202 Behn, Aphra
Watching Velma, Sophie is overcome by a traumatic
image of the police brutality that her son Smitty
experienced during a civil rights protest. Juxtapos-
ing police brutality with sexism, Bambara makes
the point that the violence of sexism within the
Civil Rights and black liberation movements was as
harmful as the violence of racist police officers who
tried to suppress the movement from outside. Hurt-
ing and taking advantage of women in the struggle
for justice hurt the whole movement and cost people
their lives. The movement as a whole takes a toll on
the lives of black people when they are not able to
heal from the traumatic, oppressive violence they
have experienced over the years as punishment for
speaking out.
Unlike her sister Palma, Velma never gave herself
any artistic or social escape from the movement for
social justice. She was working for the movement
all day every day. Through her refusal to take care
of herself, her urge to do only what seemed most
productive and necessary for the movement, she
threatened a crucial movement resource: her own
life and well-being.
Similarly, in the novel, the earth itself is suf-
fering because human beings insist on doing
what seems most profitable without taking into
consideration the connection between the planet’s
well-being and the lives of human beings. The bus
driver Fred Holt reflects on the decreasing eco-
nomic choices for workers in the area who see the
nuclear power plant as their best option, despite
the fact that the exposure to radiation threatens
their physical health. Holt’s friends, other working-
class black men, are dying as a result of radiation
exposure. Environmental racism is heaped on top
of plans of redevelopers to push black communi-
ties out of cities. Holt ruminates on the predict-
ability of economic violence in the so-called urban
renewal process while driving past a recently
demolished public housing unit: “Redevelopment.
Progress. The master plan. Cut back on services,
declare blight, run back from the suburbs and take
over,” he thinks.
A push for so-called progress in terms of
both the black liberation struggle and capitalist
economics results in violence against the women
in the black liberation movement and against
working-class communities more generally. The
novel points out that this violence erupts in con-
flict, represented by the storm taking over Clay-
bourne, which impacts everyone, even though the
most oppressed people feel it first. Bambara offers
a depiction of violence that moves from the indi-
vidual self-inflicted harm of attempted suicide to
the structural violence of racism, sexism, and capi-
talism, demonstrating that when a society chooses
selfish profits over the well-being of the group, it
is suicidal.
Alexis Pauline GumbsBEHN, APHRA Oroonoko; or, The Royal
Slave (1688)
Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave is a short novella by
Aphra Behn (1640–89). It tells the story of an
African prince, Oroonoko, who is separated from
his lover, Imoinda, and is then captured and forced
into slavery by an English sea captain. He is eventu-
ally reunited with Imoinda in Surinam (today called
Suriname), an English colony based on sugarcane
plantations and located on the northeast coast of
South America. Oroonoko contains elements of three
popular forms of Restoration literature: the New
World travel story, the courtly romance, and the
heroic tragedy. The novella’s author, an English nov-
elist, poet, and dramatist, may have visited Surinam
as a young woman. Although Behn’s biographers
now agree that her story was probably based on her
actual experiences in the New World, there is no
historical record testifying to the existence of Oroo-
noko and Imoinda.
Behn is often hailed as being one of the first
English novelists. Oroonoko was written at a time
when the narrative technique and the feature of the
fictionalized author were underdeveloped. Charac-
terized by the omnipresence of its female narrator,
Oroonoko is an early prose narrative in which the
narrator acts as the tale’s interpreter. In addition
to its innovative narrative strategy, Behn’s novella
is also one of the first pieces of English writing to
present a hero who is black and enslaved, thereby
contributing to the image of the “noble savage” in
literature.
Victoria E. Price