The Weekly Screed (#1004)

 A Slave of Euphemism

by David Benjamin

“Be not the slave of words.” — Thomas Carlyle

MADISON, Wis. — In my Boston days I frequented a cozy and artful movie house on Massachusetts Avenue between Harvard Square and Central Square, called the Orson Welles Cinema. One of the best flicks I saw there was a Russian romance, A Slave of Love, released in 1976. Last week, I thought about this film (and the good old Orson Welles) for the first time in decades because of an inexplicable and irritating linguistic assault that has been launched against the word “slave.” 

I couldn’t help wondering how director Nikita Mikhalkov would feel if he saw his film’s Russian title clunkily translated as An Enslaved Person of Love.

This all happened because I tried to read two important articles, in The Atlantic and the New York Times, about America’s legacy of human bondage. In both essays, to my dismay, the authors steadfastly avoided the use of the word “slave.” After a dozen paragraphs or so, I had to stop, stymied and distracted the recently minted euphemism, “enslaved person.” 

Even as I fled this polysyllabic evasion, I understood the authors’ well-meaningness. If one is politically delicate, one does not apply facile four-letter (okay, five-letter) pejoratives to a disadvantaged demographic. Indeed, has there ever been an American caste more downtrodden than the Black slaves of the antebellum South? Let us not continue, with harsh language, to demean these 19th-century folks in the 21st century. Let us honor them with a new — sanitized and synthetic —  designation: “enslaved persons.” Let us thoughtfully mothball the dark and haunting word that has dogged them down the centuries and — in so cleansing our prose — make them all feel better.

Which they might appreciate, I guess, if they weren’t all dead.

My objection to “enslaved persons” is not political. It’s linguistic. Until someone launched against it a posthumous campaign of gratuitous euphemism, “slave” denoted not slur but social status. When we hear it spoken still today, that single syllable brings together in the mind — in crystal linguistic clarity — the slave, the slaver, the slave market and the slaveholder. 

Even more important to language mavens like me, the simplicity, brevity and vast connotation of this wonderfully short word — “slave” — have made it one of the the great metaphors of the English language… well, any language. 

Mikhalkov’s heroine Olga is not the first “slave of love” in our cultural canon. Leda was a slave of Zeus’ love. Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet, Orpheus and Eurydice were slaves of one another’s love. The entire city of Troy was a slave of love to a woman whose heartless allure launched a thousand ships. Othello, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, King Kong, Benjamin Braddock — all slaves of love.

One only need hear Hamlet’s lament, “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”, to entertain second thoughts about cashiering one of the oldest and most suggestive words of tongue or pen.

Really, how many rhymes can you find for “enslaved persons”? 

Would Shakespeare, made attentive to euphemism by the language police of Stratford, have written, “Give me that man/ That is not passion’s enslaved person, and I will wear him/ In my heart’s core.”?

Would Wordsworth have changed, “Physician art thou? — one, all eyes,/ Philosopher! — a fingering slave,/ One that would peep and botanize/ Upon his mother’s grave.”?

Not to mention a certain British anthem that — rousingly — rhymes “waves” with “slaves.” 

Consider the scansion of Lincoln’s famous warning, “A house divided against itself cannot stand: I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free…” 

Ponder what we do to Milton in Samson Agonistes, if we alter these melodious lines: “Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him/ Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.”

Try rephrasing Gauguin’s metaphor and see if it works: “When you read a book, you are the slave of the author’s mind.”

Think of the loss of lyricism if we censor the cri de coeur of Irish Labour leader James Connolly: ““The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of the slave.” Or of Balzac, who called a married woman “a slave whom one must put on a throne.” Or even John Maynard Keynes, who lamented that practical men are too often “slaves of some defunct economist.”

And think of the editing and labeling issues that would following the adoption of “enslaved persons.” A hundred history books refer to the West African seaboards from present-day Sierra Leone to Angola as the Slave Coast. Change that to “Enslaved Persons Coast” and it seems to suggest that these persons own the coast, pay mortgages on their beach houses and do a little surfing on the weekend.

Ambiguity, you see, is the saltpeter of euphemism.

The simple mention of “slave ship” conjures chains, horrors, whippings, filth, disease, rape, death and atrocity. Recast that infernal vessel as an “enslaved persons ship” and suddenly, it’s not so bad. One can almost picture shuffleboard, floor shows, deck chairs and a 24-hour buffet. 

The language we speak, and which a few of us cherish just as it has come down to us, is a legacy with which we dick around at the peril of rendering it colorless and antiseptic. There are words immensely good and worthy of jealous preservation because they evoke, express and fix in our conscience the worst evils we’ve inflicted upon one another. “Torture” is not “enhanced interrogation.” A “lynching” is not a “necktie party.” The “Holocaust” is not a “Final Solution.”

“Slave” is a word of this caliber. Even though we do so out of righteousness or guilt, whitewashing its ugliness with extra syllables and neutral connotation insults the bloodied millions who have borne this label down to us, on their ravaged backs, through centuries of pain. “Slave” is — and should remain — a verbal slap in the face. It is a brand of shame and a symbol of ineffable human fortitude. 

There is no better word for this word than this word. To “fix” it at this late date, to make this unbroken word more palatable to the politically squeamish, can only make it less true.