12 Years a Slave: A long overdue movie for the sufferings of the blacks in America

Monday, March 3, 2014, Daejeon, South Korea.  As I turned my computer on, I saw the Oscar headlining “‘12 Years A Slave’ wins best picture, and ‘Gravity’ wins 7 Oscars”.  Though I was living in the city known for science and technology, my attention was drawn to the “12 Years Slave”.  Having not heard about the film prior to that headline, my curiosity got the better of me and soon I was watching it on VIOOZ.  It’s about 135 minutes film, but it took me nearly 4 hours to watch till the end; not because my computer was slow but the emotional build ups were too strong to bear in one sitting. 

Having read a number of slave memoirs over the years, in my personal imagination I had always questioned the western mind for not speaking the truth about slavery honestly and openly.  Why are there only slave memoirs written by black slaves?  Why are there no non-black authors and film makers willing to bring up the American and British cruelty inflicted upon one race of humanity by the other?  Yes, there have been books and films that touch upon these topics but it is hard to find the real sense of realism in those works.  The suffering and the cruelty inflicted upon the slaves goes beyond human sanity; only a human mind that is demonized can duly justify the kind of treatment dealt to the slaves. 

In my limited learning, there have been no possible answers as why the west was/is so silent about this shameful chapter of slavery in its history.  I could imagine two possibilities.  The one possibility of west’s silence on this topic could be due to its pure arrogance of being superior human race.  This would imply that if there had been no civil rights movements; Americans would still own slaves as their property.  Their conscience would not condemn them because they would sincerely believe their superiority to be God-given privilege, as they did in those days.  Or worse, the evolutionary religion of the Atheism of the west could find justification by claiming the superiority of the whites over the blacks; after all the fittest survive in that religion.

The other possibility of not talking about it would be the condemnation of its guilty conscience; the condemnation is so strong that it just does not want to remember the past.  Maybe the west just wishes that the whole world would simply forget that there were slaves in modern America; that the white Europeans were slave traders who did not hesitate to treat their fellow humans as lower than animals.

I am inclined to think that the western silence on the issue of slavery, be that in literature, media or movies, is because of the guilty conscience mingled with the desire to maintain intellectual superiority over the rest of the cultures.  This guilty conscience found some kind of relief when the western literature, media and movies found Nazism, Communism and Islamic Terrorism the ready target to demonize.  As evil as these “isms” have proven themselves to be, the west found great relief by demonizing these “isms” and distancing itself from these in claiming to be better than these.  But in reality, slaves in America suffered no less ignominy than the victims of Nazism.

Thankfully, “12 Years a Slave”, though a work of a black film maker, is by far the best realistic slave movies of all time.  It has relatively done some justice to those precious souls who perished in the Jordan with the hopes of rising in heaven.  One cannot watch this movie and not feel the sadness, anger and amazement at man’s capacity to do and to bear evil.  Hats off to the tenacious black souls who survived; yes, not just survived, they have lived and lived well!  The Jordan has been rolling and hopefully the western mind will stand up to the reality of its shame and own its evil behavior instead of hiding behind Nazism, Communism and Islamic Terrorism.