Book: Blonde roots

[liv]

Author: Bernadine Evaristo

Details: (c) Bernadine Evaristo 2008; Pub 2009 Penguin; ISBN 978-0-141-03152-1

Verdict: Blonde roots didn't work as satire for me.

Reasons for reading it: I wasn't at all keen on the premise of BR, because it seems to insinuate that if it had been white people who were trafficked and enslaved on a huge scale, then it would have been really bad, which I find more than a little distasteful. However, lots of people who are knowledgeable about African-American history and engaged in anti-racism efforts praised it and found it hilarious, so I decided to give it a go.

How it came into my hands: Newcastle-under-Lyme library.

I think Blonde Roots is supposed to be a parody of all the over-earnest but poorly historical writing about the Horrors of Slavery. I haven't read a lot of that stuff to start with, and also it fell flat for me because I couldn't sufficiently tell the difference between a parody of bad writing and actual bad writing. It's incredibly anachronistic and inconsistent, and I didn't understand the point of the way the alternate history and geography is constructed. (For example, why have a "United Kingdom of Ambossa" to play the role of an alternate reality UK, and an England as a landlocked country in Africa? I guess the idea is to make the reader relate to both the slavers and colonialists in the UK of the book's world, and the slaves snatched from their lives in the book's England, but I was very distracted by this trick.)

The other problem with the reversed history is that the slave narrator quite reasonably resents her masters and describes them in unflattering terms. But real world racism outside the book often involves depicting Black people as lazy, drunk, rapacious, violent, stupid etc, so the topsy-turvy stuff didn't quite work. There were some nice touches to the reversal stuff, like the "wyte" characters struggling with a beauty ideal based on "blak" norms, or trying to include some half-remembered form of Anglican Christianity in the rituals of the dominant blak religion. But it felt like a joke or rhetorical technique that had been over-extended; it would make a cute newspaper column, but it gets tired over the course of a whole novel. Likewise the long lists of London landmarks renamed to sound humourously African were not funny after the first six repetitions.

It may be that part of my problem is that I am not predisposed to find slavery funny. I know that in theory you can joke about anything, but to write comedy about something as awful as the death and disease on the slave ships or systematic mass rape of slaves by their owners you have to be really superhumanly good, and I don't think Evaristo is quite there. Writers like Alice Walker or Zora Neale Hurston do use humour in their accounts of horrific acts, but BR seemed well past the point of lighthearted and into obscene.

Maybe Evaristo's aim was to make it really really obvious how ridiculous and offensive a lot of rhetoric around race is. The anachronistic construction where seventeenth century style slave ships exist side-by-side with gangsta culture, or people living under cod-Mediaeval feudalism behaving like stereotypical chavs, probably serves to lampoon a whole range of racist ideas from different eras. Although I can see what BR is aiming for, as a whole it just didn't work for me. There were a few ideas and incidents from the history of slavery that were new to me, but since the whole book is parodic, I have no idea whether those things actually happened or just represent the kind of atrocities that clueless writers like to make up.

Comments

[nanaya]

Thanks. I've mostly avoided 'Blond Roots' on the basis that it would probably annoy me for at least some of reasons you name, not least that I wasn't sure the reverse-history 'parody' could work for a whole book. Additionally, I was worried it might just come off as a fantastical alterna-history version of the John Travolta/JEJ film 'White Man's Burden', and I could do without cringing that much again.

I'm slightly bothered by the idea that there's a need to show slavery happening to white people (which, in fact, DID happen in other circumstances anyway! So we don't need to create a fantasy setting for it) to, what? Get people to empathise? I think not. To promote the idea that all humans are equally prone to wickedness and exploitation? Maybe, but it's a big of a get-out, isn't it? To deconstruct ideas of race? Sure, but it sounds as though that could be better done elsewhere.

I dunno, I've looked at it a number of times and something about it just bugged me.

[liv]

I don't think it's particularly meant to promote empathy for the victims of slavery by making them white; I thought it might be doing that, and found the concept offensive. It's more trying to make racists look ridiculous, whether that's extreme and obvious things like the slave trade, or more subtle things that people who are convinced they aren't racist are prone to, like deriding African-American culture for being syncretistic and partly invented. I am inclined to care more that racism is evil than that it's ludicrous, though.

I think possibly I'm not the intended audience. In spite of the enthusiastic Grauniad blurb I don't think it was really written for Nice White Ladies. It reminds me of things like Bingo cards and Privilege lists; they're not really intended to influence anyone who isn't already on board with anti-racism, they are just a way for people who are involved in activism to reassure eachother, yes, this kind of response has happened before, you're not the only one who experiences it.

But it's really not for me, I'm afraid.

[nanaya]

Ooh, good point. I often don't enjoy back-patting self-congratulatory group politics - I don't feel much need to seek out support to be convinced that my ideas are "right" or "worthwhile" as I tend to extrapolate from first principles as a rule.

Who do you think WAS its intended audience then?

I think racism is both ridiculous and evil, and it's a good idea to analyse it on both fronts. It hits logic barriers very quickly in either direction. However I agree with you that simply dwelling on the ridicule and avoiding the evil may somewhat, hm, dilute the message?

[nanaya]

OT, but: what the hell is wrong with syncretism anyway?

[coalescent]

Hmm. I liked this a bit more than you did. I didn't feel it was preaching only to the converted; I thought Evaristo dinged attitudes on all real-world sides hard enough to avoid that impression. I think the reason it worked for me as parody was the historical mixing-up; I thought the telescoping of references to the past and present into one fictive moment worked well as a way of bring out how much the past underlies the present, and I thought it was reflected in the modern/archaic mix of the language. It perhaps also helps that I read it more or less in a sitting, so I didn't really have time to feel it was outstaying its welcome. Though I do agree that there's a certain repetitiveness in the book, that ultimately it's making the same point over and over, even if coming at it from a variety of different angles. I also think Gwyneth Jones' reading is interesting.

[liv]

Oh, thanks for that review, that definitely does help. I could see the anachronism was deliberate, and I could see that it was meant to be parodic, but that makes sense of what exactly it was doing.

Even though it is a short, easy to read book, I did feel it was extending the same simple idea over too much ground. I know I'm being harsh because I basically didn't like the book, though.