Slave Ship: A Book Review

By Gamal Hennessy

I’m developing a science fiction novel about slavery called Humanity’s Fall. The basic concept is Twelve Years a Slave meets Star Trek and follows the ordeal of one woman ripped from her brownstone in Brooklyn and thrust into the belly of a ship to be sold on the other side of the galaxy. The research for this book includes several sources exploring the impact of the Middle Passage including well-known works like Roots and Amistad to more general books like The African Slave Trade and Still I Rise. But as I get ready to write the first draft of Humanity’s Fall, I think the book Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker will have the most impact on my story.

Slave Ship looks at the mechanism of African slavery; the ships and men who captured, bought, confined, tortured, killed and sold millions of people over the course of three centuries. It explores in depth the functioning of the ship, examining the vehicle of the Middle Passage from several viewpoints. The slave ship is seen as:

• An investment for speculative European businessmen
• A debt prison for unwary sailors
• A marketplace for Africans selling slaves
• A prison for Africans captured
• A cemetery for slaves and crew killed in the journey
• A factory for the creation of slaves
• A battleground for slave inter slave conflict and collective rebellion
• An incubator for the concept of race
• A communal space for the creation of shared kinship
• A symbol of evil for abolitionists

Rediker breaks down the Middle Passage in stages, showing how ships were commissioned and purchased, how captains and crews were formed, the process of buying people, attempting to simultaneously break their spirit but keep their bodies intact for sale, the successful and unsuccessful attempts to escape, overthrow or commit suicide and the complex social relationships spending months on the ship would create. By drawing a historical and narrative thread from the people most distant from the process (who gained the most wealth) to the people most suffered the most intimate pain and lost the most, Slave Ship makes an argument for the ship itself to be one of the most influential and at the same time most ignored elements of social development in America.

I read this book during the surge in media coverage over unarmed black men being killed in various parts of the country and the groundswell of racism playing out in various levels of society. In light of this reality and against the backdrop of building my own novel, I began to see parallels between our own time and the collective experience of the slave ship. It was easy to see the bankers and billionaires as the distant businessmen, too far removed from the process to have any interest in it beyond their profit. The police became the sailors and reluctant prison guards. The minority communities become the slaves and the incubator, factory, marketplace and communal space of the ship became the spaces we inhabit now, on and offline. The ship came to represent so much of the American experience, it became easy, perhaps clichéd, to imagine America as a slave ship we are all trapped on. Slave Ship will have a lasting impact on me, not just for the inspiration it provides for my work, but in the way I perceive the world I live in.

Have fun.

Gamal

Read The Screams of Passion for Free All This Week!

A Taste of Honey

Book Three: The Screams of Passion

Nikki Sirene is a spy who uses her sexual charms to steal secrets. She lied and manipulated her way into the bed of her latest target, Manuel Cruz to stop him from smuggling weapons into America. At the same time, she has also fallen in love with Manuel’s wife Dominique.

As the two women become more desperate for each other, their world begins to unravel. Nikki's jealous superior pushes her to complete her mission and end the affair. The Russian mafia behind Manuel’s arms smuggling is close to exposing her and killing everyone she loves. Can Nikki find a way to protect her lover and finish the job or will they both be destroyed by a dark and explosive secret?

This book will be available as a free download for Amazon Kindle from Tuesday April 15th, 2014 to Friday April 18^th, 2014.

Download it now and leave a review!

Note: This book is the third and final installment of the Taste of Honey novel. It concludes the story that began in Book One: Anything for Love and continued in Book Two: The Art of Seduction.

Have fun.

Gamal

Django Unchained Is the Next Great American Spy Film

Much has been written and discussed about Quentin Tarantino's latest project. Django Unchained has garnered praise, criticism and awards as a race film, a western and a spaghetti western. But after seeing the movie last night, it is clear to me that Tarantino did something else. He successfully realizes all of the classic elements of a spy film in a uniquely American setting.

As I wrote in an earlier post (How to Write Spy Fiction), every spy story boils down to the secret struggle for a magic It. The plot of Django is easy to fit into the classic spy formula when it is looked at from this perspective. Without revealing any spoilers, consider the following milestones that occur in many spy stories and also happen in the film;

• The spy is recruited into his profession by an older, experienced mentor.
• He learns his trade and struggles with the morality of what he is doing as his skills improve.
• He engages in some form of deception to manipulate his opponent and get closer to his goal because his opponent has superior strength, numbers and society on his side.
• Some form of counterintelligence is used against him to reveal his plot.
• He is forced to engage in another spontaneous deception, surpassing his mentor to secure the Magic It.

All of these elements were defined and structured well in Django Unchained. They are difficult to see if you’re not looking for them because Tarantino uses a controversial setting and an atypical protagonist to tell his story. But this is just as much a good spy film as Argo, Skyfall or Zero Dark Thirty and should be appreciated in that vein.

It could be that Django is easier to define as a spaghetti western than a spy film. It might be more popular to focus on how many times the word nigger was used in the script or how graphically violent the film was. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that because I’m in the middle of writing a spy novel I see every movie or story in those terms. But none of that takes away from what Django reveals. By shining a light on America near the end of Slavery, Tarantino gives us a look at a struggle that was just as treacherous as the Cold War or the War on Terror. Not every spy story that deserves to be told concerns only the evils of the modern Middle East. Some stories can clearly be found in the systemic human trafficking of America’s own past.

Have fun.

G

Trade of Innocents: A Film Review

Hollywood franchises like Taken use human trafficking as the back drop for their car chases and gun fights. A thread in my own writing explores the impact of sexual slavery as part of the overall narrative. While films like Taken don’t raise the overall awareness of modern slavery they do acknowledge its existence. A much smaller independent film tackles the same subject with more sensitivity and fewer explosions. Trade of Innocents explores the complexity of the subject but its refusal to make hard narrative choices prevents the story from being truly satisfying.

The main story revolves around a former US military officer and his wife who have just relocated to Cambodia. The couple has recently lost their daughter to a pedophile kidnapper and now they are travelling around the world trying to prevent other children from being sold into sexual slavery. In their struggle to stop the pimp in a particular town the couple runs into corruption within the police department, villagers fearful of reprisals, cultural bias against girls, extreme poverty and American pedophiles that will pay any amount of money to rape children. They also have to come to terms with the loss of their own child. The strain that their daughter’s death puts on the wife and on their relationship could have been a problem more emotionally draining than fighting systemic prostitution.

Unfortunately, the traditional Hollywood movie structure hijacks this film and drains most of the life out of it. The conflict between the couple is conveniently resolved without any real effort. There are chase scenes and fist fights that don’t need to be there. The characters that you do care about never feel like they are in any real danger and the climactic opportunity for growth in the wife’s character is replaced by a predictable hero coming to save the day.

The most powerful and nuanced performance of the film is in the subplot of the American pedophile. We learn more about the root causes of sexual slavery and the depths of its perversion from this side story than in any platitude or tearful revelation of the main story. If Trade of Innocents explored more of this world it could have been a much better film. As it stands, it is a more thoughtful version of Taken even if it isn't executed as well.

Have fun.
G