Blog #7

First of all, I want to say that I think what Doctor Saidiya Hart is doing is a great way for people to get a better understanding and feel for history. Especially when it comes to people who were killed during the slave trade and would never be mentioned by name in a history textbook. Trying to tell an “impossible story” or a story which someone could never truly know if it happened or not is important. It is important because it makes people realize and remember the people who were savagely murdered during this time. It allows people to feel sympathy for those who were killed and realize that they are not just part of the figure of how many died during a time period in a textbook. Hart explains that she needs to try to tell impossible stories in order to, “expose and exploit the incommensurability between the experience of the enslaved and the fictions of history, by which I mean the requirements of narrative, the stuff of subjects and plots and ends.” (Hart 11). She describes how she wants to tell “impossible stories” to illustrate the differences between what we are taught in history classes and the actual atrocities that were inflicted onto Africans during this time. This point relates to the fact that power change shape historical archives. Many of the stories of the atrocities that occurred to Africans coming over on slave ships or slaves on plantations were often written out of history. They were completely ignored and thrown away because it made white people look like monsters. They often say that history is written by the victors, but in this case, history is written by the white people who wanted to make themselves look better. Especially during this time period, the accounts of slaves would be disregarded as false or exaggerated. This illustrates how whoever holds the power can change the historical archives to make themselves look more favorable even when they were committing atrocities.