Chapter 17
The blood-stained-gate
An archive of emotion and authenticity in the new slave narrative
This paper suggests that the slave narrative employs metonymy as an archive of memory when authors
are unwilling or unable to articulate the experience of trauma explicitly. Drawing on Frederick Douglass’s use of the
“blood-stained gate” metaphor as a repository for his emotional suffering, the paper describes how blood serves as a
metonymic vehicle for communicating authenticity in narratives in which affective descriptions run counter to the
ambitions of the genre. Ismael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) and Emmanuel Jal’s War Child
(2008) present contrasting cases of blood’s capacity to serve as a
repository for the emotional content of war. The trope of blood is then is used a lens for understanding why audiences
respond skeptically to slave narratives and suggests a less suspicious reading practice among scholars and
activists.
Article outline
- Aunt Hester’s blood
- Blood as metonymic archive for emotions
- The blood that binds
- The doubleness of blood for victim-perpetrators
- Convention and doubt
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Acknowledgements
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References
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