Essay Questions

Explore how William Dusinberre explores the theme of slavery and brings it out as an injustice in Them Dark Days

In Them Dark Days, the author clearly presents the plight of the black community following slavery. The author employs empathy in clearly bringing out slavery as an unjust vice that has to be done away with. The writer demonstrates slavery as an unjust vice, particularly due to how it presumes the life of one kind of a person being substantially much more important than that of the other parties; worse still, it encourages the idea that the blacks as a community are inferior to the white counterparts. Additionally, the slaves are mercilessly tortured and treated less than animals, beaten into submission, and brutalized. The writer demonstrates vividly how profits were preferred at the expense of the slavery of black people. In the book, the writer relates slavery to capitalism and avidly rejects the vice, introducing the concepts of social equality as well as justice.

Them Dark Days is essentially a story of the torture inflicted on the black slaves. Support this statement using illustrations from the novel

Them Dark Days follows the various vices that were carried out against the slaves. The book explicitly presents the kinds of torture that were inflicted on them, both physical and mental torture. In order to have the slaves submit, various torture techniques are employed. Moreover, the slavers who had mastered the art of human trafficking often involved in the mental humiliation of their subjects as well as emotional annihilation. While the book is a litany of the torment of slaves, it also serves the purpose of an altercation against paramnesia that might result from the distortion of the true nature of the happenings during the dark days.

Show how the need to remember the harsh truth particularly about black slavery is emphasized in the work, Them Dark Days.

While some people have a tendency of coating history with some sweetness particularly so that comfort can be enhanced, Them Dark Days is not among such works in which the harsh history of black slavery is sugarcoated. In this work, a great emphasis is made towards letting people understand the harsh history of slavery. The book explicitly argues in this way by stating that anyone who favors slavery as old-fashioned, either intentionally ignorant or uninformed.