Naomi Chebii
American Culture and Film
2nd Essay: 12 Years a Slave
28-09-2015
Ref: Analysis on 12 Years a Slave
The film 12 Years a Slave tells the horrific true story of a free black man Solomon Northup, who was dragged, kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1850s America to suffer years of abuse in the Pre-Civil War South. From start to finish, basic facts about the time, the places, the people, and the practices of the day are incorporated, sometimes in excessive detail, into Northup’s story. He speaks with authority on all subjects of his enslavement, naming names and pointing out landmarks along the way. In doing so, he dares skeptics to refute his story, knowing that public record and common knowledge would defend it.
The son of an emancipated slave, Northup was born free. He lived, worked, and married in New York, where his family resided. He was a multifaceted laborer and also an accomplished violin player. In 1841, aged 33, he was tricked into leaving his family behind his wife, and two young daughters, by two white con men, who offered him a job as a fiddler in a travelling circus. So he travelled with them to Washington, D.C., where they dragged him and sold him to a slave trader called Burch. Despite having papers showing he was a free man, Solomon was whipped and beaten and subjected into a brutal torture by his new owner.
12 Years a Slave serves as a timeless indictment of the practice of human slavery. As we saw from the film how Northup’s detailing the abuses he endured and those he was forced to inflict-provides a warning to all generations of the moral costs that slavery exacts from everyone involved. The slave himself or herself is degraded, made to suffer awful torments, and cruelly robbed of physical, emotional, and spiritual riches.
Still, the slave is not the only one who suffers. By participating in slavery, the master is morally