Mary Prince, a West Indian slave, published The History of Mary Prince in 1831. Mary Prince begins her History with a brief description of her childhood before turning to her adult experiences of slavery in the West Indies. She describes her early childhood in the household of Captain Williams as "the happiest period of my life; for I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave” (Prince, 1B). Mary Prince was sold to a number of brutal owners and suffered from terrible treatment. After suffering a brutal treatment by several owners, Mary Prince became the first women to present an anti-slavery petition to parliament. The book was a key part of the anti-slavery campaign. It made people in Britain to aware that, although the Slave
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The presence and presentation of these sentiments serve to battle the picture of the slave as brute beast, In spite of the fact that Prince feels that she can't verbalize satisfactorily the profundities of her enthusiastic torment, it is simply because the horror is unimaginable to all but God. She identifies the day of the auction as "the black morning” (3). “Mary’s mother herself had to carry her little children to market” (3) where they were sold to different owners. As potential buyers examine her as if she were an animal, insensible to the pain of being separated from family, Prince describes their words as wounding her. “When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us, and mourned over us, bagging of us to keep up a good heart and do our duty to our new masters. It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing” (4). Seeing her mom's hopeless despondency of the loss of her kids and managing her very own sadness, “Mary felt that the white observers at the auction did not thought little about the torment that wrought the heart of the Negro lady and her young ones (4). Mary now knew the bitter pains of such a loss. Similarly, In a Map to the door of no return, she describes that “dark continent” (Brand, 17) is a place where Africans are captured, loaded into ships heading for new world. It is a door many of us wish never existed. It is a door which makes the world impossible, dangerous, cunning and disagreeable. “Our inheritance in diaspora is to live in the inexplicable space. The space is measure of our ancestors’ step through the door toward the ship” (Brand, 20). However, she also interrogates this entrapment through reflections on the Door of No Return, the symbolic location of departure for Africans sold into slavery. The door is really the door of dreams. “This existence is diaspora is like that from
The presence and presentation of these sentiments serve to battle the picture of the slave as brute beast, In spite of the fact that Prince feels that she can't verbalize satisfactorily the profundities of her enthusiastic torment, it is simply because the horror is unimaginable to all but God. She identifies the day of the auction as "the black morning” (3). “Mary’s mother herself had to carry her little children to market” (3) where they were sold to different owners. As potential buyers examine her as if she were an animal, insensible to the pain of being separated from family, Prince describes their words as wounding her. “When the sale was over, my mother hugged and kissed us, and mourned over us, bagging of us to keep up a good heart and do our duty to our new masters. It was a sad parting; one went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing” (4). Seeing her mom's hopeless despondency of the loss of her kids and managing her very own sadness, “Mary felt that the white observers at the auction did not thought little about the torment that wrought the heart of the Negro lady and her young ones (4). Mary now knew the bitter pains of such a loss. Similarly, In a Map to the door of no return, she describes that “dark continent” (Brand, 17) is a place where Africans are captured, loaded into ships heading for new world. It is a door many of us wish never existed. It is a door which makes the world impossible, dangerous, cunning and disagreeable. “Our inheritance in diaspora is to live in the inexplicable space. The space is measure of our ancestors’ step through the door toward the ship” (Brand, 20). However, she also interrogates this entrapment through reflections on the Door of No Return, the symbolic location of departure for Africans sold into slavery. The door is really the door of dreams. “This existence is diaspora is like that from