Harrowing Look at Slaves’ Passage

Sold into slavery, the unnamed African who narrates “The Middle Passage” describes himself as “just another black body in a sea of dark despair.”

Yet while his forced voyage to the New World is filled with filth and sickness, it is also suffused with the beauty of the pastel sky and the dancing, azure sea. Nature retains her purity, even as she is forced to swallow the bodies of the many dead who are tossed into her waters.

This splendor, combined with the poetry of the voice-over narration, makes the film easier to watch, yet renders it all the more haunting as it plays this month on HBO (including tonight at 9:45).

Originally a French-language production by Martinique filmmaker Guy Deslauriers, “The Middle Passage” arrived at last year’s Pan African Film Festival here with a different English-language voice-over than it now carries. This one is written by novelist Walter Mosley and spoken by Djimon Hounsou, of the Steven Spielberg middle passage film “Amistad.”

The unidentified narrator could be any of the men lying in chains on the bare-wood berths in the ship’s dank hold. He is a ghost, whispering into the viewer’s ear. Determined to record history in its entirety, he holds accountable the Africans who captured and sold members of rival tribes, as well as the slavers and buyers.

The hour-and-20-minute film progresses at a stately pace, with some scenes unfolding in an artfully abstracted blur, to the shimmering elegy of violins. But the horror of the vomiting, the rats and the whippings are never long from view.

This was a holocaust that lasted nearly 400 years, with more than half of the occupants of some ships perishing during the voyage. Those who survived became “a new race, a new people”--strong and, ultimately, unconquerable.