![]() ![]() ![]() Until you remember what you’re celebrating the triumph over. Hurston’s book is about a person surviving, despite every attempt made for him not to. ![]() Cudjo ends his story as a full human, beyond the terrors he endured. 'That Zora Neale Hurston should find and befriend Cudjo Lewis, the last living man with firsthand memory of capture in Africa and captivity in Alabama, is nothing shy of a miracle. Barracoon is a difficult read, harsh and brutal at times, with just enough levity to help push a reader through. Her strength in articulating dialogue is something that shines in her later work, but it is seen brilliantly here.Hurston lets his language exist, trusting readers to find their way through it. Hurston writes Cudjo’s voice as it was spoken out loud to her. Holding the book and reading it now, Barracoon seems ahead of its time, largely due to how it makes the story of slavery both intimate and viscerally visual, as Roots did most notably several decades after this manuscript was created. Barracoon, in many ways, pursues the slavery narrative in the same manner as the book and film 12 Years a Slave: it tracks slavery’s violence and aftermath through the words, memories, and history of a single person who survived it. ![]()
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