'Inside The Most Unforgettable Scene In 12 Years A Slave'
In his article, Inside The Most Unforgettable Scene In 12 Years A Slave, Adam B. Vary wrote that “Sometimes there are movies, or scenes, or even just brief moments, that we cannot shake, that sear themselves so fully to our synapses that not only do we know we will never forget them, but we wonder how on Earth the people who made them possible could have survived them.” This is the exact feeling I get anytime I watch the whipping scene in the movie, 12 Years a Slave.
The scene begins at 1:47:00. It was set outside slave master, Edwin Epps’s plantation showing many slaves. In the scene, plantation owner, Edwin Epps forces Northup (also known by his slave name which is Platt) to whip his fellow slave Patsey for leaving the plantation to find soap. Patsey is arguably the most hardworking slave as she collects more cotton than anybody else on the plantation.
Blogger, Cynthia Fuchs, believes the scene is as bizarre as you can imagine, with Mary (Epp’s wife) urging on both her slave (Platt) and her
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Personally, I feel like this scene serves as a metaphor to the very beginning of colonialism/slavery; When Europeans came to take Africans as slaves from their various home countries. Also, it shows how we were supposedly “African traitors” who sold out our fellow man to earn a quick buck or in return for something special from the Europeans. They did something morally wrong for something one could perceive as materially right.
Europeans firmly believed Africans were nothing more than animals, so they would often subject them to primal behaviours like eating with their hands tied behind their backs or in extreme cases such as this, abusing their own people. I think, the true sadness in this scene is the fact that one can tell that Northup is doing something he loathes. But he does it out of complete fear for his and Patsey’s lives and what might happen to both of them if he does not carry out the action and please his master at the sight of his forced barbaric
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