The poem, “Middle Passage”, by Robert Hayden is a poem that depicts the sea journey undertaken by slave ships from West Africa to the West Indies known as the middle passage. His poem had three sections that describe the suffering of slaves during the time. The first part begins with
Hayden describing the deadliness of the middle passages and how slaves tried to commit suicide as a way out. He writes, “Some try to starve themselves” and “Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under." These quotes explain how some slaves would starve themselves or jump overboard as a way to kill themselves. He talks about slaves fearing if they’ll make it while being on ships during the middle passages.
…show more content…
He writes about how the slaves were chained up as well. He ends the first part with explaining how the ship caught on fire and all the crew left the ship leaving the slaves behind. Haydon begins part two with introducing king Anthracite who was a trader. From what I understand he was a slave trader for twenty years and only stopped when he got sick. In part three he begins talking about the dead and corpses. He kind of makes it seem like its making whoever said its feels guilty about the deaths. He writes, “Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, the corpse of mercy rots with him, rats eat love’s rotten gelid eyes”. Next he talks about a storm that must have took place during the middle passages on one of the ships. “But for the storm that flung up barriers of wind and wave”. Then he tells a story about the slaves took over the ship and killed some of the crew. But they left some of them alive so that they could stir the ship. He writes in the final stanza, “It sickens me to think of what I saw, of how these apes threw overboard the butchered bodies of our men”, which he explains how the slaves disposed of the bodies of the crew member after killing them. He then finishes
...cted fellow, who on account of his illness was suffered to be out of irons, followed their example. I believe many more would very soon have done the same if they had not been prevented by the ship's crew, who were instantly alarmed. Those of us that were the most active were in a moment put down under the deck, and there was such a noise and confusion among the people of the ship as I never heard before to stop her and get the boat out to go after the slaves. However, two of the wretches were drowned, but they got the other and afterwards flogged him unmercifully for thus attempting to prefer death to slavery.
He does this by showing the awful conditions on the transports ships, the savagery of their masters, and the spread of disease on the ships. In an effort to show the terrible conditions of the ships, the author writes,” The fresh air being thus excluded, the Negroes ' rooms soon grow intolerable hot. The confined air, …soon produces fevers and fluxes which generally carries off great numbers of them” (2). The author is directing his document to the general public, as slavery was rampant at this time. He wants to show people that slavery is wrong and inhumane. He writes about how inhumanely the African Americans were selected by the Europeans in order to become slaves for them. The document is a firsthand account, and the author describes being on some on the ships himself while the slaves were being transported. Like the slaves, the author gets sick while he is on the ship. On his time on one of the transports, he writes,”…I nearly fainted, and it was only with assistance I could get back on deck. The consequence was that I soon after fell sick of the same disorder from which I did not recover for several months” (2). This article was written in a time where it was not very popular to be Anti-Slavery, so the author had a lot of courage to do what he did. His neighbors and a few family members were likely utilizing slaves at the time,
There are three things in the article that is very compelling to me as a reader, the living conditions of the slaves in the ships, the rape the women faced, and the punishment styles the rebellious slaves had to endure. What they endured was almost like hell on earth, it was almost genocide, but without the intention of genocide.
Slaves were then transported to the Americas on a journey called the middle passage which lasted about six weeks. These ships were very unsanitary and cramped often carrying three hundred slaves. Once onboard the ship, men and women were stripped naked and shackled two-by-two. They could either be packed loosely or tight. Either way the ship had terrible hygiene, often nowhere to go to the bathroom. Also the slaves were hardly given any food, so many of the slaves went hungry. These factors contributed to many suicide attempts while onboard.
Slavery consisted of numerous inhumane horrors completed to make its victims feel desolated and helpless. Many inescapable of these horrors of slavery are conveyed in the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”. The entire prospect of the duration of the story is to plan an escape from the excruciating conditions awaiting Douglass as a slave. When his escape is finally executed, unpredictable emotions and thoughts overwhelm him. Within the conclusion of his narrative (shown in the given passage), Frederick Douglass uses figurative language, diction, and syntax to portray such states of mind he felt after escaping slavery: relief, loneliness, and paranoia.
Kendler, Adam. "The Middle Passage." Slave Resistance. Edward E. Baptist, Web. 13 Dec 2009. .
Examination into the true heart of experience and meaning, Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage looks at the structures of identity and the total transformation of the self. The novel talks about the hidden assumptions of human and literary identity and brings to view the real problems of these assumptions through different ideas of allusion and appropriation. As the novel tells Rutherford Calhoun’s transformation of un-awareness allows him to cross “the sea of suffering” (209) making him forget who he really is. The novel brings forth the roots of human “being” and the true complications and troubles of African American experiences. Stuck between posed questions of identity, the abstract body is able to provide important insight into the methods and meanings in Middle Passage.
Robert Hayden recoups what had been lost of the African Americans by indicating us perspectives of various African Americans of their voyage of slave brokers by bringing the slaves over the Atlantic Ocean. Ones perspective in the Middle Passage is an African American saying that "A portion of the slaves would attempt to starve themselves. Lost three early today jumped with insane chuckling to the insane sharks, sang as they went under. "(Hayden, 1962/2013, p.2372). Additionally in the Middle Passage "That team and Captain yearned with them comeliest of the savage young ladies kept bare in the cabins.
European slavers altered the way that different African people viewed one another and themselves. The book by Miguel Barnet, Biography of a Runaway Slave is a strong account that can be used to explore how Africans changed their perception of each other, and how this change influenced the lives of Africans in the Americas.
America in the mid to early nineteenth century saw the torture of many African Americans in slavery. Plantation owners did not care whether they were young or old, girl or boy, to them all slaves were there to work. One slave in particular, Frederick Douglass, documented his journey through slavery in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Through the use of various rhetorical devices and strategies, Douglass conveys the dehumanizing and corrupting effect of slavery, in order to show the overall need for American abolition. His use of devices such as parallelism, asyndeton, simile, antithesis, juxtaposition and use of irony, not only establish ethos but also show the negative effects of slavery on slaves, masters and
The Narrative of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass is written to have people place their feet in the shoes of Frederick Douglass and try to understand the experience he went through as a slave. Douglass writes this piece of literature with strong wording to get his point across. He is not trying to point out the unpleasant parts of history, but to make people face the truth. He wants readers to realize that slavery is brutalizing and dehumanizing, that a slave is able to become a man, and that some slaves, like himself, have intellectual ability. These points are commonly presented through the words of Douglass because of his diction.
The human voyage into life is basically feeble, vulnerable, uncontrollable. Since the crew on a dangerous sea without hope are depicted as "the babes of the sea", it can be inferred that we are likely to be ignorant strangers in the universe. In addition to the danger we face, we have to also overcome the new challenges of the waves in the daily life. These waves are "most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall", requiring "a new leap, and a leap." Therefore, the incessant troubles arising from human conditions often bring about unpredictable crises as "shipwrecks are apropos of nothing." The tiny "open boat", which characters desperately cling to, signifies the weak, helpless, and vulnerable conditions of human life since it is deprived of other protection due to the shipwreck. The "open boat" also accentuates the "open suggestion of hopelessness" amid the wild waves of life. The crew of the boat perceive their precarious fate as "preposterous" and "absurd" so much so that they can feel the "tragic" aspect and "coldness of the water." At this point, the question of why they are forced to be "dragged away" and to "nibble the sacred cheese of life" raises a meaningful issue over life itself. This pessimistic view of life reflects the helpless human condition as well as the limitation of human life.
conditions aboard ship were dreadful. The maximum number of slaves was jammed into the hull, chained to forestall revolts or suicides by drowning. Food, ventilation, light, and sanitatio...
The Middle Passage (or Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade) was a voyage that took slaves from Africa to the Americas via tightly packed ships. The trade started around the early 1500s, and by 1654 about 8,000-10,000 slaves were being imported from Africa to the Americas every year. This number continued to grow, and by 1750 that figure had climbed to about 60,000-70,000 slaves a year. Because of the lack of necessary documents, it is hard to tell the exact number of Africans taken from their homeland. But based on available clues and data, an estimated 9-15 million were taken on the Middle Passage, and of that about 3-5 million died. While the whole idea seems sick and wrong, many intelligent people and ideas went in to making the slave trade economically successful.
Fear has taken a hold of every man aboard this ship, as it should; our luck is as far gone as the winds that led us off course. For nights and days gusts beyond measure have forced us south, yet our vessel beauty, Le Serpent, stays afloat. The souls aboard her, lay at the mercy of this ruthless sea. Chaotic weather has turned the crew from noble seamen searching for glory and riches, to whimpering children. To stay sane I keep the holy trinity close to my heart and the lady on my mind. Desperation comes and goes from the men’s eyes, while the black, blistering clouds fasten above us, as endless as the ocean itself. The sea rocks our wood hull back and forth but has yet to flip her. The rocking forces our bodies to cling to any sturdy or available hinge, nook or rope, anything a man can grasp with a sea soaked hand. The impacts make every step a danger. We all have taken on a ghoulish complexion; the absence of sunlight led the weak souls aboard to fight sleep until sick. Some of us pray for the sun to rise but thunder constantly deafens our cries as it crackles above the mast. We have been out to sea for fifty-five days and we have been in this forsaken storm for the last seventeen.