Reading Overview for Thursday, July 8

Assigned Texts: Oroonoko (NA 947-71)

In the second section of Oroonoko, we encounter much more description of the slave trade. As your classmates shared, the slave trade developed in the 1400s when Portugal began trading slaves with northern and western Africa. Before this time, there was already an active system of slavery in Africa among tribes as they fought one another. This system was quite different from the trans-Atlantic trade in that the slaves within Africa were generally treated with more respect whereas those traded to Europeans were dehumanized. We see an example of the African system of slavery in Oroonoko’s relationship with Jamoan. By the 1600s, the Dutch and English were heavily involved in the slave trade as they acquired workers for the sugar plantations in the ‘new world.’ Here’s a brief excerpt about Surinam around the time that Oroonoko takes place:

The colonial history of Surinam really began in the middle of the 17th century when a fort was constructed by the British at the site that would later become the capital, Paramaribo. Sugar plantations were the initial economic incentive and 2000 African slaves were brought by ship to provide labour.

Control was ceded to the Dutch in the mid-1660s and the colony became the centre of Dutch slave trading. Even by the standards of the day, this was a viciously brutal territory with a high mortality rate, and despite the importation of some 300,000 slaves over 150 years, the population of the colony never totalled more than 50,000 people. Beyond the sadistic and murderous habits of the plantation owners, a large number of slaves escaped to form permanent inland (maroon) communities that waged a guerilla war against the Dutch community for nearly a century (these maroon communities still exist today).

This information comes from a blog about the slave trade and Surinam that focuses on the account of Captain John Stedman who was in Surinam in the 1770s, about a century after Behn was there. The blog about Stedman’s descriptions and the images he produced might be of interest to you.

As the introduction to Behn in the NA explains, Behn’s experience in Surinam in 1664 shaped much of this narrative. Many of the aspects of the slave trade, including the methods for acquiring and selling slaves, the treatment and torture of the slaves, and the locations described. As you will notice in the footnotes, many of the people described in Surinam are based on actual people who lived on these plantations and Behn met during her time there. Still, as we discussed in class, there are definitely parts of the story that have been fictionalized, which complicates the categorization of the text.

The beginning of today’s reading is during the Middle Passage as the ship travels from Coramantien to Surinam. As one group explained, the term Middle Passage derives from the place on the ship where the slaves were held. It also refers to the fact that the journey across the Atlantic was the middle segment of a three-part journey from Europe to Africa, then from Africa to the ‘new world’, and then from the ‘new world’ back to Europe. Much of the action, though, takes place in Surinam, on the north coast of South America. We find out much more about the natives of Surinam and about the Europeans living and running the plantations there. One group found an online copy of Edmund S. Morgan's, American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia helpful, and they noted "particularly Section 15, Towards Slavery, where they discussed the techniques the white slave owners would use in order to keep the blacks from gaining freedom." Another group found this website interesting and helpful.

Questions for Thinking and Discussion

• Our reading for the first day included quite a bit of background on Oroonoko and events in Coramantien. What is the effect of the first half of the story? Does it change the way you read the parts set in Surinam?
• Have your responses changed to these questions from yesterday? If so, how? If not, why do you think not?
• Based on the first half of Oroonoko, what do you think is the narrator’s opinion of slavery? Is she clearly against it? Is she ambivalent?
• Do you see Oroonoko as honorable? What does he do that would make him honorable? dishonorable?
• We talked some in class about how Behn gives several descriptions of Oroonoko that relate his appearance to her European audience. As the narrative continues, what else do you notice that Behn does for her European (mostly English) audience?
• How does the narrator describe the three main groups in Surinam? The Europeans? The slaves? The natives?
• A number of critics have expressed frustration and disappointment with the ending of Oroonoko. How do you feel about the ending? Was it satisfactory? If so, why? If not, what would you have like for Behn to include?