Ashraf Rushdy's Confessions Of Nat Turner

Ashraf Rushdy notes that the Neo-slave narrative genre as a whole began to come about as a response to William Styron’s book Confessions of Nat Turner. This novel sparks the conversation regarding who should be able to retell these histories, and Rushdy notes one of the most precarious aspects of Styron’s novel: “its presumption of assuming the voice of a slave, its uninformed appropriation of African American culture, its deep, almost conservative allegiance to the traditional historiographical portrait of slavery” (4). Madhu Dubey also notes that the genre “was preceded by a heightened public attention to slavery during the late 1960’s. . . . Conflicts over how slavery should be represented in the realms of historiography, literature, and

popular visual culture were clearly inflected by the militant black politics of the 1960’’ (333). This conflict is intensified by the “question of how best to recover the perspective of the enslaved . . . . Concerns about who can and should speak for the slave surfaced in response to the spate of movies and television shows that were released during this period” (333). While much of the criticism on Kindred focuses on the body and how the body tells history, often these arguments gloss over or flagrantly ignore the way physical trauma cultivates both visceral, experiential knowledge about the past, which enables Dana to gain authorial agency. Butler figures both Dana and Kevin as writers, thereby providing a tacit meta-commentary on the act of writing itself. Though both Kevin and Dana spend extended periods of time in the 1800’s, the novel is told completely from Dana’s point of view, and the reader gets very little information about Kevin’s experience. Not only does Kevin’s perspective of the past get silenced, initially Dana is not a viable candidate to voice this narrative either. This issue of being a viable authorial voice speaks to the conversation happening during the late 1960s and 1970s about who “can and should speak for the slave.” By silencing Kevin’s narrative and using time travel as a vehicle through with Dana is forced to learn the lost aspects of her personal history and the complicated black figures who reside there, Butler shows the reader that the people who can best articulate the narratives of slaves are those who have an unambiguous connection with their pain and retrieve lost knowledge about an already fragmented past. This chapter explores the importance of viable authorial figures in depth as I argue that Butler blends the Neo-slave narrative and Fantasy genres to demonstrate that being black is not the sole criterion for being a viable authorial voice. Rather, the most important criterion is to become less disconnected with the past and gain intimate knowledge about slavery.
In Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain, she discusses the effects of pain and torture on the human body and how language is destroyed as a result of trauma. The example that she provides as a comparison is a person getting her teeth drilled. She states: “It is commonplace that at the moment when a dentist’s drill hits and holds an exposed nerve, a person sees stars. What is meant by ‘seeing stars’ is that the contents of consciousness are, during those moments, obliterated, that the name of one’s child, the memory of a friend’s face, are all absent” (30). According to Scarry, “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (4). Therefore, since physical pain cannot be shared, people “attempt to invent linguistic structures” that will enable them to share their experience (6). However, this argument becomes complicated when discussing mass traumatic events such as slavery. Because the descendants of slaves did not directly encounter the experience of slavery and do not have access to the site of trauma, articulating their pain becomes more problematic. While the descendants do not feel the physical pain that their ancestors experienced, former slaves were able to retell their experiences either by passing down the knowledge verbally or by writing their own slave narratives. In addition to these narratives being passed on through the generations, institutionalized slavery continued to leave a lasting mark on subsequent generations as institutional racism continued to keep later generations oppressed. After slavery was abolished, free blacks were immediately confronted with various injustices, including the enactment of black codes and Jim Crow laws. Effectively articulating this pain becomes increasingly important, especially as the dehumanization that black people experienced because of these institutions becomes minimalized through conservative revisionism.
Because there is so much at stake when creating a language for pain, who is able to be a part of the process of telling these stories is just as important as how these stories are told.

Scarry informs us that “A great deal . . . is at stake in the attempt to invent linguistic structures that will reach and accommodate this area of experience normally so inaccessible to language; the human attempt to reverse the de-objectifying work of pain by forcing pain itself into avenues of objectification is a project laden with practical and ethical consequence” (6). She argues that because pain obliterates language and thought, the language people attempt to create to expresses the experience is often inadequate. But, genres such as the slave narrative and the neo-slave narrative problematize Scarry’s arguments by pointing to the fact that a usable language can be created from pain, and often this language takes form in the shape of metaphors, similes, and analogies. Though Scarry argues that language does not effectively articulate pain, slave narratives have done a remarkable job of articulating the experience of enslaved black people. Authors such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs, who have written slave narratives, not only effectively created the language they needed to articulate their experiences, but they show how in their most intense moments of pain, knowledge can be born. For example, Frederick Douglass discusses how he was beaten daily under the care of one of his overseers, Covey. During these beatings, thought was not obliterated; instead, Douglass was able to establish a new epistemology about slavery. This pain created a clear knowledge of how violence and brutal workloads were used to break a human and make a willing and “mindless” slave, and he was to convey this knowledge later in his own slave

narrative.
Because Douglass wrote his own narrative, he was in control over the language used to articulate his experience. However, many blacks who shared their narratives did so through an amanuensis. Joycelyn Moody notes that this was not just because many enslaved blacks were illiterate, but also because “Americans, even those who opposed slavery, did not necessarily accept women of African descent as reliable narrators, either literally or figuratively speaking” (111). Moody states that although black people and blackness were “sources of fascination, titillation, and entertainment” for many white Americans, black women authors “knew that auto/biographies by or about blacks were more likely than not to be read with distrust and disbelief—in their authenticity and authority, in their verity and veracity” (111). Due to this distrust of the black authorial voice, even when if it was filtered through an amanuensis, black authors “had to construct serious, earnest texts that would engage curious Other readers and . . . construct those Others as trusting rather than resisting readers” (111). As a result, slave narratives often times became “imbued with self-conscious strategies, as well as . . . self-consciousness about their rhetorical strategies, as well as … tempered assertions of details that those who had not experienced slavery could find both difficult to read and difficult to accept” (111). Because of this distrust, black authors and their amanuenses of slave narratives had to “triumph over both the obstructions of adversity and the inadequacies of language” (110). Even though black people were the ideal authorial voices because they personally lived through these issues, they still had to tailor their narratives to fit a still prejudiced audience.
This issue of authorial voice becomes an issue again in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this time it is on reversed. This time black intellectuals questioned and were skeptical of a white man writing a slave narrative. In modern times, while there is less at stake when writing narratives on behalf of enslaved people, writers still have to be conscientious of the language used to tell these stories. Butler even states in an interview with Randal Kenan that
one of the things [she] realized when [she] was reading the slave narrative—[she] think [she] had gotten to one by a man who was explaining how he had been sold to a doctor who used him for medical experiments—was that [she] was not going to be able to come anywhere near presenting slavery as it was. [She] was going to have to do a somewhat cleaned-up version of slavery, or no one would be willing to read it. [She] think that’s what most fiction writers do. They almost have to. (Conversations 29)
Butler also seems to comment on this issue of authorship in her novel through her portrayal of Kevin, Dana’s white husband who is also a writer. Eventually Kevin gets stuck in the past for five years, but the story is never told from his point of view, nor does the reader get the full, intimate details about his life as a white man in antebellum America. In fact, the majority of Kevin’s five-year stint that spans from 1819-1824 is relegated to three pages in the novel. In order to attempt to become a viable authorial voice, the author must be able to connect with history, understand the complex systems, avoid minimizing perspectives, and avoid harmful personal biases. These criteria are important to avoid creating more skewed narratives. Moody notes that
Furthermore, enslaved and ex-slave women’s narratives published through collaboration with literate amanuenses could interrupt, and contest, accounts of slaves’ experiences as recorded by persons who had not known bondage; they could correct erroneous details of second-hand (or fabricated) reports of slavery. (113-114)
When contemporary authors write narratives on behalf of enslaved people, they should continue this work of correcting flawed narratives and incorrect details. But, in order to write these third party narratives, these authors must expand their knowledge about the institution of slavery and enslaved people. While the quest ideal authorial voice is something many black historical revisionist may strive for, this journey will remain incomplete. Even well-versed authors like Butler cannot fully touch on the experience of being enslaved because she, like Dana, only know a fraction of the experience. Therefore, their research and journeys make them, at best, viable authorial voices. Being a viable authorial voice means that their tales will hold more veracity and reliability because of their ability to connect with history and narrate these stories without extreme bias.
Indeed, the novel undercuts Kevin as an authorial voice for the black experience because of his rank skepticism and his often skewed perception. Kevin’s inability to believe Dana’s narrative becomes an issue nearly immediately. Though Kevin watches her disappear and reappear on the other side of the room, he does not believe what his own eyes have witnessed. When Dana does reappear, he immediately demands she tell him what happened and “how [she] got wet” (15). She tells him the entire story of her trip to a wooded area and how she had to save a young boy from drowning. Dana says, “I looked at Kevin, saw that he held his expression carefully neutral. He waited,” and once she was done, his first comment is: “this stuff had to come from somewhere” (16). When she asks him if he believes her, Kevin’s only response is to ask her how long she was gone. While from Dana’s point of view it was a few minutes, Kevin responds “A few seconds. There were no more than ten or fifteen seconds between the time you went and the time you called my name” (16). From Kevin’s point of view, there was no way that Dana could have been gone for minutes when he only witnessed seconds. He tells Dana, “You vanished …. You were here until my hand was just a couple of inches from you. Then, suddenly, you were gone. I couldn’t believe it. I just stood there. Then you were back again and on the other side of the room …It happened. I saw it. You vanished and you reappeared. Facts” (16). On the other hand, Dana’s experience is more elaborate, spanning a longer time period so she responds: “And I know what I saw, and what I did—my facts. They’re no crazier than yours” (16). From the beginning, the two cannot match their experiences, and Kevin continues to dismiss Dana’s experience as “a dream” or “a hallucination,” and encourages her to “pull away from it” rather than accepting her experience and helping her deal with her trauma (17). This shows the problem of being too distant from the experience. His inability to accept narratives told to him would make him ineligible to convey them to others. Much like many of the people during and before the antebellum period, Kevin is distrustful of narratives he cannot identify with and has not experienced. Because he did not experience what Dana did, he doubts her narrative of events. Therefore, even though Dana is not yet a viable authorial voice, her narrative is privileged over his. When Kevin relates his version of events, Dana does not doubt him, even though her perspective of these events are different from his. This conflict between the two main characters epitomizes one of the most important criterion require when speaking on behalf of others: the ability to empathize and believe someone else’s pain.
During her second trip, which happens the same night as the first one, Dana is gone for a few hours. But, again, from Kevin’s point of view, this time she is gone for a “few minutes” (46). Again, Dana retells her entire experience and tells him that what she’s experiencing is getting “more and more believable,” while Kevin’s response is “Maybe” (46). Rather than believing Dana’s story, he attempts to rationalize it saying: “But the fact is, you had already seen the Bible. You knew about those people—knew their names, knew they were Marylanders, knew …” (46). Kevin’s attempts to delegitimize Dana’s experience early in the narrative highlights why he would not be a viable authorial voice. In order to be a viable authorial voice, Kevin would have to be open to what they were saying and be able to see their experiences as legitimate. However, even with his own wife, he is skeptical and attempts to revise what she has experienced so that he can believe it and digest it. These problems—his inability to believe and his skewed point of view—continue to be trends throughout the novel.