12 Years a Slave is a work that goes beyond just entertaining and informing the audience, but it makes today’s audience feel something. This period piece takes us back to the mid-1800s and portrays the injustices done to Solomon Northup who was a successful, free black violinist living in New York with his family. Solomon is drugged, shackled, and sold against his will and though he initially resists the title of slave vocally, he learns that in order to survive he must accept the label and conditions set by white slave dealers and owners. He realizes that he is in a battle for survival, but declares early on, “I don’t want to survive, I want to live.”
This film constructs its own place in the cinematic world putting humanity and our nation’s history under a microscope. Horrifying occurrences such as the lynching of countless innocent black victims, the sexual assault of numerous black women, and the separation of black families in both the North and South are just a few issues that the movie portrays. One of the biggest issues that 12 Years a Slave investigates deals with humanity. In the film, you can see how human beings were debased and degraded until their humanness was made invisible on the basis of racial and religious justification. And as a human being, it makes you wonder how this evil could’ve endured not only in America, but in the world for such a long period of time.
It hurts me to visually observe what I have read in slave narratives such as The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. As a black female in America, it is hard to confront the past because I, like many others, know that this nation has a long history of hypocrisy. We called ourselves the land of the free even though millions upon millions of enslaved peoples inhabited much of the continent’s landscape. We fought for our rights against Great Britain and declared Independence Day failing to grant our own citizens (or at least those who counted as 3/5 of a citizen) their independence. As a black citizen of this nation, feelings of resentment and hatred can easily come up when I envision my ancestors being treated in such a manner. It is hard to not be disturbed and disgusted by the atrocities that occurred with such frequency from our nation’s founding. A man’s twelve year battle with the institution of slavery was just a small segment of a people’s 400 year battle with this nation for equality and human rights.
Although this article may seem more like a rant than a review, I hope that it reveals the capacity for a film, specifically 12 Years a Slave, to provoke conversation and contemplation. This movie brings to light many issues that children don’t really learn about in schools today. It is up to us to seek out knowledge surrounding America’s history, its complete history. We can put art into action just as director, Steve McQueen and his team; turn Solomon Northup’s narrative into a film adaptation. As Lupita Nyong’o says in her interview on The View, “Acting is a way to take history personally…and to make history relevant.” So my hope is that when watching this film or encountering any hard-hitting works like 12 Years a Slave, you do keep in mind the seriousness of our history and maybe use these opportunities as a way to inform yourself and others. Make your life a reflection of what you learn and allow yourself to be inspired by our history to prevent past wrongs from recurring.