ABSTRACT
In a brilliant and harrowing study, The Body in Pain (1985), Elaine Scarry describes death (the cessation of sentience) and pain (the grotesque overload of sentience) as the most extreme forms of self-negation. She juxtaposes the self which she locates in the voice, with the body, or mere sentience. She analyses torture as an extreme process of self-negation until torture victims experience themselves exclusively in terms of sentience or the body, and the torturer sees himself exclusively in terms of self-extension or the voice. I contend that the conditions of antebellum slaves were analogous to torture, since slavery was a concerted effort by white masters to usurp the slaves’ voice and reduce them to mere sentience. The slaves’ pain had a private and public dimension: private insofar as all suffering is deeply isolating and incommunicable, and public since it was the common experience of African-American people. Recovery from pain, therefore, had to serve personal and public needs by healing both the individual and the communal psyche. I will first examine the structure of spiritual performances to show that they are determined by a movement towards integrating the body and voice and lending communal support to individual leadership. Later, I will consider how allegory was used to form continuities with an African past, to encode clandestine liberation messages, and to project journeys to freedom.
