Joseph Pitt

I must admit I thought I'd never make it through the entire thing. I forced myself to read for hours on end Sunday evening and still I didn't finish. So today on lunch I finished the last ten pages or so. Then, because I am a nerd, I re-read the Blackboard announcement that said to focus on three of the chapters. Three. And I read the entire thing!

Of course, I have no one to blame but myself. If I would have read the instructions with a little more attention to detail, I would have been done reading within a few hours instead of a few days. Geesh.

I don't think the extra reading hurt any, though. I think it actually might have helped me develop a better feel for the writing as a whole. That could just be a fanciful delusion I'm selling myself, though.

This book had a lot of details in it. Too many to remember, actually. I know my highlighter was certainly working overtime. Of course, I tend to highlight things that snag my interest and not necessarily things that are 100% relevant to the potential discuss that may arise. After all, I'm sure no one else made funny little notations in the magin about the development of what sounds suspiciously like Nair. Not to mention the special attention I drew to the architecture of Algier. Neither of those two things really provided any insight into the writing or the author, but I found them interesting.

We talked quite a bit about Joseph Pitt and his writing in class today. Personally, I find him intriguing. There were so many contradictions in his work. Trying to read between the lines with him was more difficult than I had anticipated. Then again, I had expected his account to focus on the things that happened to him. I had envisioned a journey through the trials and tribulations of slavery. I don't know that he fulfilled that expectation, at least not in the way I expected.

I think that's what I find so fascinating about this book. Not that it was a page turner, because it wasn't, but that it seemed both informative and open, and yet at the same time it also seemed hesitant and defensive. The contrasts were subtle at times and jarring at others. Yet, I never felt him to be an untrustworthy narrator, just a conflicted one.

I try imagine what it must have been like for him during the construction of this piece of literature: a man newly returned from sixteen years of slavery in a foreign country. He must have been anxious to fit back into the old life. Yet, it is easy to imagine that his friends and family, while rejoicing to have him home, may also have been looking for the tell-tale signs of cultural assimilation. He might have come home to his family and his country, but how could he be other than a changed man?

Throughout the reading of this text I really felt like it was a hundred page (or more) plea to his fellow countrymen to accept him, to understand him. Yet, even so, he didn't totally sell out. He owned up to his "sins" even while proclaiming his undying devotion to his Christain upbringing. Something I'm not so sure he truly felt at all times during his captivity. But I could be wrong.