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\\n “Go to Jerusalem and mark the foreheads of the men who sigh and weep because of all the abominations that occur there… Kill them all, old and young, maidens, women and children, but do not even approach those who have the mark.”\\nThe first thing that must be known about Nat Turner is that he is not the same as a car, although both are movable property that can be sold or rented by the hour. It is also important to understand that Nat Turner, even being black, was endowed with free will and volition, in such a way that, unlike the car, the consequences of his actions were not the responsibility of his owner and that, therefore, he could be judged for them. And most importantly, Nat Turner led the bloodiest rebellion of black slaves against slavery in the US, a failed rebellion for which he was judged and sentenced to die on the gallows.
Regarding The Confessions of Nat Turner, it is also advisable to know that it is a work of fiction, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and that it was written based on the supposed confessions that the slave himself made to his defense lawyer Thomas Gray in the hope of being released from the chains that tightened his ankles, wrists and neck and thus make his last days more bearable before being hanged.
And, finally, they must know that reading “The Confessions of Nat Turner” will challenge them to understand why this novel was so criticized and even branded as racist.
Styron makes an exercise of reflection in his novel based on what little is known about Turner's life in order to establish a plausible basis for explaining some of the events that occurred there. Why the massacre of 57 people, including children and women, many of them defenseless and murdered in their own beds? Why did Turner, who led the rebellion, only take care of killing a single person? Why was that person precisely an 18-year-old girl? Why did his action not limit itself to appropriating the means that would allow them to flee to freedom? Why was the rebellion so little supported among black slaves? Why did many of them defend the possessions of their white owners?
\\n “Servants, obey your masters with all fear, and obey not only the good and gentle masters, but also the perverse… all the wrongs you commit against your masters and mistresses are wrongs you commit against God himself, who in his designs has given you these masters and mistresses, and expects that you will behave towards them in the same way that you would behave towards him.”\\nFor my part, I can only understand the criticisms in virtue of the sacrality that the myths, the symbols, of a struggle that is otherwise just and necessary come to attain. Only from that quasi-religious perspective can it be understood that someone like Nate Parker, director of The Birth of a Nation, another vision of the same events narrated in Styron's work, can come to see in the character of the novel “a sexually disturbed lunatic whose only motivation depended on his uncontrollable lusts for white women, and a rebel who lacked a true purpose or intelligence.”
And only starting from this indignation at the argued doubts that Styron raises about the traditional figure of a virile, dominant and brave Turner, can the ability of a white person to understand what slavery meant be questioned; only in that context can the criticisms of the recourse of giving a literary voice to a character who clearly should not be able to express himself as he does here be framed; only with that perspective can someone find it aberrant to put in the mouth of a slave the indignant contempt for many of his unfortunate companions (“Beat a negro, starve him to death, let him wallow in his own excrement, and this negro will be yours until the end of his days.”), that one can wonder why there were not more rebellions, that the docility of many of them in the face of their oppression can be denounced, that it can be observed how internalized their situation of slavery was.
Criticisms that, in my opinion, have as little basis as those made to Styron from the other side of excusing the massacre.
Read the novel, a great novel, and if you find reasons for criticism, we will discuss them.