Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives

"Unchained Memories," produced and presented by HBO, is perhaps one of the most comprehensive, enlightening, and moving recreations of slave life as told by those who suffered and lived to tell the tale.

The readings and reenactments in this documentary are taken from interviews conducted by sociologists, ethnographers, and anthropologists--as well as historians, with former slaves in the 1930s. Many of these former slaves were in their late eighties, nineties, some were over 100 years old. They tell tales of forced starvation, deprivation, beatings and whippings, as well as surviving in the harshest climates without sufficient clothing to cover their bodies, or shoes on their feet. They speak of brutal planters who assumed their own sexual access to black female bodies as a natural right emasculated slave men and tore slave families apart. Most of all, they speak of work, work, work, with no respite for their endless labor.

An interesting note to keep in mind about this documentary, is that these interviews represent the midpoint between an oral and a literary tradition: well-known and wonderfully talented actors such as Samuel L. Jackson, Angela Bassett, CCH Pounder, Robert Guillaume, Don Cheadle, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Roscoe Lee Brown, Jasmine Guy among others, reenact the transcribed interviews of real slaves, imbuing each narrative with pathos, compassion, and intuition, against the narration of Whoopi Goldberg. 

"Unchained Memories" speaks to the dying art of oral tradition: the film resurrects the dynamic and the performative aspects of oral culture, while simultaneously committing to national memory the sufferings as well as the survival and endurance of the American slave.