01/50: Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo
I first heard about this title from delux_vivens and the concept sounded interesting: imagine if the roles of slavery were reversed. One of the "praise" quotes on the back of the book sums it up best:
"An ingenious way of refreshing the horrors of the slave trade... More than just a clever satire on race [it] achieves what one presumes the author intended: to remind us that "us" and "them" could so easily have been reversed, and that regarding someone as less than fully human is the root of all tyranny."
Let the reader be warned now that if you are a sensitive soul and/or have delicate sensibilities, this WILL be a hard read for you. The description of the conditions on the slave ships, the punishments administered to rogue slaves and the otherwise inhuman treatment serve their purpose to drive home the horrors of just what being a slave meant. Sure, you've probably learned about it in a classroom, but probably not in the same amount of detail Evaristo (and other authors who have written on the subject) describes. But this is the point and serves as a knock to the head for the ignorant reader to wake-up. Evaristo seems to lay it on thick, but I think she feels she must so that the point won't be missed. She's saying, "All this actually HAPPENED to my ancestors and relatives. How would you feel if it were yours?" As one Amazon reviewer put it, "This book would be a great educational tool and potentially a great device to kick-start race-related discussions."
It was also a bit of a hard read because the pacing of the narrative varied so greatly. The first 40 pages or so, Evaristo seems to be trying to take every racial stereotype given to blacks and turn them around on to whites. From the writer's perspective, I can understand why (it's a pretty solid whack from a clue-by-four) but it bogs the narrative down.
The pacing is also slowed down as Evaristo squeezes in EVERYTHING about the character (a whyte slave named Doris in her home country, better known by her slave name of Omorenomwara), even if it's not all interesting. I'm guessing this was to flesh out the character's back story more and make her more empathetic. It works to a certain degree, but just as soon as you're starting to like her a bit and rooting for her escape, the story is abruptly interrupted with a brief narrative from the slave holder, Bwana, and his perspective of slavery. This rounds out the story and takes every justification original slave holders had turns it around; it's sad to think the rationale Bwana uses, is in fact the same reasoning white slave holders used during their time.
Book Three returns the reader back to the original narrative and Evaristo seems to finally find her footing in the pacing. The rest of the book flew by and was jam-packed with action and resolution. Evaristo keeps it interesting with some twists that left me wondering how many of them were based on true stories. Some seemed a bit too convenient, but the world is too strange a place to ever truly rule anything out as just "coincidence."
Overall, not a bad book, but it could have been better with a bit more editing. Evaristo has so much to tell the reader, that she misses the mark that would better be served by SHOWING us. Let the story speak for itself. The first-person narration makes the story personal and drives the points Evaristo's trying to make, home.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone that doesn't get why slavery is a sore point for thousands of millions of blacks today and anyone who desperately needs a good whacking with a clue-by-four.