Framing the Past

Guest blogger, Zetta Elliott

In the past, when I taught my course “Gender, Terror, and Trauma in African American Culture,” I urged my students to consider this problem: how can we study representations of trauma when trauma resists representation? How do writers find the words to describe unspeakable acts of violence, and how can artists give form to shapeless feelings of terror? Over the course of a semester, we would grapple with these questions and sometimes conclude that the most a writer can do is frame the traumatic experience. Toni Morrison employed this strategy in her brilliant ghost story, Beloved. Ella refuses to talk about the years she spent locked in a house, the sexual slave of her sadistic owner and his son. Ella insists, “You couldn’t think up what them two done to me,” but the reader is left to do just that—imagine the endless possibilities framed by that isolated house of horrors.

As I work on the sequel to my time-travel novel, A Wish After Midnight, I find myself confronting these issues once more. How do I write about the brutality of slavery and the devastation of war without turning my readers off—or turning them into voyeurs? In the nineteenth century, writers of slave narratives had to be careful not to offend the “delicate sensibilities” of white, genteel, Christian readers—after all, the goal of slave narratives was to provide a vivid, first-hand account of “the peculiar institution” that would convince northern readers of the pressing need for abolition. Today, most of those constraints are gone, and neo-slave narratives can delve into aspects of the slave experience previously deemed too shameful or risqué.

My goal, however, is not to shock readers with my uncensored version of history. Instead, I seek to represent something virtually indefinable—what fellow black Canadian writer Dionne Brand calls, “the fissure between the past and the present.” My enslaved African ancestors were brought to the Americas via the trans-Atlantic slave routes that came to be known as the Middle Passage; Brand characterizes this horrific forced migration as “a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being…a physical rupture, a rupture of geography.” That Atlantic slave trade ended in 1808, but its legacy remains an unhealed wound, a “visible secret” in this country still divided by race. So how can a contemporary writer represent a profoundly traumatic experience that lasted for hundreds and hundred of years?

For me, speculative fiction offers a number of possibilities. When the official historical record fails me, I am allowed to ask, “What if?” I can take a set of known parameters and fill in the blanks with imaginative, educated guesses. Most importantly, the time-travel device enables me to recreate the jarring experience of dislocation that my ancestors endured. Torn from their families and cultures, stripped of their languages and religions, and thrust into a violent, unjust, and confusing country, these survivors quite literally moved between worlds. When I snatch a teenage girl from contemporary Brooklyn and send her back to the Civil War era, I force her into the same hybrid existence faced by her African American forebears. Genna tries to remain true to her 21st-century self, but she must simultaneously adapt to a racist, sexist society that has little use for young black women. How much of her original identity can she retain? What kind of person does she have to become in order to survive in this hostile environment?

Writing this sequel has left me searching for signs—where would today’s teens find traces of Africa in New York City? I have started with religion since that seems most closely linked to what many still refer to as “black magic.” Separated from her boyfriend Judah, Genna is desperate to open another portal that will lead her back into the past. My job now is to help her discover the tools she’ll need to reverse history. Hundreds of years ago, enslaved Africans had no choice but to pass through the Door of No Return; crossing that threshold led them away from Africa and out to the boats that waited to transport them to the New World. I am hoping to devise a way for Genna to harness the power of her African ancestors so that she is able to control her own movements and shape a past that, to many, still seems beyond redemption.

References:
Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001.

Born in Canada, Zetta Elliott moved to Brooklyn in 1994 to pursue her PhD in American Studies at NYU. Her poetry and essays have been published in several anthologies, and her plays have been staged in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland. Her first picture book, Bird, won the Honor Award in Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Contest; it was named Best of 2008 by Kirkus Reviews, a 2009 ALA Notable Children’s Book, and Bird won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers. Elliott’s first young adult novel, A Wish After Midnight, has been called “gripping,” “vivid, violent and impressive history.” She currently lives in Brooklyn.