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Male And Female Slave Narratives Analysis

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Slave history and its socio-cultural apparatus remained unrecognized owing to the white man’s burden. Most slaves could not share their cultures and histories as they were extremely forbidden from worldly communication. Consequently, their narrative also showed a frantic struggle to maintain their identity and humanity in a system that had denied both. Certainly, the early black literary voices had been time-honored in institutionalized slavery and were in verbal forms. These slave narratives were obvious expressions from marginalized slave-areas subjugated by the white’s hegemony. Nevertheless, there were momentous differences between male and female slave narratives. Female oral accounts are as an integral part of that Afro-American literary tradition as they enlarge the historical assumptions about nature and function of literary tradition. …show more content…

To voice their burden of being slaves, female slaves had to struggle a lot whereas male slaves recorded their anger, frustration and feelings of powerlessness, nonetheless, their common experience of dehumanizing conditions of slavery creates a powerful communal voice. Through their narratives, the black managed to esteem and preserve their value system including, music, songs, voodoo, beliefs, spirituals, religion, ancestors, kinship-ties, herbal medicines, food habits etc. The slave narratives have been read by critics as rerecording of history of slavery, as of humanity of the blacks as they also carried with them from ‘South’ by forging their cultural principles into new forms of expression that would sustain the conditions they met in ‘North’. Through these forms they were able to respond to social, racial and economic exploitation under which they

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