironically being privately remodeled to serve as guesthouses or restaurants.

8. For a description of the debates from a representative of the Smithsonian, see Christine Mullen Kreamer, “The Politics of Memory: Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle Museum Exhibition ‘Crossroads of People, Crossroads of Trade,’” Ghana Studies 7 (2004): 79–91; and Kreamer, “Shared Heritage, Contested Terrain: Cultural Negotiations and Ghana’s Cape Coast Castle Museum Exhibition ‘Crossroads of People, Crossroads of Trade,’” in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 425. For the position of an African American expatriate who was involved in the debate, see Imakhus Vienna Robinson, “Is the Black Man’s History Being Whitewashed?” Uhuru 9 (1994): 48–50. For anthropological and academic responses, see Edward M. Bruner, “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora,” American Anthropologist 98, no. 2 (June 1996): 290–304; Brempong Osei-Tutu, “African American Reactions to the Restoration of Ghana’s ‘Slave Castles,’” Public Archaeology 3 (2004): 195–204; and Sandra Richards, “What Is to Be Remembered?: Tourism to Ghana’s Slave Castle-Dungeons,” Theatre Journal 57, no. 4 (December 2005): 617–37.

9. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7.

10. For a discussion that questions the veracity of the claims typically made in the tour narratives, see Brempong Osei-Tutu, “Slave Castles, African American Activism, and Ghana Memorial Entrepreneurism” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2009), 143, 155.

11. Bayo Holsey, Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 6.

12. Amissane Hackman, guided tour, May 23, 2006, Cape Coast Castle, Cape Coast, Ghana.

13. Philip Atta-Yawson, guided tour, Fort Amsterdam, Abandze, Ghana, May 27, 2006.

14. Anne C. Bailey, African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Beyond the Silence and the Shame (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 33.

15. Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, The Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, a Native of Zoogoo, in the Interior of Africa (Detroit: George E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One Against Amnesia: Metaphor and Memory in West Africa
• Two Magical Capture in a Landscape of Terror: The Trope of the Body in the Bag in Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
• Three Geographies of Memory: Mapping Slavery’s Recurrence in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road
• Four The Curse of Constant Remembrance: The Belated Trauma of the Slave Trade in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Fragments
• Five Childless Mothers and Dead Husbands: The Enslavement of Intimacy and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Secret Language of Memory
• Six The Suffering of Survival
• Epilogue The Future of the Past: The New Historical Fiction
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index