Islam renounced the practice of slavery some 1400 years ago and laid the foundation of the abolition of slavery and thereby the concept of ‘freeman’. According to Islam, granting lifetime freedom to a slave and ceasing his bondage earns loads of blessing to his owner. What Islam managed to eradicate in 600 A.D was revived due to an obstinate and power-obsessed mind-set of Europeans because the African people had begun to be transported, first to Europe and then the addiction glided over to the English settlers in Philadelphia, Virginia and Jamestown of North America where the ancestral Teutonic spirit was beating its waves against the African shore and claiming its so-called right for mastery. The ‘new England’ people having carved out a civilization from wilderness exploited the black hands of Africa brutally for the progress of their newly born nation.
Actually, this trait of trespassing, colonisation and imperialism goes back to their adventurous forefathers of Scandinavia. The Teutonic races of Scandinavia which survived the vegetation-less snowy land and tumultuous seas, had learned to exclude ‘fear’ from their genetic setup. This fearless spirit never left them through their adventures in Europe and their migration to America. Exercise of power and authority became their so-called birth-right. Soon after industrial revolution as well as the Renaissance, the European man’s spirit became restless once more and new lands began to be discovered every now and then. Discovery of America, Asia and Australia resulted in long-term struggle and civil disobedience on the part of the natives, followed by a suppressed acceptance for the Englishman as a ruthless ruler. But the results of imperialism in Africa had such an outcome which upturned the fate of the natives as free people. Missionaries were sent on the pretext of civilizing the black ‘children of devil’. The blacks were made to realize their inferior self due to their coal-dark complexion and that also in their own land, Africa. The English people colonised areas of the African land, setup their camps and business and made African natives serve them for minimal or no wages at all. At various places in African continent, the native youth were captured, chained and dumped into slave ships and thereafter a journey to North or South American subcontinent which would let loose a series of atrocities and an unimaginable brutality. Many a happy African souls fell victims to horrendous and dejected fate. This was not the end to everything as not less than seven or eight generations and some 250 years were lapsed until a bloody struggle involving personages like Abraham
Lincoln and Martin Luther King won the African slaves their partial rights as human beings and as American nationals. Even after restoration of American Republic and abolition of slavery, white American race still despises the black blood. People of both races, if involved in conjugal relations, are branded with a shameful endeavour to raise a ‘brown’ race. Not to mention the fact that God has been too merciful with the West or such words like bloodless, yellow or red race would have been at large, according to the complexion of far North Americans including Canada and Texas, Central America and equatorial areas of South America.
Such inhuman acts of racial discrimination scorched the human spirit down to its acumen and its wriggling scripts have penetrated almost every genre of American and European literature with fair amount of shamelessness for indifference on the part of the oppressors. The realm has expanded itself from short-stories, poems, biographies and novels to cinema theatres and schools of criticism and a distinct literature involves writings of African descent or white writers favouring Africans and therefore known as Black Literature. Themes concerning African slaves in America and their generations born and grown in the midst of white masters, brown race segregation, blacks being jailed for petty matters and their unprotected women and so on, are also taken up by prolific American writers, either white or black.
For next few pages, the paper shall be an attempt to analyse some of the American writings portraying the dilemma of the ‘rootless’ in the ‘roots’ of American land.