Interrogating Oroonoko: Torture in a New World and a New Fiction of Power
This article interrogates the function and effect of the penultimate paragraph of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, where Oroonoko is tortured and executed. Reading the scene through the prism of European practices of ritual punishment and judicial torture as well as New World uses of torture, I argue that the scene cannot be read, as many critics have, as one of martyrdom. Rather, the scene emerges as closer in its rhetorical aims to those articulated by Elaine Scarry in her seminal analysis of torture, The Body in Pain (1985). As is the case with judicial and modern torture, Behn deliberately produces a body in pain in order to give legitimacy to the truth of her own narrative. Yet, in opposition to that brutal practice, she simultaneously exposes the fictional nature of her own narrative power. She reminds the reader of the violence inherent in any appropriation of another’s story for one’s own political or literary ends, and in the process paradoxically produces one of the first modern, democratic subjects.
"I could right what had been made wrong": Laila Lalami's appropriation of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko
This paper investigates Arab American novelist Laila Lalami (b. 1968)'s re-writing of Alvar Nuňez Cabeza de Vaca's La Relacion, a travelogue that chronicles Spanish conquistador Panfilo de Narvaez (1470–1528)'s expedition to claim La Florida to the Spanish crown in the sixteenth century. Lalami's The Moor’s Account (2014) is a historical novel narrated by Mustafa ibn Muhammad ibn Abdulssalam al-Zamori, a Moroccan slave known in Spanish annals as Estevanico/Estebanico, who was one of four survivors of the Narvaez expedition and whose testimony, unlike those of his Castilian companions, was left out of the official record. As a postcolonial historical novel, The Moor’s Account recovers Mustafa's voice and empowers him to narrate the adventures he undertakes in La Florida for eight years. The paper argues that in reimagining and re-constructing Mustafa's story, Lalami appropriates and adapts Aphra Behn's seventeenth century novel Oroonoko (1688) which is one of the earliest English novels to foreground the themes of displacement and enslavement through relating the eponymous hero's adventures in Surinam. Hence, this study is both analytical and comparative: on the one hand, the paper gives a close reading of Lalami's The Moor’s Account; on the other hand, the paper highlights the similarities and differences between the two texts. The two novels attempt to recover the silenced voices of two African men/Moors who have traded in slaves and were themselves enslaved at a later point in their lives. At the same time, the two novels differ in their narrative techniques, representation of women and denouements.
English politics and the concept of honour, 1485-1642
INTRODUCTION The problem of violence, particularly in relation to politics, is a perennial theme of Tudor historiography, discussion of which has recently been renewed in G. R. Elton's Ford Lectures. These begin with an evocation of the pervasive violence of the Tudor social world. People carried weapons; there was a latent irascibility in the air. Men were prone to brawl and take offence. Silly quarrels escalated into battles in the streets. Conflicts were rapidly translated into the language of the sword. This was particularly so when large issues of politics or religion were at stake. Dissidence could be conceived only in terms of a violent, disruptive stance. It was revolt, “rebellion”, the waging of war against the king. Symbols and scenes of violence figured prominently in manifestations of dissent. There were assemblies of armed men, and banners might be raised. Martial postures and attitudes were assumed. There were sieges and, now and then, battles. But what motivated the pervasive violence? Did it have any method, rhyme or reason? How was the language of the sword translated into politics? It will be suggested below that the root of the matter lies in the mentality defined by the concept of honour. This, emerging out of a long-established military and chivalric tradition, is characterized above all by a stress on competitive assertiveness; it assumes a state of affairs in which resort to violence is natural and justifiable; the recurrence of personal and political situations in which conflict cannot be otherwise resolved than violently.