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Eve M. Troutt Powell : Tell This in My Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire . xvii, 246 pp. Stanford : Stanford University Press , 2012. $40. ISBN 978 0 8047 8233 3 .
Reviews: The Near and Middle East
This is a book about how former slaves as well as former masters experienced and, even more important, remembered slavery over a wide geographical area including Sudan, Egypt, the central Ottoman Empire and Italy at a time of colonialism, modernization, anti-slavery measures, missionary activities, and of nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Without ever misleading the reader as to where exactly her authorial priorities and sympathies lie, Troutt Powell studies the accounts and narratives by such enslavers and masters as Babikr Bedri, (Ali Mubarak, Huda Sha(rawi, Halide Edib and Leyla Hanim to reconstruct the many worlds of the enslaved individuals and their enslavers/masters. Slaves were far from being non-entities in the childhoods of these people. We learn, for example, how (Ali Mubarak, an Egyptian government official, had had a former Ethiopian slave, Anbar Effendi as his role model in his professional life.
The real task of the book, however, is unsilencing the archetypically and supposedly silent, the enslaved, especially in the Middle Eastern and European contexts. To achieve this, the author moves to a different group of sources, the stories of the enslaved as narrated by themselves - in other words, ego-texts by the enslaved. The task...