Book: Blonde roots
Oct. 16th, 2009 09:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: 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.
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.
