Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 2 | Page 3

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Tell This in My Memory
By: Eve M. Troutt Powell
Tell This in My Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. 246pp. $40.00. ISBN: 9780804782333.
Volume: 1 Issue: 2
June 2013
Review by
Roberto Mazzo, PhD
Western Illinois University
McComb Campus
In the late 19th century, slave trade in Sudan, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire was still very active. There is a large silence surrounding slavery and
its legacy in these regions. Eve Troutt Powell in Tell This in My Memory aims at presenting narratives of slaves and slave owners in order to show
how slaves told their stories, and how the experience of slavery affected those involved. The narratives selected show how slaves travelled
thousands of miles from their places of origin, how they changed, learned languages and converted to new religions. Slave owners’ narratives, on
the other hand, show how slavery was considered a normal experience from childhood and how, for some it proved difficult to make the transition
to a world without slavery. Eve Troutt Powell should certainly be commended, as she has been able to show slavery from an interesting perspective:
the memory of those who experienced slavery, as slaves or slave owners. As this work relies, for the most part on memoirs, the feeling is that there
should have been an introductory chapter problematizing sources. The author critically discussed the narratives presented and sources in every
chapter; however the book would have certainly benefited from a general methodological overview.
The book is divided into five chapters, well connected and written in a fresh style that allow the reader to appreciate the analysis of the narratives
presented, and at the same time, become more curious about the lives of the characters under scrutiny. It is the variety of narratives and the diversity
of the case studies presented that indeed constitute one of the strengths of this book. Chapter 1 is centered on the textual map of Cairo written by
‘Ali Mubarak between 1886 and 1889. Troutt Powell, relying on the famous topography know as Al-Khitat al-jadidah al-tawfiqiyah li misr alqahirah, explores the understanding of slavery in Egypt through the eyes of its author. In the analysis presented, ‘Ali Mubarak openly talks about
slaves and slavery; Troutt Powell has noted how he used the terms ‘abid defining black African slaves and mamluk to define white slaves.
However, she points out that this dichotomy does not really tell us more about these slaves. The successful attempt made by the author to look at AlKhitat focusing on the participation of slaves in Egyptian society shows that, though the identities of those men and women were often
oversimplified, they were not silent and did possess a voice that was often translated into an active agency.
In Chapter 2, it is the narrative of Babikr Bedri which is under scrutiny—a Sudanese trader, previous fighter in the Mahdi’s army, deeply religious
and later interested in girls’ education; and last but not least, slave owner. At the age of 94, in 1944, Babikr Bedri wrote his memoirs in Arabic
through which we can see that slaves were part of his life from childhood. An analysis of the memoirs takes the reader through the life of Babikr
Bedri, showing how slaves were always in the background and formed an order that he considered natural. It is not a surprise, then, that the arrival
of the British at the end of the 19th century was perceived by Babikr as a threat to his traditional way of life. Though the British for two decades did
little to interfere with slavery, it was clear that this system was coming to an end. Babikr owned slaves well after the end of the First World War and
never dropped his prejudices about ‘Blacks’ and ‘Negroes’. In his life, he matured an appreciation for the difficulties experienced by women; he
was a pious Muslim believing that treating women fairly and providing them with an education was a moral duty. Troutt Powell has noted that
Babikr Bedri honoured slavery and he always treated his own slaves as children, patronising them but never giving them a choice. Though this
narrative is revealing of slavery through the eyes of a slave owner, it does not really say much about what slaves talked about and their personal
histories.
With Chapter 3, the attention of the author switches to the narratives produced by slaves in order to find out more about the struggles of slaves
narrated in their own terms. Through this chapter, Troutt Powell shows how Salim Charles Wilson, a Dinka man enslaved in southern Sudan, wrote
of his own enslavement and how he struggled telling his story. Salim—the name was given to him by his first owner—was a contemporary of
Babikr Bedri, but unlike him, he was a slave that eventually became a free man and worked as a lecturer in England looking at slavery with
contempt rather than with nostalgia. Freed by an English missionary, Salim reached London in 1881 and while becoming proficient in English, he
also converted to Christianity. Troutt Powell suggests that the narrative produced by Salim, I Was a Slave in 1939 was meant to teach the reader
about the Dinka, making Salim an anthropologist of his own people, exposing the audience to a history of slavery told by a former slave.
The following chapter explores the memoirs of two important women in Egypt and Turkey: Huda Sha’rawi and Halide Edib Adivar. This chapter
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