A Different Look at The Transatlantic Slavery: Phillis Wheatley: An Eighteenth Century Slave Poet

ABSTRACT

A slave of Senegalese or Gambian origin was the first black poet of the eighteenth century to write poetry in a language other than her own. It should be noted that long before Europeans arrived in Africa, the Songhai people of the Middle Ages wrote whatever they wanted in the Songhai language using Arabic script. Deported to the United States in 1761 at the approximate age of seven (07) or eight (08), this slave was sold to the Wheatley couple who named her Phillis after the name of the ship from which she disembarked. Phillis learnt how to speak the English language in record time. She also learnt how to read and write English from her boss’ children. Very intelligent, gifted and moreover very precocious, she wrote her first poem at the age of fourteen. She died thirty years after arriving in the United States, the University of California at Berkeley in 1909 compiled about forty of her poems in one volume for posterity. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this paper examines the psychology of children so as to apprehend the phenomenon of Phillis’ precocity, then a typological analysis of her poems will be carried out and at last some of her outstanding poems will be scrutinized. As finding, it is revealed that Phillis suffered a subtle acculturation like the entire black race in general.

FULL TEXT