Word: slaving
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Nothing less savage-or less funny -than Anthony Hecht's couplet commentary on Aesop, the slave as moralist, should introduce this small masterpiece on man's ingenious cruelty to man. Yambo Ouologuem (pronounced Oo-o-lo-guem), born 30 years ago in the French Sudan, now the Republic of Mali, writes from the point of view of victim. But what a victim...
...scene is complete without its obligatory corpses: various Old Massas die from fire, asp and poison (stomach "exploding like an infernal machine"). Sensuality, in turn, has an almost murderous force. Always there are the users and the used. Slave caravans seem to march across the top of every page like an endless frieze...
...thousands disappears. The brilliant-and clearly well-researched - pageant of 7½ centuries of "galloping inhumanity" (1202 to 1947) drastically slows its tempo. African Everyman becomes specific-one Raymond-Spartacus Kassoumi of a Nakem that increasingly resembles Mali. Nakem's black rulers have already decided that only slaves will be exposed to corrupt French schooling. Raymond comes of a slave family. He studies hard and, as his reward, ends up in Paris receiving an elite-and not so elite-education. To Ouologuem, Kassoumi is the ultimate sophistication of slavery: the black man imprinted with a white soul. African history...
Singer, the author of Satan in Goray and The Slave, delivered an essay in which he emphasized that Yiddish writers must be rooted in the Yiddish culture in order to be successful. "It is no accident," he said, "that the great Jewish writers come from places where Yiddish is read...
...system they will never be given any real authority by the Arabs of the north; at independence in 1956, for example, the northerners grabbed off 796 of the 800 available government posts. There is, moreover, a long history of hatred between the two regions: in the 19th century, Arab slave traders from Khartoum and Cairo carried off 2,000,000 blacks in chains from southern Sudan...