Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Our Nig
While reading Wilson’s narrative, I see the reason why she chose to write this in a fiction format instead of an autobiography. Since slavery was a controversial issue back at the time period, there hasn’t been a novel that is published by a black woman before. Therefore, writing the story in a third person would be more acceptable to the public and actually let the world see how bad slavery really is. At the same time, Wilson’s “Our Nig” does slavery in detail and the majority do not want to establish bad reputation because of the whole slavery thing. Thus, that might be the reason why this novel was lost to scholars for over 120 years.
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I agree with you completely on your ideas about why she wrote it in third person as opposed to first person. She was in a difficult place because she wanted to tell her story but had to separate it from reality by changing the names of characters and speaking through the voice of a narrator other than herself. If she had written it in first person, people would have been offended and it would probably have been lost for longer than 120 years, if it was ever published at all.
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