Nick G.
Solomon Northup was a free and educated black man living in New York with his family when, in 1841, he was abducted and sold into slavery.
After his eventual release back into freedom, he wrote an account of
his life as a slave on a plantation in Louisiana.
That account is the basis for the film released in cinemas in Australia
last month.
The film is a powerful and confronting depiction of the brutalities of
the slave system.
That is a very good thing, but it is also quite a safe background for
the film’s message because in the advanced capitalist countries the age of
slavery has gone. It needs no
defenders. Hedge fund managers and
unemployed labourers alike can condemn it is a cruel system, never to return.
And the real and surviving slavery in today’s global economy, estimated
by the International Labour Organisation as applying to 20 million men, women
and children is never brought to our attention by the popular media or by our
political leaders.
Perhaps the closest reminder of what slavery was like – the physical
and mental torture of people who had no rights because they were “things” not
humans – is to be found in the writings of people like David Hicks and the
British-Pakistani citizen Moazzem Begg, both of whom were suddenly and without
just cause kidnapped by the US imperialists and held in the isolation and hopelessness
of Guantanamo Bay.
“I don’t know anyone that can share that misery (Northup’s),” wrote one
US soldier after viewing the film. “The
closest thing I have witnessed is the hardships Afghans endure during my
deployments there…imagine having to watch your wife, sister, child get beaten
nearly to death for minor ‘offences’ and have to stand by silently or suffer
worse consequences, and things of this sort playing out day after day, for
years.”
That said, the message of the film is that oppressed peoples cannot win
their own liberation, but must look for saviours from among the ranks of
enlightened members of the upper classes.
In this way, a film which is clearly progressive in its condemnation of
racism and slavery acts to reinforce an idea with which our contemporary rulers
- the US imperialists and their hirelings and collaborators –would be quite
comfortable.
The ease with which the film becomes a contribution to the ideological
domination of the imperialists is to be found in Northup’s own personal story.
Not having been born into slavery, and having experienced a comfortable
free life in a developing capitalist economy and society before his kidnapping,
he had no reason to reject class society or to try to find ways of organising
mass slave fightbacks and revolts. If
only he could establish the truth of his kidnapping and its horrible injustice
he had other ways – ways not open to slaves by birth – to escape from his
servitude.
This explains what his contemporaries described as the “even-handedness”
of his account compared to other depictions of slavery composed by run-away
slaves.
One reviewer wrote in 1853, “Its tone is much milder than we expected
to see exhibited; a man who had spent twelve years of the best portion of his
life in such servitude, would be excusable for giving expression to bitter
feelings; but, while he seems to fully realize the magnitude of his sufferings,
he does not condemn all.”
Northup, as a successful author and an educated man, was so famous in
his day that he undertook a long series of lecture tours. Here again he exhibited the same “even-handedness”.
According to a Vermont newspaper correspondent in 1854, “Solomon Northrop
(sic), the rescued slave, related the
experience of the tender mercies of slavery at the Court House in St. Albans on
Saturday evening last. He talked pretty
well for a ‘chattel’, ‘a thing’ as our government regards him. His unaffected simplicity, directness and
gentlemanly bearing impressed us far more than many fervid appeals to which we
have listened.”
No doubt these references to his failure to “condemn all”, to the fact
his personal narrative was different to “many fervid appeals” for the abolition
of slavery, was reassuring for the film’s investors and its production company.
“If you want to survive, do and say as little as possible,” Northup is
advised by fellow slaves.
Although he refuses to bow down and surrender his dignity, and is determined
not to give in to despair, he vows to “keep myself hardy until freedom is
offered to me”.
The terrible violence of slavery is safely in the past, but the message
to people oppressed by big landowners, giant corporations and every type of
mean-spirited and bullying small employer or overseer is to wait for help from
above, to believe in the possibility of salvation through the goodness of
benefactors within the system, to wait until freedom is offered.
There is a certain sophistication required today in the way in which
the ruling ideas of society are made from the ideas of the ruling class. Such ideas, such cultural values, beliefs and
behaviours are a superstructure protecting the exploitation of person by person
at the economic base of society.
Twelve Years a Slave is part
of that super-structural sophistication.
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Further Reading:
http://anti-imperialism.com/2013/12/28/movie-review-12-years-a-slave/
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Further Reading:
http://anti-imperialism.com/2013/12/28/movie-review-12-years-a-slave/
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