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14 reviews for:
Oroonoko: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: In a New Adaptation
Biyi Bandele-Thomas, Aphra Behn
2.76 AVERAGE
14 reviews for:
Oroonoko: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: In a New Adaptation
Biyi Bandele-Thomas, Aphra Behn
2.76 AVERAGE
This is worth reading for as status as perhaps (depending on your definition) the first English-language novel, though not necessarily for its intrinsic merit. Still, my hat's off to Aphra Behn for an important literary achievement.
I seriously did not understand this book I was so bored the whole way through, and that's the worst thing that can happen when it's a set book for your university course. It just messed with my head.
Read in preparation for an Open University course. This was fairly short and the language was easier to understand than I had anticipated. Europeans don't come out of this very well.
*Really* want to give this 4 stars but this tale has issues. A completely fascinating stew of clashing genres, styles, and social attitudes written by a woman at the dawn of the age of imperialism and the Atlantic slave trade (and indeed, the English Novel itself). Oroonoko’s tale is pure romantic whimsy but weighted savagely with apparently directly observed details of the brutality of slavery. It’s short, fluently written and swift to read. I was pleasantly surprised that such early prose (1688) was so easy for a modern reader. It’s worth checking out.
Aphra takes a lot of criticism for her inconsistency on the morality of slavery, but to me she’s extraordinary for her compassion for Oronooko’s & Imoinda’s plight, and for her vivid first-hand descriptions of early-colonial South America. Her inconsistency is of the same kind as that of an Occupy Wall Street protestor carrying a Starbuck’s coffee: we are all embedded in cruel societal structures & can only of necessity resist from a compromised position. Aphra was married briefly to a slaver and visited Surinam.
Compare her work to Defoe’s Crusoe. I wonder if Defoe was influenced by Behn’s tale - both are books exploring early colonial territories, both books claim to be factual, and both build up a sense of realism through accretion of telling and minutely observed documentary-style detail.
But reading Oroonoko it struck me quite hard that Defoe’s concretisation strategy has one massive hole: whilst we are told Crusoe is both a slave plantation owner and a merchant and trafficker in slaves (he is shipwrecked whilst on a slaving mission), slaves themselves are completely absent from his book and so are any details of their lives and exploitation. This is what Behn supplies in graphic and horrifying length.
At least some of Behn’s troubling inconsistencies on issues of race and exploitation must be due, I think, to her commercial writer’s sense of how to address her contemporary European audience. Despite its flaws, I’m willing to claim Oroonoko for the right side of history: the guilty silence at the dark heart of Robinson Crusoe is Oroonoko’s polar opposite.
“But Caesar told him, there was no faith in the white man, or the gods they adored, who instructed them in principles so false, that honest men could not live amongst them; though no people professed so much, none performed so little; that he knew what he had to do, when he dealt with men of honour, but with them a man ought to be eternally on his guard, and never to eat and drink with Christians without his weapon of defence in his hand, and, for his own security, never to credit one word they spoke.”
Aphra takes a lot of criticism for her inconsistency on the morality of slavery, but to me she’s extraordinary for her compassion for Oronooko’s & Imoinda’s plight, and for her vivid first-hand descriptions of early-colonial South America. Her inconsistency is of the same kind as that of an Occupy Wall Street protestor carrying a Starbuck’s coffee: we are all embedded in cruel societal structures & can only of necessity resist from a compromised position. Aphra was married briefly to a slaver and visited Surinam.
Compare her work to Defoe’s Crusoe. I wonder if Defoe was influenced by Behn’s tale - both are books exploring early colonial territories, both books claim to be factual, and both build up a sense of realism through accretion of telling and minutely observed documentary-style detail.
But reading Oroonoko it struck me quite hard that Defoe’s concretisation strategy has one massive hole: whilst we are told Crusoe is both a slave plantation owner and a merchant and trafficker in slaves (he is shipwrecked whilst on a slaving mission), slaves themselves are completely absent from his book and so are any details of their lives and exploitation. This is what Behn supplies in graphic and horrifying length.
At least some of Behn’s troubling inconsistencies on issues of race and exploitation must be due, I think, to her commercial writer’s sense of how to address her contemporary European audience. Despite its flaws, I’m willing to claim Oroonoko for the right side of history: the guilty silence at the dark heart of Robinson Crusoe is Oroonoko’s polar opposite.
“But Caesar