We begin this Senior School year with the transdisciplinary theme, The ecological Imagination as Catalyst for Transformative Change. As part of our literature component, we are reading James by Percival Everett. The author describes this book as a conversation with Mark Twain’s Huck Finn which in its time exposed the cruelty and barbarity of slavery in settler America.
What we are loving is in our reading of James, also set in the times leading up to the American Civil War, is that it is written from the point of view of Jim who is a slave but also a loving family man, an educated man, and a man alongside others engaged in resisting the dehumanisation of slavery.
As we travel with Jim and Huck in their escape on the Mississippi River, we experience again and again the humanity of Jim, his resistance, agency and the solidarity he finds with other slaves. This is in stark contrast to the dehumanisation and exploitation characteristic to the times, particularly for slaves. In one instance, Jim who has secretly read the philosophical treatises of the Enlightenment including those advocating the abolition of slavery, has the opportunity to write his own ideas when a fellow slave gives him a stolen pencil (an act of solidarity in itself). He writes, “I wrote myself into being…” His story not “related” but “self written”!
It is a salient reminder in our own times when we are complicit in so much harm and exploitation, that there is power in resistance, in solidarity, and that we can find our agency, our own way into living a meaningful life for a kinder and fairer society. We too can write ourselves “into being” and toward “inter-being”.
