Amistad
I love slave-market scenes!
Like whipping scenes, I find them visceral and at times confronting but always erotic and arousing. I have had many hours of "enjoyment" from viewing and writing about slaves being bought and sold or flogged.
I guess, given my temperament, it is easy for me to transpose myself into these scenes and to take on the role of one of the slaves. Who among us who profess to being "slaves" doesn't share my feelings?
The 1997 movie, "Amistad" is among my favourites because of the disturbing realism it gives to the meaning of enforced chattel slavery. We see free black Africans kidnapped from their homes and families and carried off to slavery in strange new lands most probably unknown to them where they are condemned to work as mere beasts-of burden under appalling conditions.
I recall watching Amistad for the fist time in silence and was deeply affected by the "realism" of the slave scenes. I watched as the terrified slaves were herded from the land-based slave-holding pens into boats and ferried offshore to the waiting slave-ship. There, driven by the whips of their handlers, they hastily clambered on board and blessed by a priest who gave them a Christianised name. This wasn't fiction; such blessings of the new slaves was common. Now deprived of their freedom and their birth names, they were reduced to the level of animals, stripped naked for obvious sanitary reasons and shackled onto overcrowded benches for the long voyage of up to eighteen weeks to their new homes - in this case it was Cuba. Many wouldn't survive the voyage becoming victims of the unsanitary conditions while others simply lost the will to live and expired.
On arrival in Cuba, the new slaves were unloaded and placed in holding-pens to recover from the voyage and to be conditioned ready for auction.
On auction-day, as seen in the above picture, the slaves were scrubbed clean and their bodies coated with palm-oil to favourably highlight their physiques. Finally, placed on the auction-block, they could only watch in mute fear as people outbid one another for the "right" to buy and own them.
Such is the hopelessness of chattel slavery!
A number of times, I have written about slave-auctions in my stories. I have never sanitised them and I have always striven to make them as authentic as I can. To do otherwise is to trivialise the nature of true slavery and to deny the suffering and humiliation felt by another human has he is being bought or sold.
Certainly, I take writer's licence in my interpretations of slave-auctions to cater for the erotic interests of myself and my readers. However, I try to write stories that appeal to the Master/slave community and at the same time to recognise the indignity and humiliation a real slave felt as he was sold. Whether or not I succeed is for others to judge.
Chris
The above scene is a movie still from the 1997 movie, "Amistad".
Chris,
ReplyDeleteI too love very much Slave-Market and auction scenes both in movies and in novels / stories. (unluckily the good ones, like the one you mention, are quite rare, both in Cinema and literature).
I love them for a lot of good reasons, that could be too long to be discussed here, but that probably might be summarized in one statement: in the life of a slave, the moments of his sale / auctionin a Market .... of his helpless display to the eager and obscene gazes and brutal body inspections of his perspective buyers ...... was certainly the CLIMAX of his abjection and humiliation well under any human dignity, at the level of beasts and cattle, or even more of merely passive "objects" (rightly Cicero observed that in the Slave Markets of ancient Rome, slaves on sale were obliged by traders to passively suffer so brutal and humiliating body inspections that e.g. a horse or a donkey would have NEVER suffered without wild reactions and rebellions !!!).
So, in the whole life of a slave, the moments of his display and sale. like an object or an animal, in the Slave Market was certainly one of the most SADISTIC situations that he could experience ..... even worse and more sadistic than e.g. many situations of hard-labors that he could be obliged to suffer in his whole life of servitude.
Thanks for recallin this; and let me say that I hope and yearn to read soon some new wonderful scenes of Slave Markets and auctions, described in full details by your incomparable Art, as you only are able to do, in some new stories of yours. Thank you.
Karel