Amazing Grace

To craft a well structured and universally appealing narrative, the author must consider the relationship between the speaker and the audience it is directly addressing. The creation of a good speaker/audience relationship is greatly dependent on the openness and accessibility of the main character to its readers. This two-way communication is constructed through a first person narrative. In the narrative titled, “Amazing Grace,” by Abdel Nasser Ould Yessa, the speaker not only creates an intimate relationship with its readers, but also directs its message to a specific audience. Instead of speaking to a universal audience, Yessa’s narrative aims at advocating a message to a particular audience. Even though the speaker’s primary audience is distinct and specific for most of the narrative, a connection to its general audience is created through a first person narrative and the inclusion of universal, relatable elements. With pronouns like, “I” and “we,” Yessa, the narrator, presents his story and conveys to his audience first hand, what he did, how he felt, and why he did it. The reader is then able to experience the events of the story through his lenses.

What makes Yessa’s slave narrative unlike other narratives from its genre, is that it is not only written from a slave owner’s point of view, but also its structure employs multiple speakers aimed at a definite audience. In the narrative, the speaker immediately limits its audience by incorporating cultural elements and descriptions that aren’t relatable and held in common with all. For examples, the description of his circumcision ceremony, filled with large “ritual tents” and “celebratory songs,” with “hammered drums,” and his decision process of choosing a slave, distance...

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...ands. You have power. You built this country. All you are missing is confidence” (Sage and Kristen 203). The use of pronouns, “we,” and “you” shows that Yessa is speaking on the behalf and representing the slave owners of the world to an audience that is not limited to Yebawwa, his former slave, but to whom Yebawwa represents, the slave population as a whole.

The emplacement of cultural elements and themes may have restricted the speaker’s audience and lengthened the distance between the speaker and western audiences, but through the use of a first person narrative and universal ideologies a connection is still established. The use of a first person narrative may not be able to fully transcend the cultural barriers that exist in the story, but is able to shorten the distance between the speaker and the reader and create a sense of authenticity and truthfulness.