This is a book about how former slaves as well as former masters experienced and, even more important, remembered slavery over a wide geographical area including Sudan, Egypt, the central Ottoman Empire and Italy at a time of colonialism, modernization, anti-slavery measures, missionary activities, and of nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without ever misleading the reader as to where exactly her authorial priorities and sympathies lie, Troutt Powell studies the accounts and narratives by such enslavers and masters as Babikr Bedri, ʿAli Mubarak, Huda Shaʿrawi, Halide Edib and Leyla Hanim to reconstruct the many worlds of the enslaved individuals and their enslavers/masters. Slaves were far from being non-entities in the childhoods of these people. We learn, for example, how ʿAli Mubarak, an Egyptian government official, had had a former Ethiopian slave, Anbar Effendi as his role model in his professional life.
The real task of the book, however, is unsilencing the archetypically and supposedly silent, the enslaved, especially in the Middle Eastern and European contexts. To achieve this, the author moves to a different group of sources, the stories of the enslaved as narrated by themselves – in other words, ego-texts by the enslaved. The task proves to be a difficult challenge on many counts. Remembering and writing slavery away from home, in a different cultural milieu, was an immensely difficult task for many former slaves, requiring them to be erudite in languages other than their own; there was also the problem of literacy, but this was only part of the problem: the fully cognizant author makes us aware that there was the permeating question of mediation or intervention by others.
One might assume that this was inevitable in cases where the narrator was illiterate or barely literate, as in the cases of Murgan, Bakir Ahmed, Sister Mary Josephine and even in the case of the renowned Saint Josephine Bakhita who dictated her life story to fellow sisters on two separate occasions. However, Troutt Powell makes it very clear that it was not simply a question of literacy and linguistic skill, there was also a tug-of-war between formerly enslaved authors and their “editors” as to what to tell and how to tell their own life stories. Simply put, mistrusting the capabilities of former slaves to tell their own stories, “editors” wanted to control the former's narratives. A former slave from the Sudan, Salim C. Wilson, who settled in England, had to write his life story several times over as “he struggled for control over his narrative with his English evangelical editors”, with the result that we have several versions of his story published between 1881 and 1939, and that we have a changed narrative.
We have to bear in mind that these voices, with one exception, i.e. Şemsigül the Circassian whose story was partially preserved not in a narrative but in official documentation, all belong to formerly enslaved individuals and not to actual slaves. In other words, the accounts by former slaves are as much about how slavery was remembered as about how it was lived. This raises the question of what can be learned from these narratives about slavery itself as practised in the Sudan and the Middle East. The short answer is a great deal – and in the near absence of narratives by slaves themselves, we have to make do with these accounts. On the other hand, we have to realize that the telling of slavery in these narratives had a place so long as it served a purpose. For many of the former slaves who left an account of their life, slavery was the cause of their misery as well as the reason for their bliss later in life. They had other narrative priorities – revolving around how they made good, spiritually and otherwise, in their new societies – than telling about slavery.
Moreover, slavery and its attached traumas often led individuals to forget. Enslaved individuals could forget even their own childhood names, not to mention the name of the tribe to which they belonged. Even the very eloquent Daniel Sorur Pharim Deng, a former slave from the Sudan who became a priest in Italy, and for whom the kind of “editorial challenges that confronted Salim C. Wilson” did not exist, could only ascertain the name of his tribe “[a]fter considerable research” involving the study of explorers’ maps.
It is against these odds that Troutt Powell succeeds in the difficult task of finding the lost voices and giving them meaning, thanks to her sensitive yet critical approach to the sources produced by the former slaves and others. Here lies her greatest contribution to the field. It is a pity that material from the collected volume by Terence Walz and Kenneth M. Cuno (Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egypt, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean, Cairo, 2010) could not be incorporated in the present book. Madeleine Zilfi's monograph (Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference, New York, 2010) is similarly absent.
As is to be expected of any text, Troutt Powell's book contains a number of factual inaccuracies. For example, the Mamluks need not have been Christians (p. 20) but non-Muslims at the time of their enslavement. The Coptic master of the Muslim female slave in Gaw is more likely to have been a local Christian than a “foreigner” as he is referred to as “al-nasrani” in ʿAli Mubarak's text (pp. 30–31). Likewise, the trade in African slaves was made illegal not in 1874 (p. 129) but in 1857. Needless to say, these and similar errors should not be construed as standing in the way of Troutt Powell's achievement. Tell This in My Memory makes excellent reading and is written with sensitivity and good taste.
