ABSTRACT
This chapter explores anti-slavery literature by late nineteenth-century Ottoman writers whose own mothers had been purchased as slaves from the Caucasus—an untapped subgenre of intimate biofiction. Writing unceasingly about slavery, these writers, often representatives of the state, employ ambivalent filial/romantic/paternal overtones in their attitudes toward the character of the slave girl. Their works vacillate between anti-slavery sentimentality in identification with the mother and apologias for Ottoman slavery in identification with the state. Sami Paşazade Sezai’s Sergüzeşt (1888), the poster child of the subgenre, attempts to mourn the traumatized, formerly enslaved mother, but ends up undertaking her own mourning for her lost mother and motherland. After a series of displacements along the waterways of the slave trade from the Caucasus and a failed attempt to escape with a Sudanese eunuch enslaved in Egypt, Dilber ultimately drowns by suicide in the Nile. Her ghurba, first in an Egyptian Turkish household in Istanbul and then in Egypt, reflects the author’s attempt at displacing the problem of slavery from the paternalizing metropole to the extravagantly Westernized Egyptian Turks now living there, and finally back to the liberally Orientalized Egyptian province. All proclaimed cultural identities become enmeshed in the slave trade in a perversion of the “Egyptian promise” of an East–West synthesis of the highest order.
