The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson
Title: The Salt Roads
Author: Nalo Hopkinson (NaloHopkinson.com; Author's Blog; @nalohopkinson)
Genre: Fantasy
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Warner Books
Reviewer's Note: I hope that the tags I have used are appropriate and as always, if any part or the whole of this review is not appropriate for this community, I will edit or delete immediately at the request of the moderators.
Basic Plotline: The lives and tales of three women - Mer, a slave on a sugar plantation on St. Domingue before it becomes Ayiti/Haiti, Jeanne Duval, the "ginger colored" lover of poet Charles Baudelaire, and Thais, a Nubian prostitute in Alexandria - are connected and interwoven by the spirit Ezili, using the unused vitality of an infant buried in the soil of St. Domingue. As these women struggle and love and survive, Ezili connects them across time and circumstance, through heritage and history, through blood, tears, sweat, sex, birth, death - the Salt Roads.
The Positives: This book confirms my belief that Nalo Hopkinson does not get enough appreciation as an author, either in awards or in popularity. The Salt Roads is a gorgeous, complex, layered work. Though it is steeped with subtleties and secrets, it is such a vivid, bold, bombastic book. It does not flinch or turn away from reality, from the harshest and ugliest and most scatological, but neither from the unnoticed beauty and the strength to be found there.
The characters are it's strong point. They are sympathetic, they are real, and more importantly, they are each a part of their shared history, a facet of their people as they - called by many names, finding themselves in many circumstances - worship, grow, suffer, survive, develop, hope, live, die, breathe. The book is a work of poetry all it's own, a testimonial to strength and all it's many forms. All of these women have their weaknesses, foibles, flaws - but they are still strong in the ways that they can be. They are also beautiful, transcendent in the ways that they eke out survival and joy and in places not conducive to those things. Mer is long-suffering, patient, wise with her own raw sense of humor and anger and longing for home and hope and the help of gods that seem not to answer. Jeanne is colorful, bold, materialistic, a dancer who becomes the scandalous lover of the white poet Charles Baudelaire she is sensual, vain, loving and not loving at the same moment, going from a glorious beauty to a woman scarred by syphilis and a twisted love affair. And Thais, optimistic and energetic, longing to see something else, to be something else, who sets out on a journey to see the things she has only heard of in stories and finds herself on a journey to sainthood.
The prose itself is a kind of poetry and though it never gives itself to over-flowery speeches, it is beautiful and there are many times when the book becomes an outright poem. Broken up in into chapters as short as a paragraph or as long as twenty pages, sometimes broken down until the prose is just a few lines of actual poetry, it is a journey that tickles at the abstract mind as well as the literal. I appreciated both the gritty, earthy details in the lives of the women - constantly colored with the imagery of salt, salt in tears and sweat and blood and even semen and bodily fluids - and the unearthly, ethereal details of Ezili, not bound by salt though traveling along the road of salt through Jeanne, Mer, and Thais.
This novel consumed me as I read it, and I felt myself much like Ezili, not so much reading about these women as inhabiting them through their lives at different time.
The Negatives: I think the only substantive negative in this book is that some readers might and will be thrown by the non-linear plot. Most readers, even of this genre, are used to a plot that is a sequence of events starting in one place and progressing until the conflict is resolved and all loose ends are tied up. There is no such structure in this book, and some readers may grow frustrated because it does not seem that the conflicts of the lives of these women are resolved or connected. Hopkinson is exploring something through this novel that is not precisely a conflict at all. The history of a people and of people's lives may have individual conflicts, but the larger tale of them is not in itself something that can be resolved or told as a neat dotted line leading from one place and ending in another. In my edition of the book (don't know if there have been other re-printings) there is an interview with Hopkinson in which she states that fractals and fractal patterns played a large part in the writing of this book, and that helped me to read this book not as a linear series of events but as a larger pattern.
I also would have liked to have seen Thais/Meritet's storyline more explored and I felt it didn't really make it's place in the novel as well as Jeanne and Mer's bits did. It felt underdeveloped, and I would have liked to travel Meritet's road more, exploring what she did after the rumors of her sainthood began and perhaps to see more about her life, especially because she, like Mer, faced a conflict of religions between the growing rise of Christianity and the beliefs in her own gods (Hathor, Isis, etc), and to see her dealing with that would have strengthened the book overall.
The other negative is that I would be cautious of giving this book to a younger reader as it contains very graphic scenes of sexuality and violence. Not only is the language very harsh in some places (the n-word and the c-word make many appearances, and not just in a blandly excusable historical way) but there are many graphic scenes of violence, especially against slaves. So this is not something I'd put in the hands of, say, a twelve-year-old unless they were a very, very mature twelve-year-old and had a very understanding adult to guide them through the reading of it. And if you are a person triggered by violence - in one instance a slave is skinned alive, in another one is burned alive, there are many instances of whipping, some domestic violence, a miscarriage - I would advise you to be cautious and decide if you think you can handle it. The violence and sex are in no way gratuitous or there just for shock value. Hopkinson is not, so far as I read this, out to shock anyone. She is out to tell a tale that cannot help but be disturbing when told honestly, and these scenes are part and parcel of the lives these women lead - but they are very vivid. Use your own judgement
CoC Score: 10. Hopkinson herself is a Caribbean writer, and she writes about the lives of women who may be classified differently in racial categories (Mer is an African-born slave, Jeanne a half-Haitian, half-white French woman, Thais a Nubian in Egypt), but the novel is almost exclusively about people of color, many different colors. While the prejudices and racial hatred these women face in various forms is explored, it is done in a way that de-centers whiteness and the white gaze. We do not see them through the lenses of white masters or white lovers, but rather through themselves, their gods, their history.
Gender Score: 10. The novel centers on women, and does an impressive job of showing the many things women also go through without centering it on the male gaze. Female pleasure, sexuality, and bodies are refreshingly centered in this book. There are good women, bad women, and always, women who have agency even when so many try so hard to take it from the.
GLBT Score: 10. There are so many modes of sexuality in this book, and even more refreshingly, they are not so cleanly labeled as white, western society has often made them. Stuffing any of these women into the boxes of "lesbian" or "straight" or "bisexual" would be impossible, but queerness is so vividly and wonderfully portrayed in this book. Jeanne has a male and a female lover, Mer seems to prefer only women and lives in something of a threefold relationship with Tipingee, whom she loves dearly. Joel, who cares for Jeanne as she declines in health, dresses himself in Jeanne's dresses and pantalettes. These are not meant to be titillating, but rather as part of the expressions of need and desire and love these people feel.
Ablism Score: 10. Nalo Hopkinson herself identifies as a PWD, and in this book, she shows a compelling picture of Jeanne Duval coping with the effects of syphilis and the stroke it caused. I was impressed to see that even though Jeanne deals with difficulties, she is not stripped of sexuality or agency after her stroke. Indeed, she continues to love and live as fiercely as ever.