While modern history of Libya is often associated with its emergence as a modern rich oil-producing state and, recently, as the Arab state most intensely transformed by the Arab spring, its pre-modern history is more conflicted and heterogeneous. Slavery is a major constituent part of that pre-modern Libyan history. Slave ownership was practiced there even before the rise of Islam, and black slaves exported from Africa were widely traded throughout North Africa, across the Mediterranean and the Islamic world. Najwa Bin Shitwan’s Zarayeb al-‘Abid (2016; The Slave Yards, 2020) harks back to the premodern society in Libya, focusing on a period straddling the end of Ottoman rule and leading up to the imposition of Italian colonial rule on Libya in 1911. The novel not only traces the complex interconnected histories of three generations of slave descendants around Benghazi, both those living in their masters’ households and those outside the city in slave ghettos, but also incorporates testimonies of individual slave protagonists as they recount their trials and privations in their struggle to gain dignity and break free from the yoke of subjection and dispossession. In my paper, I explore blackness as a social construct that is connected to not only race but also to the social dynamic that produces it in relation to desire and power. In communities where polygamy is practiced and tolerated, female slaves are often treated as concubines who are expected to submit to the will of the master and satisfy his desires while still conceding subjugation to the enslaving power of inherited and socially imposed blackness/slavery. The readers, however, are made aware of the parallel historical developments that are taking place, such as the Ottoman edict for military conscription, the outbreak of the plague of 1874 and the Italian colonial rule. This parallel narrative is an effective literary device that suggests a need to integrate slave micro histories in the official historical record for a more inclusive and assimilated society. I argue that the efforts of the master patriarchs in the enslaving household to disown Atiqa, Muhammad’s biracial daughter, functions allegorically to represent the erasure of the history of slavery from the official historical record of Libya. When Ali, Atiqa’s white cousin, visits her with the official document of her birthright, he is gesturing to the need to rewrite slavery and its atrocities within a revisionist account of the history of the nation in modern Libya.