Katrina Stokes

Excerpt from Our Nig as a Visual Experience

Harriet Wilson provokes the reader immediately with the title of her story, Our Nig. To read Wilson’s story is to confront its title, the racism that owns the title, and digest its implications. The title renders the reader aware of the bias that Wilson writes within; the bias that has shaped her thought, limited her dreams, and challenged her survival. Wilson’s writing suggests an acute awareness of the prejudice of her readers. Wilson anticipates their reaction by confessing “her inability to minister to the refined and cultivated, the pleasure supplied by abler pens”. (Wilson Preface) In order for Wilson to initiate herself into authorship, she must disqualify her own voice to gain the approval of her readers; this is only the first of many paradoxes within Our Nig. Although it seems as though Wilson is passive in response to the discrimination and abuse inflicted upon her, she protests through the black and white imagery that reoccurs throughout the text. Because Wilson wrote Our Nig in hopes to “aid her in maintaining herself and child without extinguishing this feeble life”, she must express her emotional opposition indirectly through subtext in order to keep from offending the reader. (Wilson Preface) It is important to extract the nuances within the imagery that Wilson carefully weaves throughout Our Nig to finally face her pain along with many traumatic lives lived as a result of racial and gender discrimination. Today there are more readers who dare to confront Wilson’s story than in 1859 when the book was first published. The prejudice that Our Nig addresses is deep rooted within American society, still, even a century after it was written. Our Nig creates a space in which a discourse about gender and racial interaction is possible because of the distance from the events that occur in the narrative; however, the need to be removed indicates the prevalence of the biases that still silence people based on their race or gender. 

Our Nig rejects the categorization of not only people, but also literature by refusing established genres. Wilson does not write within the guidelines of captivity, sentimental, or slave narrative genres. Frado’s character challenges the conventions of the captivity narrative because she is unable to ever claim an existence separate from the societal discrimination that acts as a prison. Our Nig deviates from the slave narrative as well because it does not focus on the institution of slavery nor the resistance and migration of those enslaved. Frado’s racial identity demotes her from fitting the role of a sentimental woman upheld and respected because of her family values. Frado’s race marks her as the product of the antithesis of the traditional American family; she challenges the sentimental genre that outlines the proper female role. The contradiction of Frado’s identity as both black and white, fictional and real, strong willed and beaten down, outspoken and silent places Our Nig in a social space of its own. 

Wilson’s imagery describes the push and pull of dark and light not only to define identity, but also describe a prophetic vision. While light represents hope and promise in the beginning of a new day, it proves false and yields the darkness of despair. Wilson as an author lives this truth through her own real life experience. Though Our Nig is recognized today as a text that has been the catalyst to an unconventional discourse about race and gender, Wilson never was able to experience this reception of her work during her own tragic lifetime. Her writing embodies herself because it does not fit completely into any of the genres (slave narrative, captivity narrative, traditional sentimental novel) that it is associated with. Wilson’s writing breaks away from the conventions of these narratives especially in the ending, which is not triumphant for Frado as she restates her ties to the Bellmonts and thus her abusive past. Though the reader wants to think he or she lives in a society that has moved on from the oppression of the past, the protagonist’s failure to overcome her abuse signifies the continuing presence of categorization of race and gender. This pessimistic ending restates the oppressive cycle continuing to remain within society. The problematic conclusion does, however, act as a call for action and progressive change. Wilson’s text is derived from her own life experience yielding Our Nig as a symbol of her own struggle to survive economically as a woman of mixed racial descent. While Wilson’s text is grounded in reality of her lifetime and also contemporarily, its fictional quality as well as its historical context give the reader space to confront problems with racial and gender interactions within America.  

Wilson illustrates the power of the value of one’s skin color in determining the attainability of liberty and self. Wilson’s struggle against the economic constraints that her gender and race restrict her to is not attributed solely to the institution of slavery. In this way, Wilson looks to American society as responsible for perpetuated prejudices. The male Bellmonts demonstrate that indirect result of observers of violence is just as severe as the abusers themselves. This approach is daring because it places the responsibility of discrimination based on race and gender on the entire public criticizing the ethical basis of America. Wilson grapples with the ownership granted according to “a hierarchy of light” demonstrated by the imagery throughout the text. Wilson selects a passage by Eliza Cook that describes the dark side of what light represents:

Oh! Did we but know of the shadows so nigh,

The world would indeed be a prison of gloom;

All light would be quenched in youth’s eloquent eye,

And the prayer-lisping infant would ask for the tomb.

For if Hope be a star that may lead us astray,

And “deceiveth the heart” as the aged ones preach;

Yet ‘twas Mercy that gave it, to beacon our way,

Though its halo illumes where it never can reach. (Wilson 24)

The paradoxes found within what light and dark represent further flush out the complexities of asserting oneself within the constraints of society’s racial expectation.  

The images that Wilson creates throughout Our Nig act as a representation of the struggle to break down “the hierarchy of light” that is part of American history. Wilson’s text gives the reader a visual experience, which provides opportunity to translate physically into artwork. The literal artistic relationship between dark and light values within a composition are what makes an image successful. It is in the contrast in which the viewer is able to find beauty as dark and white are united working together. Blackness and whiteness also dictate the literary sphere dominated by Western written tradition and white publishers mandating who could have a voice during the time Harriet Wilson wrote Our Nig. With whiteness came the privilege of a voice while black writers had to jump through the hoops of white publishers to be heard.In this way whiteness represents speech and blackness silence. 

This performance piece is homage to Harriet Wilson, and a demonstration of how all values are necessary and essential to forming a successful piece of artwork. The performance element asks the viewers to eliminate either the dark or the light within the images by either drawing on top of them or erasing them to show that domination of any one color reduces the value and beauty of the images. The images based on the dark and light imagery within Wilson’s text act as an illustration of her writing. The conflict between dark and light is described rhythmically in the text: “Some sufferer has counted the vibrations of the pendulum impatient for its dawn, who, now that it has arrived, is anxious for its close” (Wilson 40). The arrangement of the works themselves forms a clock that is representational of the passage of time allowing increased appreciation of Wilson’s voice and echoes the beat of black and white imagery woven throughout Wilson’s book. The clock functions as an environment by surrounding the viewer with images derived from Wilson’s narrative. The artwork itself will be invaluable in the end after it is destroyed, but the concept they represent will resonate rather than their physical appearance and value. I want to make the point that though Wilson was not able to witness a positive unity between light and dark in her lifetime or to personally benefit from her writing as much as she would have hoped, her writing is now part of a movement towards a progressive and harmonious future. 

The twelve images drawn on plexiglass panels are painted on the back with white or black paint. From the outside of the circular orientation of the hanging plexiglass panels, the solid black and white sides alternate to initiate the viewer into the dichotomy of black and white that the project presents. This view of black and white as separate entities presented on the outside is bleak in comparison to dark and white values working together to create beautiful images that function to illustrate Wilson’s text. The contradiction between the inner and outer portions of the circle presents the negative tendency of society to separate black and white for order that was very prevalent during Wilson’s lifetime and still existent today. The union of black and white within the images gives them meaning. As the viewer steps into the circle of images, it marks the departure from the “order” of darkness and lightness imposed by racial prejudice within society. The images on the inside of the circle are in the order that they appear within Our Nig telling Wilson’s or Frado’s story. The illustration of Wilson’s text in this format is meant to inspire and facilitate a discourse of race and gender.