An outstanding adaptation

Rating: 10/10 (31 August 2014)

This book has just been adapted into a film. In fact it is the second time. . .
There could be a third side to the question reflecting a change among the Blacks themselves. Since the beginning of this century the Blacks influenced by the mostly Christian NAACP and those influenced by the Nation of Islam have developed an approach of their heritage as Post Traumatic Stress. They have two names for this. The First group calls it Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome and they are essentially centered on the concept of reparations, hence a collective approach, neglecting the psychological individual problem and hence admitting more or less, like Booker T. Washington, that they have no knowledge of their ancestry. The second group calls it Post Traumatic Slavery Disorder and they are centering their approach on an individual procedure within group processing to help each individual and his group to understand and step out of the problem by re-assessing and revalorizing their past generations and their heritage going as far as possible within slavery itself.
The recent adaptation of the book (first published in 1853) is outstanding in spite of the fact that it cuts a lot of stuff from it. It shortens the legal battle at the end for example but it gives a clear vision of what the Trauma of slavery was and how the Blacks managed to go through it. Never did they really drop their belief that surviving was not worth suffering for. The film gives some fundamental elements that enabled the Black to survive under the worst possible duress and violence. First of all the very planters and slave owners for reasons that have not yet been explained on the Anglo-Saxon side of slavery actually preached their slaves the Bible and Christianity. In the film one planter uses it to elevate their morals and ethical vision, and another uses it to justify his violence against them. But in a way or another they transmitted to them, more nilly than willy, willy-nilly anyway a religious vision that claimed hope and that eternal life was won by suffering in this world. The slaves turned this belief around into a clandestine and underground call for rebellion (openly stated in the next world) in the name of freedom doubled with a tremendous patience in front of the real situation that was a sign of some complicity with God himself. One song, in front of the grave of an old slave, is just that double message. Booker T. Washington explains in his autobiography Up From Slavery:
"Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom. True, they had sung those same verses before (emancipation and the end of the Civil War), but they had been careful to explain that the "freedom" in these songs referred to the next world, and had no connection with this life in the world. Now (after the full emancipation after the Civil War) they gradually threw off the mask, and were not afraid to let it be known that the "freedom" in their songs meant freedom of the body in this world." (p. 21-22)
The other elements that enabled the slaves to keep their sanity for one and their dignity in their survival for two is the direct negation of what Willie Lynch had said: deprive them of their language, deprive them of their culture, deprive them of their religion. He thought that by doing that he would be able to negate their humanity. The Slaves just had to learn another language (the interest of their own masters), English, French or Spanish, and then this new language enabled them to retain and develop their mental power and intelligence. They replaced their old religions with Christianity though they often invested in this Christianity some old beliefs and myths producing Voodoo, for example and other local Africanized version of Christianity. They retained their rhythmic culture and nature and they transformed any task performed on the plantation under duress and violent overseeing into a singing class, a rhythmic experience, a unique cultural survival (enabling them to keep the rhythm of the work, hence satisfying the interest of the planter and escaping whipping in the evening). Actually it is this cultural survival that has produced the music of the Blacks in America and that music has become the polyrhythmic music of the world today. It is a shame the film does not five a full experience of a "Christmas vacation" all planters provided their slaves with. That was one of these moments (present in the book) when the Black slaves were mostly reviving and re-energizing their own African heritage, even five or ten generations after the Middle Passage.
The film shows that mental survival, at the cost of psychological trauma, and we can thus understand that even when a slave wanted to die in order to escape his or her suffering, the survival instinct, multiplied by their own survival experience, will be stronger and will take over and enable him or her to go on one more step or two. The main character, Solomon Northup, is the acme of that survival attitude in how he manages to never forget who he was and still is, in spite of his having to hide his real nature and identity behind the imposed name and identity of Platt.
After the lethal selection of the Middle Passage, the Africans who had survived crossing the Atlantic had managed to develop this survival stance that will enable them to enrich our world today with one of the greatest African heritage we all share in music. . .
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU