Persuasion Through Depictions of Violence in Protest Literature

In this essay I will engage with Frederick Douglass’ autobiographical text Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Audre Lorde’s poem Power in order to analyze how the two authors faced the urgent question of whether violence or mere persuasion was the best response to oppression and injustice. I will take a look at Kimberley Drake’s essay On the Literature of Protest: Words as Weapons to reflect on her points regarding depictions of violence in protest literature and will then explore the ways in which both Douglass and Lorde exemplify methods illustrated by Drake. I will ultimately argue that they both use graphic depictions of violence as one of the means to persuade their readers of the urgency of eradicating slavery and racism, employing violence depisctions as a means of persuasion that becomes crucial to their arguments.

In her essay On the Literature of Protest: Words as Weapons, Kimberley Drake discusses tactics employed by protest literature writers in order to appeal and effectively communicate their ideas to their readers. She writes that “one of the primary goals of any piece of protest literature is to make the reader feel uncomfortable, outraged, or shocked” (Drake, 15), and depicting instances of violence is precisely the tactic used by some protest writers to achieve this and effectively communicate their ideas to the reader. Protest writers, she writes, “portray incidents of oppression and typically do so realistically, often showing graphic violence in detail” (Drake, 5). The goals of violence depictions, according to Drake, are to “convince whites to eradicate slavery” (Drake, 5), and to establish a “public literary identity [that] transformed African-American protest” (Drake, 5). Drake thus explains that depicting violence in protest literature serves the dual function of communicating the horrors of whatever regime it attempts to advocate against and of compiling a public literary identity. It is the first of these purposes of violence depictions that I will focus on in this essay and will demonstrate being used by both Douglass and Lorde to convey the urgency of dismantling the regimes they advocate against. Furthermore, Drake explains that “[c]reating protagonists who are both victims are perpetrators of violence … can shock and even traumatize readers, giving them a new perspective of their society” (Drake, 6). In the case of Douglass and Lorde, this new perspective of society is of one without slavery and racist oppression, and they shock their readers in order to achieve this new perspective. Such depictions of violence, along with other tactics employed by protest writers, “are intended to raise the reader’s consciousness and create a ‘revolutionary countermood’ that will lead to social action” (Drake, 7), writes Drake. Violence depictions thus play an important role in protest writers’ works, shocking the reader, allowing them to perceive a better society, and inciting revolutionary sentiments in them that would aid them in the creation of such a society. Douglass and Lorde are precisely the writers who aim to shock their readers with depictions of violence and do so, as I will go on to show, to convey the urgency of dismantling systems of oppression that excuse and perpetuate racial violence.

Specifically referring to Douglass’ Narrative, Drake explains that violence depictions within it are “designed to show white readers how their political views on slavery may be morally corrupt” (Drake, 5-6), thereby inciting the reader to question their own position on slavery. I will now take a closer look at this text and will show that Douglass uses depictions of violence to shock the reader by using details and descriptive language and ultimately to advocate against slavery and to communicate the urgency of dismantling it. In the introduction section of the narrative, it is noted that “Douglass deliberately relies on graphic language and gory imagery to provide neither himself nor his audience any safe space from which to remain immune to a sense of shock and horror” (Douglass, 32) and “seeks to reinforce the horror of slavery as a dehumanizing system in which no one was left innocent” (Douglass, 33). His graphic language, thus, works directly to implicate the reader and those who, during his lifetime, chose to remain idle as slavery continued. He does not shy away from depicting violent incidents because without them the reader would not be as compelled to act against slavery. Douglass’ narrative is filled with graphic descriptions of the violence he had witnessed while enslaved. Writing about one master, Mr. Severe, Douglass recalls that he had “seen him whip a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this, too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother’s release” (Douglass, 99). Such a precise description of the violent incident, with an allusion to its length and the detail that the victim’s children had been witnesses to it, portray the incident in a very unsettling way. It might not have sufficed to simply say that Mr. Severe had whipped his slaves to get the brutality of this practice across, and Douglass’ detail and word choice achieve to communicate it. Describing an incident during which a master named Mr. Gore shot and killed an enslaved man named Demby in a creek, Douglass again uses detailed language to communicate the atrociousness of the event. “His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he had stood” (Douglass, 107), Douglass writes. The details used to describe Demby’s disfigured body create disturbing imagery that might have otherwise been lost to the reader.

These, among several other incidents of violence that Douglass was witness to and included in his narrative, are further supplemented by his accounts of violence done unto himself. He recalls an occasion during which his master, Mr. Covey, whipped and “cut … [him] so savagely as to leave the marks visible for a long time after” (Douglass, 130), also specifying that this beating wore out Mr. Covey’s switches (Douglass, 130). Once again, Douglass chooses to convey the violent incident with detail and precision so as to communicate the extent of its horrors and, by extent, the horrors of slavery itself. This is one of many examples of violence that he and other enslaved people suffered that he provides throughout the text, all ultimately working toward urging for the abolition of the system of slavery that justified them. The details of the incidents and the descriptive language are key to this appeal, since they compel the readers to contemplate the extent of the horror they are complicit in by failing to act against it. Douglass, thus, uses carefully detailed incidents of violence to hold “white southern slaveholding classes accountable … for the brutalization of enslaved bodies” (Douglass, 37), and to urge them to dismantle systems that allow this brutalization to continue, which might not have been achieved to the same extent without the detailed depictions of violence.

I will now take a look at Lorde’s poem Power to analyze its depiction of violence and show how its inclusion in the poem persuades the reader of the horrors of racism and creates a sense of urgency for eradicating it. The poem concerns the murder by a white police officer named Thomas Shea of a 10-year old Black boy named Clifford Glover in 1973. She describes the incident with purposeful detail, describing the murder itself and the way it haunts her. “[A] dead child dragging his shattered black/ face off the edge of my sleep/ blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders/ is the only liquid for miles” (Lorde, 6-9), Lorde writes, focusing on the details of how the Black body was disfigured. The imagery of the boy’s blood running for miles arguably brings it to the attention of the reader, how much blood has been spilled due to the senseless murders and brutalizations of Black people. The shocking details and imagery Lorde uses to describe the murder convey its full horror and brutality, which communicates to the reader the capacities of racism’s capabilities. Lorde also communicates an urgent need to dismantle racist systems through an ominous warning of a future ridden with death and violence if current racist systems are not dismantled. Writing about the trial of Thomas Shea, she explains how the only Black woman on the jury otherwise consisting of white people was convinced to vote that he was innocent. Lorde writes that the white jury members “lined her own womb with cement/ to make a graveyard for our children” (Lorde, 41-42), ominously predicting a future in which Black kids are doomed to be killed. This imagery communicates a perpetuation of violence if current violence is not dealt with properly, demonstrating how urgent it is to deal with the violence at hand.

Lorde further argues that allowing racist and violent systems to continue will result in more violence in the future through writing that if justice is not done, more grotesque violence will follow, since people’s powers will become corrupted and will result in violent actions. She writes that “my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold/ or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire/ and one day I will take my teenaged plug/ and connect it to the nearest socket/ raping an 85 year old white woman/ who is somebody's mother/ and as I beat her/ senseless and set a torch to her bed/ a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time/ “Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.” (Lorde, 47-55). Lorde’s inclusion of this graphic incident of rape and murder demonstrates how violence to which there is no proper justice will perpetuate horrible violence in the future, which indicates the urgency of dealing with immediate violence. She describes the incident with detail and visual imagery so as to communicate the full extent of its brutality and illustrate the full extent of what unresolved violence might turn into. This has the effect of compelling the reader to urgently dismantle racist systems that result in violence, since that might prevent the occurence of certain future violence. It might not have sufficed to simply argue that violence perpetuates violence, but graphically illustrating an incident of it, specifying that if justice is not done people in positions will become corrupted (Lorde, 47), simultaneously has a shocking and jarring effect and communicates the urgency of the matter.

Thus, as Drake explains in her essay, and as Douglass and Lorde exemplify, protest writers use depictions of violence to shock their readers, compel them to act against systems of oppression that excuse this violence, and, in addition to that, as I have demonstrated in this essay, to communicate the urgency of this acting. Not only do Douglass and Lorde use their words as weapons, as the title of Drake’s introduction suggests, they also use them as sorts of ticking clocks that convey the urgency of eradicating slavery in Douglass’ case and racism and police brutality in the case of Lorde. Graphic and detailed depictions of violence become one of the means of advocating against oppressive systems, and both authors engage with them methodically to persuade their readers.

Works Cited:

Drake, Kimberly. Critical Insights: Literature of Protest. Salem Press: a Division of EBSCO Publishing, 2013.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Broadview Press, 2018.

Lorde, Audre. “Power by Audre Lorde.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53918/power-56d233adafeb3.

Artist: Lydia Makepeace