A map of slavery across the Atlantic
£13.95
Buy this book
Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Manu Herbstein
2001
e-reads, USA
456 pages
Reviewed by Tony Simões da Silva
Anyone who tackles as the topic of his first novel one of the most traumatic events in recent world history reveals a considerable degree of guts and artistic ambition. As a theme, slavery has been explored by some of the greatest names in contemporary writing in English: Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987), Abdulrazak Gurnah in Paradise (1994) and Ayi Kwei Armah in Two Thousand Seasons (1974), for instance. All have sought to examine slavery in a way that makes it a human, rather than simply a historical experience. However, it is the eighteenth-century African writer Olaudah Equiano whom Manu Herbstein might be said to have in mind here, as it were. In his Life of Olaudah Equiano (1989), Equiano set out in vivid detail the long process that took him away from his parents’ village, through a number of African owners, and eventually to Barbados, in the Caribbean.
In Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2001), Manu Herbstein sets himself the challenging task of fictionalising the kind of experiences Equiano spoke of from a personal viewpoint, and as I turned the novel’s 456th page, it is one I felt he had met fully. Indeed, insofar as he adopts as his main character a female slave, Herbstein clearly invites the juxtaposition of his novel to Equiano’s text. Ama maps slavery from the moment of capture in Africa to the arrival in America, in this instance in Brazil. Substantial chunks of the work are devoted to the dealings in human beings conducted by Europeans and to the long Middle Passage. South African born, but a resident of Ghana since 1970, Herbstein brings to his work the passionate curiosity of the outsider and the objective bias of someone whom Elmina Castle, with its explicit links to slavery, "never fails to move", in the author’s own words. Most of all, though, in Ama Herbstein creates a work of literature that celebrates the resilience of human beings while denouncing the inscrutable nature of their cruelty. Like that other great moment of horror in the history of humanity, the Holocaust, the slave trade exists at once as reality and myth, a kind of ‘unconscious’ of contemporary civilisation.
This is story telling on a grand scale, literally and metaphorically. The novel spans a geographi
cal frame that reaches from Africa to America, depicting in closely observed detail also the horrors of the Middle Passage. An epic of the slave trade, Ama offers a carefully imagined examination of the failings of humanity when possessed by greed and a desire for power and influence. Herbstein is especially good at evoking the mood of the time, the mind frame of slaves and slavers, and the political and economic conditions that made slavery possible. Ama echoes the views of writers, historians and philosophers of the African diaspora who have argued that the phenomenon of slavery is inextricable from the deepest foundations of contemporary western civilisation. The blood of Africa, the Antiguan writer, Jamaica Kincaid reminds us, soaks the streets of Bristol, of London, of New York. The foundations of capitalism, the sociologist and historian Paul Gilroy asserts, rest on the sediment of the slave trade. Thus, although Ama does not obscure or excuse Africa’s own collusion in the slave trade, European nations such as Britain, Holland and Portugal come in for considerable flak. But Herbstein seems less interested in apportioning blame than he is in understanding the mechanics of the slave trade. This is a painstakingly researched work of imagination, but one in which the fictional draws for its sustenance on a wealth of knowledge gained from anthropology, history and other cultural sources. As the note ‘About the Author’ states, in Ama Herbstein has tried "to understand not only the victims but also the beneficiaries of the evil trade in human beings" (n.p.n.). Thus, at the beginning of Part III, "The Love of Liberty", we read:
"A work of literature that celebrates the resilience of human beings while denouncing the inscrutable nature of their cruelty"
African slaves were sold in Lisbon as early as 1441. The European discovery and colonisation of the Americas set the scene for the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which lasted from early in the sixteenth century until the second half of the nineteenth. The slaves were all African. So too were many of those who sold them. The buyers ans shippers were almost all Europeans. In the course of three hundred years, upward of ten million black men, women and children arrived in the Americas as unwilling migrants. Millions more died on the journey to the Atlantic coast, and at sea. (245).
Ama tells story of Nandzi, a young Bekpokpam girl in West Africa who is captured by a rival ethnic group at a very young age and then repeatedly sold, given away and exchanged indiscriminately by a number of men to many other men; first in Africa, subsequently on board the ship to Barbados, and eventually in Brazil, where the ironically named The Love of Liberty has to put to land after a particularly bad storm. In her life time Nandzi will be named Ama, then Pamela, then Ama again, ‘One-Eyed’, Ana das Minas and, as the novel concludes, Ama. Raped variously but with brutal regularity initially by Asante warriors, members of a rival ethnic group, then by English and Dutch seamen, by assorted members of the ship taking her away from Africa, eventually by her Brazilian owner and his manager, Ama’s body becomes a graphic and disturbing emblem of the destruction of Africa – literally, of the rape of Africa. Not surprisingly, the novel concludes with the reflection that "[T]he end of this story is yet to be written" (456).
Indeed, there is a sense in which Ama’s character is Africa itself; like the continent, Ama is explored, exploited, lied to, and abandoned. Like Africa, Ama is strong but often much too naïve; deeply moral but unsure about how to deal with the deceit of those who surround her; finally, Ama and Africa share in common an enormous capacity to adapt, to survive, to forgive, if not to forget. Speaking to some of the many slaves she meets on the way out of Africa, she remarks at one stage: "Oh, Edinas and Fantis and Asantes, we are all the same family" (161). Like Ama, Africa has been desired, sexualised and turned into a commodity. It has also at times been complicit in its own destiny. At one stage in the novel, Ama considers her own involvement in the slave trade in ways that resonate with a broader cri de coeur that has since characterised the work of many African intellectuals and artists. But the symbolism carries throughout the novel in different ways: when, during the long voyage out to the Americas we read that "Ama came out on deck, starved, dehydrated, filthy" (343), it is not Ama whom we watch but every slave who has ever undertaken the Middle Passage. Ama’s suffering, and its imprint on her body and face become visible reminders of the hidden trauma of slavery. After initially meeting her in Africa, during the time she was his uncle’s partner, the slave trader Williams, "William Williams, the nephew….was shocked at her appearance. During his year at Anomabu he had learned to distinguish one black face from another. He rather fancied himself as a connoisseur of African beauty. This girl had been quite pretty. Now her appearance was grotesque" (334). By focusing on the brutalisation of Ama’s beautiful body, and on the psychological scars of her experiences, Herbstein dramatises the collective trauma of slavery through the story of a single African woman.
The novel is divided in four main parts, entitled "Africa", "Europeans", "The Love of Liberty" and "America". Structurally, the symbolism here too is reasonably obvious: Ama is, before anything else, an epic of the African Diaspora. Part 1, "Africa", describes the daily lives of the sort of people whom we will later meet on board "The Love of Liberty", on their way out of Africa. It depicts a world of complex and sophisticated cultural rituals, and heated political conflicts. Hersbtein is judicious but unsparing in his portrait of 15th century Africa; we are presented with a continent as rich in blessings as it is afflicted by internal disputes. This is at once an idyllic world and one constantly threatened by the risks brought about by change in its broader sense. Ama begins in a small village in a remote part of Africa. It is here that we are introduced to the young girl left behind when her family and the people in her village attend a burial elsewhere. Ama, the narrator informs us, and "[l]ike all Bekpokpam girls, has been betrothed at birth" (2) to a man 20 years her senior. Soon we will learn about other customs and traditions, since one of the most salient aspects of the novel is an overt emphasis on the recreation of an Africa that stands up as a direct challenge to the colonial historical inscriptions of the continent as an empty place.
This section is followed by another, entitled "Europeans", in which Nandzi, now known as Ama first comes in contact with European slave traders. Her treatment at their hands is at once brutal and perplexing, for while raping her and generally abusing her, some of the men she meets here will be instrumental in helping her fulfil her intellectual potential. Some European men are nasty and uncaring, but others adopt towards Ama a more humane attitude, in some cases actually falling in love with her. They are seduced by her physical beauty and mesmerised by her intelligence. It is here that she becomes known as Pamela, a name bestowed on her by a Dutchman in love with the classics of English literature. Ama’s endless interactions with Europeans are never one-sided, and in that way Herbstein seems to reflect also on Africa’s encounter with Europe. Often the relationship is cruel, dangerous, brutal and destructive; but almost just as frequently it is a dense and rewarding one. Its characteristics are typical of European colonialism’s contact with Africa, a mixture of benevolence and wrongdoing, kindness and pillaging.
In the third part of the novel Herbstein attempts to bring to life the experience of the Middle Passage, a particularly daunting prospect. To imagine Africa prior to the arrival of the white man is a task well supported by a wealth of historical evidence; likewise, the encounter between Africa and Europe has been well documented, if at times such coverage is quite unreliable. The Middle Passage, however, is different; its horror, like that of the Holocaust, almost insists that witness be borne only by those who suffered the trauma of transportation to America, and in smaller numbers also to Europe and elsewhere. Yet Hersbtein is particularly successful at conceiving and fleshing out the essence of the journey in which so many Africans perished. By having Ama ‘stand in’ for the many millions who left Africa in the cargo holds of countless ships, the novel is able to put a human face to a phenomenon known primarily through cold statistics and historical narratives.
Finally, in its concluding part Ama tells the story of Ama’s arrival in Brazil, in the ironically named Salvador da Bahia [the Bay of the Saviour, or more literally the Bay’s Saviour], the cradle of cultural hybridity if ever there was one. I realise that my reading of Ama as the same as Africa becomes somewhat less plausible in this section. For if Ama symbolises all slaves, giving the many the face of the one, then her survival and disembarkation in Brazil risks underestimating the sheer horror of the numbers of those who never made it there, the hundreds of thousands, or millions thrown overboard into the deep Atlantic Ocean. It is important, then, that we acknowledge this aspect; perhaps equally useful here it is to note that the Ama who comes ashore in Brazil is a very different woman from the young, beautiful girl who left Africa.
This Ama is now half blind, and as ‘One-Eyed’, the name she is given by her new Portuguese owner, she embodies in full the duality of each African’s experience of the Middle Passage. Ama arrives in Salvador alive, but a part of her died in the journey. The loss of one eye, combined with an increasingly scarred and spectral body stand as apt signs of this experience. In Brazil Ama soon begins to do what she does best, deftly adapting to place and people, learning the ways and the language, translating the world around for those who accompanied her, translating herself into the New World. At the conclusion of the novel as at its opening, Ama functions as a bridge between worlds real and imaginary, a link between the culturally familiar and foreign. In the course of Herbstein’s dense and unpredictable narrative, Ama becomes the epitome of the outsider as insider, of the migrant as a work in (of) translation.
Told partly through the perspective of an omniscient narrator, the story often relies on Ama’s own interpretation of her experiences and those of the people with whom she interacts. Ama’s narrative voice is central to the storytelling, and it constitutes at once one of the novel’s most successful aspects and one of its less stable narrative devices. In part, I am conscious that my occasional discomfort with Ama as a narrator stems from the fact that the views she expresses much too often seem to betray those of the narrator (author?). Ama, one might suggest, if somewhat unkindly, is invested with far too much meaning for any one single person, much more for a simple village woman to carry. As noted earlier, Herbstein seems to ‘intend’ Ama as a celebration of the heroism of all the millions who made the crossing, and the many more who did not.
It is understandable in this context that Ama should be such an extraordinary woman. She is possessed of enormous intelligence, insatiable curiosity, a courage without limits and the most generous and selfless personality. She learns languages with the ease of the born polyglot, masters chess in a couple of hours, and has a grasp of the machiavellian world of colonial politics that would the envy of many a United Nations diplomat. Yet, half of these achievements would still have made her a fascinating character and an outstanding individual. For my money, this is the one glaring flaw in a novel that otherwise combines a good yarn, an intricate and seductive plot and a writing style that holds the reader in thrall until the end. Herbstein has attempted to create in his novel what might be read as a ‘partner voice’ to Equiano’s, and once we get over the difficulties that a ‘gendering’ of his narrative raises, this is an extremely engaging work of fiction. Long, perhaps a little too long; a less keen emphasis on the anthropological recreation of Africa in the first part of the work, and a more sparse account of the Middle Passage would only have strengthened this very accomplished piece of writing. But then Manu Herbstein is in august company here, as anyone who’s read A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1991) or Louis de Bernières’ Birds Without Wings (2004) will attest. Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade deserves a wide readership, and I hope that it will succeed in gaining it.
Tony Simoes da Silva teaches at the University of Exeter
