MADreads

Blondes don’t always have more fun

June 16th, 2009 Kylee

Nearly every American has read at least one unflinching account of slavery - painful as it is, it’s an important part of our country’s history.  Bernardine Evaristo has written an entirely new sort of slave narrative: an imaginative one in which the white people are the slaves, not the slave owners.  Her novel Blonde Roots imagines what the world would be like if Europeans were smuggled into Africa to work on sugar cane plantations, rather than Africans being sold to Americans to work in their fields.  She tells the story of Doris Scagglethorpe, a woman kidnapped from the Cabbage Coast of England as a girl, who has worked for Captain Katamba (whose initials - ironically, KKK - are branded onto her back) ever since.  The book is divided into three parts: our introduction to Doris just as she’s given an opportunity to flee with the help of the underground railroad, a change in perspective to see things from her master’s point of view, and a return to Doris’s life on a sugar cane plantation.  This is an ambitious, audacious novel, and I’m not sure it’s entirely successful.  The tone of the narration is dry and clever, verging on snarky, which makes it interesting to read, but frankly, made me pretty uncomfortable.  If the author intended to use shock value to make her point, it certainly worked on me.

After Blonde Roots, I decided to check out Octavia Butler’s classic science fiction-influenced novel of slavery, Kindred, which I though was a heck of a lot better.  Dana is a 26-year old newlywed writer who is in the process of settling into her new home with her husband Kevin when she is instantly transported to a different time and place - the pre-Civil War South.  After saving a young child from drowning, she finds herself back in her living room.  Back in 1976, she deduces that the plantation she was on was the very same one that Alice, an ancestor whose name she has only seen in an heirloom family Bible, may have been a slave on.  The next time she feels herself being pulled away, Kevin grabs her and is transported with her.  Kevin’s white skin gives him an entirely different role in this other world, one that tests their relationship in ways nothing could today.

Butler brilliantly imagines Dana’s experiences as a highly educated, modern black woman thrown into the world of slavery, and reading about these experiences is painful and eye-opening.  Dana’s relationships with Kevin and with Rufus, another ancestor who also happens to run the plantation, are expertly explored through Butler’s writing.  I think Evaristo might have been attempting to evoke a similar effect in her novel, but if you ask me, Butler clearly has won this round.  I also recommend M.T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing if you’re interested in fresh takes on slave narratives.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction, Science Fiction