Shadows of the Slave Past by Ana Lucia Araujo

Author:Ana Lucia Araujo [Araujo, Ana Lucia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Modern, 21st Century, World
ISBN: 9781135011963
Google: 4xMWBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-08-07T16:06:49+00:00

Work and Punishment

Contrasting with the United States, Brazil never developed any national project to collect the testimonies of former enslaved individuals. Men and women who performed slave labor in Brazilian rural and urban areas left very few written accounts describing their work and living conditions, the only exception being Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua. Unlike Douglass, who was born on US soil, Baquaqua was born in West Africa. Soon after his arrival in Pernambuco, he was put to work. In his narrative, he describes his grueling working conditions: “At the time of this man’s purchasing me, he was building a house, and had to fetch building stone from across the river, a considerable distance, and I was compelled to carry them that were so heavy it took three men to raise them upon my head […].”50 In spite of trying to please his master, Baquaqua soon understood that these attempts would not change his situation. To endure his new life, like his slave mates, he started drinking alcohol, then ran away, but was “soon caught, tied and carried back.”51 But like other enslaved individuals born in Africa, Baquaqua resisted his fate. Sent to sell bread in the city, as many urban slaves did at the time, he took part of the money earned to buy alcohol but was discovered by his master, who severely whipped him. Following this event, he attempted to kill himself by drowning in a river but was rescued by a group of individuals in a boat. Once again, he was brought back home and severely beaten by his master, who then sold him to another man living in Rio de Janeiro. Baquaqua’s new master was equally cruel. According to him, he treated a slave girl, bought at the same time as himself, with “shocking barbarity.”52 Certainly the working and living conditions on the Pernambuco plantations were horrendous, and, unlike as Gilberto Freyre suggested, the relations between masters and slaves were far from harmonious.53 Indeed, from the north to the south of Brazil, most heritage sites and museum exhibitions depicting slave labor highlight physical punishments. These representations contradict the traditional image of Brazilian slavery as more humane in comparison to the cruel slave system in the United States, at the same time emphasizing a victimizing image of the enslaved population.

Few visual images of nineteenth-century European travelogues portrayed physical punishments, but the existing ones were widely disseminated, helping to shape the collective and public memory of slavery in Brazil. Among the most popular images of physical punishments are two lithographs (Figures 4.5 and 4.6) illustrating Debret’s Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil and one lithograph (Figure 4.7) of Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil by Rugendas. Since the nineteenth century, these images have been displayed in museums, book covers, posters, documentary films, and soap operas.54 Debret’s visual representations certainly contain several accurate elements, but his renderings featuring physical punishments contributed to conveying an image of enslaved men and women that excessively focuses on victimhood and victimization. The Museu Júlio de Castilhos

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