Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 2 | Page 5

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 i