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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Madeleine Dobie, Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVI] 2024
► pp. 307–323

Chapter 17
The blood-stained-gate

An archive of emotion and authenticity in the new slave narrative

This chapter 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, it 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.
Keywords: slave narrative, Frederick Douglass, Ishmael Beah, Emmanuel Jal, modern slavery, child soldier, blood, new slave narrative, Sierra Leone, civil war
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
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
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References (20)
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