Losing Your Name

The most poignant and powerful time for me in the film 12 Years a Slave was not when the beatings took place or the general degradation meted out to the hero as a matter of course or even the general terror of his life.

No. It is very quiet, very matter of fact: our hero is told that he will be called by another name from now on. He will no longer be Solomon Northrup.

He is now ‘Platt’, the name of a runaway slave from Georgia.

The name of someone else.

He is frightened, confused, beaten and humiliated, and now he must answer to another name.

A name given to him by someone else, a name given, ultimately, by conquest, a name that was not his choice, not his wish, a name that would be tied to him like the ropes that bound him and which he could not shake, could not undo-a name that would define him forever.

He couldn’t change/couldn’t alter his reality.

At first he resists and demonstrates this by saying ‘Solomon’ when he is called ‘Platt, but gradually he comes to learn that if he does not do as he is told, does not come when his new name is called, does not work, nor eat, nor sleep, nor run or play his fiddle or do nothing at all when he is commanded to under his new name, then the consequences for him could be dire…fatal

In the end, he is freed because he does not forget his name.

His own name, the name he’d been born with, the name, I suspect, of his father, had been thrown away, just as blithely as you blow away leaves or throw something into the trash. It was to be banished, never heard of again.

As ‘Platt’ the slave who ran away, Solomon Northrup has no ability to change his situation.

He has no power.

In the end, he is freed because he does not forget his name.