Memory and Storytelling Theme Analysis

Upon boarding the slave ship bound for the North American colonies, it becomes immediately apparent to Amari and her friend Afi that they will never return to Africa. When they realize this, Afi encourages Amari to cling tightly to her memories of home—soon, they’ll be all she has of Africa. However, Amari’s enslavers are aware that these ties to Africa are what helps the slaves feel human and connected to their happy pasts, and so they make a point to discourage slaves from speaking in their native language. They also rename the Black slaves and insist to one another that slaves are, on the whole, unable to remember much. But it’s clear that the slaves do, in fact, remember their old lives and their cultural legacies. The novel ultimately suggests that as slaves arrive in the colonies, have children, and attempt to create lives for themselves in whatever way possible in light of being enslaved, their connections to their memories, stories, and names carried over from their past are exceedingly valuable. Those memories—which, in later generations, become stories—are what help them connect with and take pride in their African identity. Memories, in essence, allow them to be more than slaves.

As Amari is forced into slavery—she’s captured, shackled, branded, and transported to the American colonies—her captors understand that the best way to break the slaves’ spirits is to deprive them of their language and thus, their ability to communicate with each other. To do this, those who manage the warehouses where slaves are quarantined prior to being sold violently forbid their captives from “talking African.” Any conversations that do take place amongst the slaves must be short, quiet, and to the point—so there’s no time to either remind each other of where they came from, or to encourage each other to bravely face whatever comes next. Forbidding the native languages, in other words, fractures any sense of community shared amongst the slaves—and alone, unable to either communicate or understand what’s going on, Amari recognizes that she and her fellow slaves struggle to remain strong. Further, Amari’s memories of home begin to seem less and less useful as she finds herself purchased by Mr. Derby as a gift for his son Clay’s birthday. The memories of her fiancé, Besa, or of her former happiness doesn’t make being raped nightly by Clay Derby any less horrific.

However, as Amari gets to know the slave Teenie, who was born in the colonies to a woman who came from Africa, she begins to see that it’s nevertheless essential to hold onto her memories and pass them on—this is how, Teenie suggests, they can maintain a sense of who they are. Though Teenie never learned her mother’s native language, she does keep a small scrap of kente cloth (traditional West African woven cloth) that her mother managed to hold onto during her transatlantic journey. For Teenie and her four-year-old son, Tidbit, that cloth is a symbol of the tenacity, courage, and the history of not just Teenie’s mother, but of all Black enslaved people in the colonies. Without language, then, Teenie’s memories of her mother and of her mother’s stories of Africa become even more essential to her conception of who she is. Those memories keep her grounded and reminded that she has a rich history and that her heritage and identity extend well beyond the life she leads as a slave.

However, the novel makes it clear that this kind of quiet hope isn’t something that every slave can hang onto, as slavers are often successful in permanently divorcing slaves from their language, names, and history. At one point during her journey south, Amari encounters Besa, her fiancé from home—but he looks nothing like the man she remembers. He speaks in English, barely seems to recognize his Ewe name and insists that he’s now Buck—and most heartbreaking of all, he’s adamant that he has no future now. Besa’s fate makes it clear that the consequences of being a slave go far beyond simply being ripped away from one’s home, denied respect and agency, and forced to work for free. Rather, for the many individuals who don’t see the point in remembering the past or for the many others who struggle to pass down their stories from one generation to the next, the consequence is a loss of culture, a loss of history, and a loss of one’s very identity. Though it is, of course, impossible to go back and remedy the atrocities committed against enslaved people, the novel itself—a work of historical fiction—nevertheless proposes that in order to honor those individuals who suffered abduction and enslavement, it’s essential that they and their stories not be forgotten.