WRITING ACROSS LANGUAGES & IDEAS.

Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave is powerful partly because it requires very little fictional embellishment. Northup was born a free man in New York, was kidnapped in Washington in 1841, sold into slavery and remained enslaved in Louisiana until his rescue in 1853. His narrative was first published that same year.

My Assamese translation, published in 2017, brought this extraordinary first-person testimony into Assamese for readers who may know slavery principally as a historical institution rather than as an accumulation of individual human experiences.

Northup’s story is especially disturbing because freedom and enslavement coexist within the same life. He was literate, married, economically active and recognised as a free citizen before being abruptly stripped of every legal protection that should have made such a fate impossible. The documentary material preserved with the narrative—including the legal efforts to establish his identity and secure his release—makes the story not only memoir but evidence.

For me, translation was therefore also an act of historical communication. The book asks a question that reaches beyond nineteenth-century America: how secure is human dignity when institutions decide that some people are entitled to less of it than others?