For this paper I have watched the movies 12 Years a Slave and Secrets and Lies. The first film I mentioned is about slavery in the 19th century in America starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Northup Solomon. It’s actually based on the novel of Northup Solomon, a citizen of the middle class. He has written this novel after years of slavery. He was a black man who was kidnapped and afterwards got sold as a slave. Northup has already got a wife and two children when he gets kidnapped. Before he gets into slavery, he has been working as a violinist and lives in New York with his small family. One day, two men want him to travel with them to Washington and promise him to offer him a job as a musician when they return. He accepts their request and the three men go to Washington. What Northup did not know was that these two men weren’t to offer him a job in return but were to kidnap him. At dinner in Washington, they drug him and then lock him up in a cellar where he also gets chained. A white man first tortures him and calls him Platt, a slave that ran away from Georgia. He asks him about his name and starts beating him because he replies that he’s called Northup and not Platt and that he’s a actually a free man. This white man then takes him to New Orleans by ship where they sell him to William Ford as a slave. He starts working for him but one day an over-seer called John Tibeats attacks him and Northup fights back. After this incident, his owner Ford has to sell him to Edwin Epps because if not, Tibeats will kill him. After working for several years at Epps’ plantation, one day the sheriff comes over to see Northup. He starts asking him questions about his earlier life and as soon as he notices that the given answers are the same with wh... ... middle of paper ... ...y their way of acting. Their facial expressions and the awkward silences kept me interested. I enjoyed watching this film because the story was easy to understand. I didn’t have to pause to replay a scene just to comprehend what was going on. The actors spoke very clearly and that’s very important to me because I never want to focus on the subtitles when it’s not necessary. What I didn’t like about Secrets and Lies was the character Cynthia. She didn’t have mature manners and kept crying instead of solving her problems by searching for a solution. What surprised me was the mature behaviour of Hortense. Her mother should definitely take her as an example and learn how to behave well. I expected her to be very angry and hateful at her mother but instead she acted modestly, discreetly and purely. Once again, I’ve understand that secrets and lies will get us nowhere.
The film 12 Years a Slave takes us into a twelve-year window of Solomon Northup’s life. Its origin comes from Solomon Northup’s book, with the same title, that recounts one fragment of America’s most embarrassing exploits. The film was directed by Steve McQueen and was released in the year 2013. The director chose 12 Years a Slave to work with after much searching for non-fictional story that featured a man who was ripped from his family and forced into slavery. Solomon’s story was just that. Many critics have been praised the film and particularly single out Chiwetel Ekiofor’s performance as the best acting of the year (Solomon Northup).
The criteria of this essay are just used to inform the readers about what black people had to endure during slavery. Also, showed how whites treated black people. The movie also showed how black people had to deal with how white people treated them.
Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave narrates the author’s life story as a free Africa-American man from New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the pre-Civil War South. Northup was born and raised, lived, worked, married, and raised a family in New York as a free black male. Northup was a farmer, and a multi-task laborer and also a talented violin player. In the year of 1841, two scam men offered him profitable work playing violin in a circus, and then Northup think about the offer and traveled with them to Washington, D.C., where he was drugged, and sold as a slave into the Red River region of Louisiana.
Imagine that it is the year 1841 in Saratoga, New York and blossoms of the dogwood tree are swirling around your face as the wind gently tousles your hair. All seems well in the world, and, to Solomon Northup, great opportunities are coming his way. Two men, by the names of Merrill Brown and Abram Hamilton, had offered a dream job to Solomon. They had asked him to join them in a circus, playing the fiddle, an instrument Solomon had mastered. However, these men were not as honest as they seemed. Brown and Hamilton later drugged and kidnapped Solomon at a hotel one night during the tour. These men successfully forced Solomon into twelve years of slavery.
In 1861, Harriet Jacobs published her book “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” The story is based in Southern United States of America during the time before Jacob escaped from slavery in 1835 (Reilly 649). Jacobs uses the name Linda Brent as a pseudonym (Reilly 649) and describes her experience as a female slave through a first person narration. The purpose of the selections featured in Kevin Reilly's, “Worlds of History,” is to show the victimization and emotional suffering female slaves feel against their white masters vs. the physical pain a male slave endures.
The Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, An American slave takes a look at how it really feels like to be a slave. There is only so much you can learn about slavery in the textbooks. Oftentimes we know what slavery is, but never really understand how brutal it was for the slaves. Within the autobiography, chapter one lets you learn about who Frederick Douglass is and you learn about his childhood. You learn about his family, and the life he lived as a slave. Douglass shares his experiences to help us learn how exactly slaves were treated. Douglass emphasizes his writing in a unique style to capture the audience, while also reeling in their emotions to embrace the experience of being a slave, and uses an effective tone to illustrate
The topic of slavery in the United States has always been controversial, as many people living in the South were supportive of it and many people living in the North were against it. Even though it was abolished by the Civil War before the start of the 20th century, there are still different views on the subject today. Written in 1853, the book Twelve Years a Slave is a first person account of what it was like for Solomon Northup to be taken captive from his free life in the North and sold to a plantation as a slave in the South, and his struggle to regain his freedom. Through writing about themes of namelessness, inhumanity, suffering, distrust, defiance, and the desire for freedom, Northup was able to expose the experiences and realities of slavery.
In Solomon Northup’s narrative, 12 years a slave, he shares a story of the horrors of his past that was a lifelong reality to many African Americans throughout American history. Northup, being a free man of Saratoga, New York, was stripped of his freedom and sold ‘down the river’ to the Bayou Boeuf of Louisiana and was bound to slavery for twelve years. Along with recounting the gruesome hardships and labor that he had to endure, Northup also gives detailed accounts of the lives of fellow slaves that he comes across, primarily, women. Northup’s narrative allows readers to see that the hardships that slave women experienced by far surpassed anything that a slave man could endure. Stripped of their families, beaten relentlessly and forever victims
Slave narratives were one of the first forms of African- American literature. The narratives were written with the intent to inform those who weren’t aware of the hardships of slavery about how badly slaves were being treated. The people who wrote these narratives experienced slavery first hand, and wanted to elicit the help of abolitionists to bring an end to it. Most slave narratives were not widely publicized and often got overlooked as the years went by; however, some were highly regarded and paved the way for many writers of African descent today.
Neo-slave narratives are an African American genre that is concerned with the continued affairs of slavery, physical and psychological, on both slaves and the enslavers. They examine questions of labor, violence, denial, unequal relations of dependence, and the need to build better futures together with former oppressors (Gates Jr. and McKay).
In history, slavery is regarded as one of America’s largest downfall. Many experiences have been documented to the public by victims of slavery. Two of the most infamous works are Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents In The Life of A Slave Girl. The novels had a mutual purpose of convincing a White Northern audience of the terrors of slavery in order to finance or join abolition. Douglass uses an emotional appeal and credibility to achieve his purpose. Harriet Jacobs also uses these appeals in her novel. However, Douglass’ narrative is more effective to the reader.
Fourteen thousand. That is the estimated number of Sudanese men, women and children that have been abducted and forced into slavery between 1986 and 2002. (Agnes Scott College, http://prww.agnesscott.edu/alumnae/p_maineventsarticle.asp?id=260) Mende Nazer is one of those 14,000. The thing that sets her apart is that she escaped and had the courage to tell her story to the world. Slave: My True Story, the Memoir of Mende Nazer, depicts how courage and the will to live can triumph over oppression and enslavement by showing the world that slavery did not end in 1865, but is still a worldwide problem.
Northup, Solomon, Sue L. Eakin, and Joseph Logsdon. Twelve years a slave. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Print.
This document acknowledges the different set of rules about what the master expect from his slaves to do and not to do. The plantation rules described in this document is accounted from the diary of Bennet Barrow’s, the owner of 200 slaves on his plantation in Louisiana on May 1, 1838. No one will be allowed to leave the plantation without Barrow’s permission is the first of many plantation rules. To add, no one is allowed to marry out of the plantation and allowed to sell anything without their master’s consent. Rules implemented by Barrow is strictly dedicated to the safety and security of his plantation of from encroachment of outsiders. He is more concerned about his
12 Years a Slave is a very iconic movie about Solomon Northrup and his being kidnapped into slavery. Northrup was a free man, a professional violinist, and a farmer. After being drugged, he was shipped away from his family and forced to work in New Orleans. During his slavery, he was forced to pick cotton and endure many hardships for 12 years. Eventually, he was freed and returned to his family. The people who captured and enslaved him served no punishment for their crimes since blacks were not allowed to sue white people at that time. Solomon was stripped of all his rights not only as a human, but also as an American and was illegally put into slavery for 12 years.