Amistad

In class on Wednesday, we watched Steven Spielberg's 1997 film Amistad. In this blog, I'm supposed to explain how the film helped me visualize slavery, but the daily grind of slave life is not what Amistad's about. Instead, the film helped me visualize the conditions of the slave passage between African and the New World, and some key actors and arguments in the drama of the slave debate.

The opening minutes of the film, Cinqué's desperate struggle to free himself from his chains in the hull of the ship, are of course highly dramatic and very "Hollywood." They are, however, really riveting and honestly disturbing - the blood, the sweat, the lightning, the rain... It seems to represent the whole of the calamity of African slavery, and it is in that aspect that the film helped me 'visualize slavery.'

There is also Cinqué's description, through the help of an interpreter, (and montaged by Spielberg) of the absolutely inhumane conditions of his capture, trade, and passage. The sight of starving Africans climbing over each other for a morsel of the gruel the sailors brought them... the woman with her baby... the drowning of the slaves... that's all sickening to me, but again helped me 'visualize' the slave trade. I'm used to reading about it in books, but it was really poignant to have a visual representation.

Third, my favorite part of this film was actually that it provided a stage on which the many major arguments for and against slavery were presented. John Quincy Adams, Baldwin, Joadson, and Cinqué himself were able to make voiced powerful arguments against slavery, and Holabird and John C. Calhoun voiced the opposite. These arguments even came up in a discussion with some friends last night.

Didn't West Africans practice slavery themselves? a friend asked. All I had to do was quote Ensign Covey, the interpreter, to explain the difference between these two types of slavery. And who can forget John Quincy Adam's final speech before the Supreme Court of John C. Calhoun's tension-filled words at the Presidential dinner?

More than the daily life of a slave, this film helped me visualize the debate surrounding slavery and the passage between West Africa and the New World.