Unravelling Unpersons: Inscribing the Voices of Contemporary Slavery in the UK

The number of enslaved people living in contemporary Britain is estimated at around 25,000. They are trafficked migrants of various sorts, such as sexual slaves, cockle-pickers, and domestic servants. Their isolated existence is not documented by any official papers; therefore, they have access to few rights and are often referred to as ‘ghosts’, non-persons’, ‘unpersons’ – or ‘outsiders incarnate’, in Zygmunt Bauman’s words. This essay will investigate two genres dealing with contemporary slavery in the UK. The first is represented by selected sociological works on the phenomenon (Anderson, Waugh, Gupta), which all attempt (though in different ways) to restore these people’s humanity by reporting their own words. The focus will be on the methods by which they recover these marginalized voices in a written form: how prominent are their first-person narrations in the books? What techniques are employed to structure the description of their ordeals? What is the role of body language to convey their traumatic experience? How important is the interaction of narrator/author for the former’s narration? How far does the victims’ illiteracy impair their ability to communicate their own stories? The second area of interest is fiction. The purpose here is to analyse the interaction between selected novels on the issue and the abovementioned sociological reports, and how fiction might reflect the difficulty in making those voices heard. Cases in point could be Ruth Rendell’s crime novel Simisola, where the identity of a murdered African domestic worker constitutes an unresolved question unsettling the traditional features of the genre; Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail, where the brutalized protagonist overcomes her voicelessness by branding her own body.