Star Wars’ Black Slave
Profit and Anti-Blackness: Centuries of Dying
For many, the saying “art imitates life” is nothing more than a playful rumination on the human condition, e.g. we can only recreate or represent what we know or experience. But to many others, that saying can convey the agony of representation. A prime example of this dissonance occurs in the case of Oola, a Star Wars character played by Femi Taylor.
Oola is a Twi’lek [sex] slave that appears in Star Wars Episode VI. She grew up wanting to be a dancer, and passionate as many Twi’lek are about their craft, she did it well. She eventually escapes her homeworld and is “employed” by Jabba the Hutt, who in Episode IV, attempts to pull her closer to his body by the chain and collar around her neck during one of Oola’s dance routines. She refuses, pulling her chain back in frightened desperation, trying to prevent her body from becoming any more his. This clearly pisses Jabba off, and so he drops her through a trap door where she stands. She falls into a pit, where she is eaten by Jabba’s pet *rancor after everyone on the floor above her laughs and guffaws at her demise.
As the main plot continues, a hero of the series (Leia Organa, played by a now-deceased white woman formerly known as Carrie Fisher), takes her place as dancer. Leia kills Jabba, and she proves her hero’s-worth. Oola is never heard of again.
Loser and victor, respectively.
Femi Taylor & the Twi’lek
The Twi’lek are humanoids, and apparently are a popular slave race. Sometimes they can be seen wearing headdresses— some of which were traditional, others implemented by slave masters to prevent Twi-lek from communicating with each other in a language their masters could not understand. The ‘females’ are considered to be one of the most beautiful species in the galaxy. They paint and/or tattoo eyebrows onto their faces because they usually have none, and because it makes them more palatable to non-Twi’lek.
The Twi’lek are so palatable, that the ownership of their bodies and being literally become the main currency of Ryloth, their own home world. The galactic enslavement of Twi’lek is tolerated by the overarching government known as the Galactic Republic (comparable to the United Nations of our world).
Young Twi’lek are sold into slavery to help them avoid growing up in the harsh conditions of Ryloth, which are akin to what our ideas of developing countries of the third and fourth worlds are: hostile environments characterized by little to no water, jagged landscapes of rock and sand, and turbulent seasons with high winds. Many lived in mud brick homes that offered protection against the heat of their homeworld.
Because Twi’lek lack the capacity for inter-planetary travel, some see slavery as an efficient means of proliferating the galaxy and keeping their culture strong. Many live as slaves, entertainers, or both. Some also work as slavers — slaving everything Twi’lek and not enslaving other species. They become objects that reflect their owners’ status and wealth, and thus forfeit their autonomy to become embodiments of social capital, itself— something we would call social death in our reality.
The Twi’leks were enslaved and labored in their own mines for the profit of the Hutts, or were sold outright on the open market. After generations of slavery, the Twi’lek species became far more numerous across the galaxy than on Ryloth, and most felt little connection to their own homeworld… Twi’lek clans regained control of their planet from the Hutts, but the prosperity of their ryll [resource] mines still made them targets of pirates and mercenaries. To ensure their continued wealth, most of the Twi’lek clan leaders chose to deter such threats by selling their own people — in particular, their women — into slavery. The sale of Twi’lek dancing girls was continually tolerated by the Republic, and slavery remained Ryloth’s primary currency as it had for past millennia, while the ryll trade fueled the planet’s black market economy.
To make a clear comparison to chattel slavery versus the various modes of servitude across Africa before white people started stealing bodies for capitalism, chattel slavery would eventually be introduced to Africa, in particular West Africa, in a way in which nations would become dependent on it, eventually enslaving their own through unprecedented violences and abuses. In order for the nations to survive, they had to kill themselves.
Just as white people had arrived upon the shores of Wai’tu kubuli, noticed that Kalinago women spoke a different language than the men, and thus assumed that the women must be from a captured tribe, white people assumed that anyone working as caretaker in one way or another, or as prisoner of war, must be a chattel slave as they knew it. They were wrong about the supposed “slaves”, just as they were wrong about the Kalinago women, who spoke pidgin with the white colonizers because it was the language of trade, something Kalinago women often did with neighboring nations.
Many of these peoples would continue their lives as they lived it in Africa on the shores of Brazil, in the Caribbean, and eventually in Amerika. Many of the people who were captured in war, for example, would take their strategical prowess to their grave as Maroon “kings” and “queens” in Wai’tu kubuli — formidable foes to colonial Governor, and local drunk, Ainslie.
Many experts, such as Black Caribbean socialist Walter Rodney have discredited the claims by many white people who lived in a time of ideological anti-obscurantism and global manipulation coined as The Enlightenment, where various reasonings could be collected in order to justify their horrendous deeds across the world — from race science to the antiblackness of humanism and beyond.
In a paper read to the Ethnological Society of London in 1866, the viceroy of Lokoja Mr T. Valentine Robins, who in 1864 accompanied an expedition up the River Niger aboard HMS Investigator, described slavery in the region:
"Upon slavery Mr Robins remarked that it was not what people in England thought it to be. It means, as continually found in this part of Africa, belonging to a family group-there is no compulsory labour, the owner and the slave work together, eat the like food, wear the like clothing and sleep in the same huts. Some slaves have more wives than their masters. It gives protection to the slaves and everything necessary for their subsistence- food and clothing. A free man is worse off than a slave; he cannot claim his food from anyone." [likely sarcasm]
Understanding this, it ought to be no surprise that slaves turned chattel slave would attempt to kill themselves aboard chattel slave ships. The dissonance between “slavery” at home and chattel slavery became apparent aboard the vehicles that drove them to suffering and social death.
As for the socially dead Twi’lek who escaped slavery, they often times ended up in prostitution or thieves, most likely because they could not find any other way to survive.
Hidden under green pigmentation, Oola was played by a 22 year old Black woman named Femi Taylor, born in Nigeria — a place once popular for slaves to be stolen from. Stolen, not traded, because only ome party knew what chattel clavery was.
According to her wiki, Femi is not only an actress, but also a dancer. She was adopted at the age of 2 from Nigeria, and spent a lot of her life pursuing her passion at the London Contemporary Dance Company and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York.
In 1997, the filmmakers considered bringing her back to film a shot for the revamped edition of Episode VI, but were concerned that she wouldn’t fit in her original costume. However, Taylor had retained her figure, and filmed the scene in which she looks at the the bringers of her death with terror, before dying. She was the only member of the cast who was asked to come back and re-film for this new edition.
“I had no idea what it was I was auditioning for. They were quite secretive, and they said they wanted me to come in my swimwear. I thought “I hope it’s not a blue movie.’” — Femi Taylor
Black Women / Non-Men / Slaves
I’m positive Femi got paid in money for her job, though I can not confirm how much at this time. What really concerns me is how similar Oola the Twi’lek dancer’s story is to the real life chattel sex slavery of many Black women that continues to this day, and how much it has contributed to Star Wars’ success — regardless of how much Gaddafi spread awareness of slavery’s modern day existence. Femi’s role wasn’t simply a reflection of a reality many Black women face today, but a recursive continuum of violences’ past; just how much is money worth to a person surviving in the rotten depths of underdevelopment, intergenerational trauma, and social death?
Black women have been enslaved since c. 700 AD, on the eastern and northern coasts of Africa. Seen as uncivilized, and nonhuman, whether due to their physical makeup or due to the “harsh environments” they thrived in, we were not universally considered “equals”.
Like Western-borne chattel slavery and plantation labor, and somewhat unlike Afrikan slave trades, slaves were expected to work close to the family that claimed ownership over them. Both men, and women, were sexualized in the “Arab slave trade”, all male slaves being castrated in the process. There was always a degree of sexuality involved in slavery regardless of gender, as this castration was performed not necessarily for aesthetics, but to prevent proliferation of Blacks in Arab nations (where revolts did occur). Castrated male slaves were also purchased by wealthy Arab kings, “employed as security agents to protect harems where their wives and concubines were caged.”
During these painful times, many slaves did have sexual relations with their masters. Chained to the foreign blur of what was called a harem, an entity that is considered property can not consent, and thus the Black women and men there who experienced this life were in a constant state of raped and stolen.
“… the desirability of African women and the perceived sensuality and sexuality of the ‘samara’ [a common word used to refer to black women] are celebrated in songs throughout the Arabic-speaking world … Fetishization for this perceived hyper-sexuality of blacks is not uncommon and reinforced by both Western and earlier Middle Eastern imperialist texts as well as by the contemporary Arabic media.” — Aurora Ellis
Black slave women have also been notoriously experimented on, especially when pregnant, to ensure a vaccination of some sort would work on pregnant women also, and to observe the effects of such innoculation.
Humans were simply unevenly valued in society during this period of time, so harshly to the point of Black people being considered nonhuman and beneath Natives, referred to as “savages”, but human nonetheless. It was an ontological hiearchy: racialized and gendered — born of a genocidal project, a cassus belli, or more accurately, a recursive death machine that has been developed and made increasingly efficient since antiquity. Take, for example, the “observations” of the “physician” Hippocrates, often regarded a “historian” like Pliny and Herodotus alike, who “observed” Amazonian women burning off a breasts to throw javelins with more power.**
Lies like this are a product of hypervisibility. Today, pivatized, and public racial/gendered dishonorment backed by the US government (essentially pogroms) was nationalized for major profits that constituted most of Amerika’s economy. And it all became a multigenerational genocide in which captive Afrikan women were only able to birth future slaves, read money.
“… never heard of again.”
Not once in Black history has another society considered Blacks equals until the advent of chattel slavery’s abolition, during which even some abolitionists viewed Blacks as inferior. Blacks were kept not only as hard laborers but also as caretakers and for the sexual exploits of their masters, under whom they obviously had no autonomy over their own bodies; the consequences of resisting sexual advances were violent, to say the least: whippings, limb mutilations, starvation, and rape. And if the master was caught in the act, his wife not obliging, the wife’s anger would be taken out on the slave, and not the master.
Thousands, upon thousands, of victims devoured by pain, suffering, misplaced anger, and well-planned hatred—
each year, every decade,
for
fourteen
centuries.
It was so common, that the majority of Black Amerikans can find a modicum of European DNA when tested, even when a there isn’t a single white family member to be seen.
Rape laws were also double-standard, with both pointy ends diving slowly, and with a learned patience in intention, into the throats of Black people. Black men would be castrated and/or put to death for being accused of rape (though it was commonly a lie), while white men could rape Black women without fear of punishment.
Even while Black women and non-men were commonly raped and molested without a non-Black batting an eye, they were also coercively gendered when they didn’t identify as “women”, or ungendered when they did. Black non-Men were considered too masculine to be Real Women™ (AKA non-Black women), and too feminine to be the beastly Black male. White slave owners justified their rapes and molestations by basically saying they were only Real Women™ in bed. (click through pictures below to see an excerpt from Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Thiefing Sugar)
In the Caribbean, a caste system based on the darkness of skin was invented where “mulatto” women were seen are more Woman™. This notion even expressed itself in art, where lighter skinned women are often times made to be the main subject of a painting , or otherwise were centered, while allegedly participating in the same monotonous slave chores (see paintings below).
In Mexico, “casta paintings” represented the same unspoken caste system in our present day society— echoing the effects of blanqueamiento in Brazil.
It is mostly kept alive by the fact that Black people have at the very least still not received reparations that transcend the manufactured necessity of money, or otherwise successfully vanquished white supremacist desirability and humanist standards to this day. The tradition carries on today in that most desirable Black people have a lighter complexion than their darker-skinned counterparts; they are desirable in relationships where wealth is redistributed such as job hires, romantic and sexual relationships, friendships, and representation in media. In the midst of all this history, we still hear ahistorical disparagements and humblebrags such as “just because I’m in the house doesn’t mean I’m not a slave!” While this is true, it is used to justify an upper hand and a foot in to non-Blackness that us darker-skinned negroes will never have unless we bleach our skins.
Numerous paintings served as what is essentially softcore porn, sexually objectifying people across the gender spectrum via innuendo and unspoken grammar, to individuals who sought to purchase slaves, settle in the West, or simply view them as entertainment. This form of voyeurism evolved from Natiomal Geographic and other indigenous-as-sexy into similiar forms that exist today. One can go as far to argue that, even when not sexual, the voyeurism of web publications such as Vice also enact a direct form of voyeurist violence onto subaltern peoples. Black women continue to be the ‘beasts’ who, if slept with could get a white man accused of beastiality, yet have been highly coveted by white people in a double bind that ties us to both rape and the invisibility of hypervisibility.
Of course, once there, a grand festival Terror Dome of rape, torture, and unconsensual and unjustified punishment was to be found for all oppressors to behold and partake in. They functioned sort of like the dungeons in Eli Roth’s Hostel do: as places to partake in any pleasure, regardless of how far it went, for as long as you are white, or are a Black slave owner, and you used slaves to do it. But I would argue that these plantations offered more: a place to self-actualize as not a god, but a god amongst Black people, meaning that every day, no matter how shitty your life was, you could wake up and know that, at the very least, you are either not a Slave, or at least not Black. A very unsustainable set of conditions and ecologies, indeed… We can’t be surprised that revolts involving mass murder and arson across acres of land took place as a reaction. In fact, this is exactly why Abraham Lincoln and many others sought to free Slaves, hoping to deport us via pressure to be “unkidnapped” yet “re-colonized” soon after as well. After all, he always did believe that America “was and always should be a white man’s country.”
Regardless, many slaves, sought ways to improve their lives, even if it was within the oppressive wreckage of ever-eroding slave communities. Many learned to read and write, though relatively a few. Those who escaped were more than often brought back, or lived as maroons on remote land, constantly under the threat of being found, killed, or more profitably, re-captured as slaves. Many had to live a life “underground” until they reached land where they could be free. And even then, many had to turn to thieving for food and shelter. Mati, and batiman, as they called themselves in places like Surinam and Jamaica, enjoyed same-gender relationships and were respected until laws were passed to prevent this behavior, seen as un-Christian and moreso (even as cassus belli), a detriment to slave society, profits, and white ontology.
And with the pro-nonblack reforms that constantly took place to drive Black people further into the corner, and deeper into our graves, what was once lost for the Slave could never be found in the same way again. In this way, the Slave will never have access to the same narrative a non-Black person would in that there is no foretold end (like Marx’ communism), and no narrative of recovery (e.g. Native sovereignty). Like Oola, we die the death of a plot device every day. We are forced to exist in a vacuum of eternally returned scapegoating.
Loss of Time and Place
Most upsetting is that in the history of slave trade of Blacks (a category including those who would be considered Black in the future as well), no foreign entity has intervened in stopping the trade of our bodies. Even today, countries aren’t taking urgent action against Libya’s slave market. Why? Because our comprehensive labor (cultural, industrial, etc.), which is essentially our bodies and minds, are defined as currency and as the prime example of what is not human in this reality— therefore we are profitable to everyone (including, but to a much less extent, ourselves!). We were and are desirable in the bed, in the fields, in the flesh-mauling sugar cane fields, in the kitchen, and in war where non-Black lives could be spared. We grew and grow more desirable the lighter our skin is, the more respectable we are, the more we protect our oppressors— the more we become our oppressors. The catch is, we can never become what non-Blacks always become.
Example:
When Blacks arrived in shackles on the shores of what many call Turtle Island, they were offered as tokens of status to Natives. Many of them took us in as slaves, and the rest allowed it to happen. Even after that, many tribes decided that Blacks are no longer a part of their tribes, and many Natives even think we don’t belong in Amerika… Thus, we have become placeless to many.
This narrative appears to promise that there is an unspoken rule sewn deep into our existence— that we are either doomed to a productive death, or perhaps that non-Blacks are just afraid to confront the evil they have created, facilitated, ignored, and profited from, thus allowing themselves to continue harvesting the blood, sweat, and tears of our history.
It is essentially a very loud agreement in a language unheard—
and just like that, “the Slave” is made synonymous with Blackness.
Narrating Blackness
Today, people are quick to accuse Black people of appealing to an ahistorical disparagement commonly referred to as “oppression olympics”, but the truth is that chattel slavery is unique to Black people, and has never, ever been answered for in all fourteen centuries it existed— and everyone is complicit, including Black and non-Black people of color.
Today, we also see Blacks selling other Black people on sex slave markets for prostitution amongst other non-consensual “marketplaces”; this is also a misinformed cassus belli most useful in pushing the agenda that because Blacks also participate in slavery, Blacks are also to blame. The truth is, just like the Twi’lek, many if not all of the majority-Black countries, and Black communities within first and second-world nations (referred to as the fourth world), have been purposefully and indifferently underdeveloped.
We have not been given global reparations, because our past is still profitable; if reparations were paid, civilization itself would be permanently altered because of the massive amounts of harm that would have to be reversed. We have lost millions to what is essentially the longest protracted and industrial genocide in history. It is so long, time itself is also something we would need redeemed. If reparations were fully paid, it would be as if Oola had killed Jabba the Hutt, the Sith, the Jedi, and everyone who had let her and other Twi’lek be enslaved. Imagine what Star Wars would be today had she done so...
There are many differences between Twi’leks and Black people: we (including Blackness itself) were not invented by white people, we don’t have a tendency for submission, and we live in a colorist caste system of a world where lighter skin (measured against hair texture, speech patterns, etc.) is more often than not considered more human, unlike that of the Twi’leks who aren’t prized by lightness, but by hue. Still, our histories are so similar. In the end, this involvement of Nigerian-born Femi Taylor, moved to the land of The Queen for Better Opportunity™ is just another baroque nightmare reflection of our ongoing ontological oppression — a recursive, eternally returning inset within an inset of recreated and repurposed memories and promises towards the future…A matryoska doll of antiblackness.
Personally, I hate relating to oppressed fictional characters because I’m tired of being represented as a non-Human. But, it’s hard not to see the similarities particularly because my own social death starves me of an identity; I’m from Dominica, an island in the West Indies, but even there the youth are growing more and more enamored with Amerikan culture— the same culture that is extremely accessible to non-Black people to the point of it seeming like it is always consensually produced for non-Black consumption. Why? Because Amerika is a first-world country, and Dominica is a third-world country without nearly as many amenities to sell. This is a threat to Dominican culture not only because Dominica’s main export is its tourism, but also because Black Amerikan culture is volatile due to the vulnerabilities forced upon Black people in Amerika. Drawing Dominicans to a Black culture that is much more prone to being raped and pillaged is like coercing a starved lamb to its death with food.
For those of us Blacks who have read decolonialist classics like Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proleteriat, Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People, and afro-pessimist classics like Red, White, and Black by Frank B. Wilderson, we know that today’s Blackness is nothing other than an anti-hegemony— probably the most potent of all. It is also the antithetis of the most universal hegemony of today: whiteness.
Where Blacks are deemed delicious, savory and sweet, we find ourselves to be nothing more than momentary lapses of reason, to be consumed by non-Blacks and Blacks alike. In the spirit of ancient Greek and Roman speciations of non-citizen Barbarians as cyclopses or other monsters, Black people are simultaneously beasts, and feasts.
Our social and death has been romanticized and even sexualized to the point of rivaling the ontological degradation of Orientslism (which does also affect Black Asian indigenous people), and has historically inspired the spirits of many non-Black organizations and uprisings ranging from the Amerikan revolution to the far-left fight for labor rights (a la Lucy Parsons and crew). Lazy images of “the [wage] slave”, often portrayed with a darker body, have been conjured ad nauseum by Amerikan “working class [nonblacks]”, to paint a dramatic portrait of the entire working class, even while many Blacks actual chattel slaves (including Lucy Parsons herself) existed. Even Lenin participated in referring to Russians as slaves, saying they had it worse than Blacks!
Yes, this is today’s ‘Blackness’ — not yesterday’s Blackness of indigenous roots, forever dispossessing what ‘indigenous’ can ever mean for Black people…
As Gavin Eugene Long / Cosmo Setepenra [most likely unconsciously] projected in his self-published book, The Cosmo Way: A W(H)olistic Guide for the Total Transformation of Melanated People, Vol. 2: The Ascension: melanin, a dark pigment found in the skin, is "what gives Black people that Soul, that 'glow,' that 'bop' in their step that 'swag' in their demeanor that 'jazz' in their talk. Mentally, it is what makes us natural creative geniuses in terms of all arts: music, literature, dance, performance, science, etc…” ‘Bizarre’, indeed 🙄. It is exactly what we are being made to be by a cultural superstructure that expropriates and monetarily appropriates the indigenous, in us.
Today, we see reiterations of the weakening #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, all but co-opted by Trump himself. But alas, it all fulfills our nonconsensual roles as the slave race of stolen people: hyper-visible trophies normalized into slavery, entertainers for multiple markets ranging from counterculture to politics, status symbols for the rich and the poor, etc..
I only discovered that Oola was played by a Black woman, from Nigeria, the same night I started writing this. I was watching Episode VI with a friend, her scene came up, and one wiki search lead to sources, which lead to more. Since last night, I have been nauseous at the not-so-distant memory of me being excited to see the upcoming film Star Wars: The Last Jedi— a film that belongs to a franchise that has made at least $4.28 billion on these representations of what is essentially a real, Black story. BARELY ANY of that has been paid in reparations to Black people. It has not in money, nor in recognition. And now Disney, with its own overtly racist past, owns its future.
I am happy Femi got the part, and made somewhat of a living off it(?), but I’m upset that she still has to be a Black woman in an anti-Black world while these capitalist scum are making billions off her hard labor — off our hard labor, our centuries-long history of death have still not escaped or ended. And it’s all for the social, political, and economic capital of non-Black people. I’d rather see time and money go to giving us our full autonomy back.
Still, here we are “riding out the storm”, seeing the story of our suffering being written in real-time whether it is “better” or worse, and continuing into unknown realms as dark as loss itself.
Tott (a Twi’lek character): “We have a saying on Ryloth — one cannot defeat a heat storm. One must ride it.”
Really, what is the difference between Oola and the rest of us? When will our roles end?
How will they end?
Who knows…
*rancor (n.) — bitter deep-seated ill will; bitterness or resentfulness, especially when long-standing; rankling resentment or ill will; hatred; malice
Suggested Reading:
- Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People
- Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Thiefing Sugar
- http://www.arabslavetrade.com/
- bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/9chapter3.shtml
- http://racebaitr.com/2016/05/24/stolen-people-stolen-land/#
- What is Ontological Oppression?
