Weekly update

This week was consumed by the only paper I had to write for my ghosts class. Not much progress made on the various books I accumulated this book, but there were a lot of panicked trips to the library.

-“Covering,” Kenji Yoshino. G-d as my witness, I’m finishing this book.
-“The Summoning,” Kelley Armstrong (FWD write-up here) (17). Chloe starts seeing dead people and is locked up in a group home for unstable teens where she is forced to accept that she is ill… or suffer the consequences
-“Dumbfounded,” Matt Rothschild (158). A fat, cross-dressing, gay, red-headed Jew? It’s like Rosthchild’s life was compiled to amuse me.
-“The Ghost Writer,” Philip Roth (49). I figure I should read one Roth book, since my class is reading like five.

-“Who Fears Death,” Nnedi Okorafor. I thought I returned this already.
-“Blonde Roots,” Bernadine Evaristo. I was panicking about my ghosts paper and just started grabbing books I had already read.
“Dust,” Karen Frances Turner. I could tell from the title it was a zombie book, but I didn’t know it was ON THE WRONG SIDE.
-“Out Stealing Horses,” Per Petterson. Goodwill!
-“Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife,” Mary Roach.

49. “Blonde Roots,” Bernardine Evaristo

“Blonde Roots” is historical fiction with a twist, imagining if Europe had been imperialized by Africa and whites (or “whytes,” in the vernacular of the book) enslaved.

This was an interesting idea, but extremely heavy-handed, especially the first several pages, which is all telling (as opposed to showing). While the story calls for a massive over-haul in ones thinking (because the fingers of slavery are that long), all I heard for the first few page was “THE WHYTES ARE THE SLAVES, GET IT, BECAUSE IN THE REAL WORLD, THEY WERE THE SLAVE MASTERS AND ALSO THERE ARE THE WEST JAPANESE ISLANDS LIKE THE WEST INDIES AND HER MASTER’S INITIALS ARE KKK BECAUSE HE IS BAD LIKE THE KKK.”

I mention this because I would have stopped reading if someone in 50books_poc hadn’t mentioned that the first forty or so pages are really all about reversing/echoing as much as possible of narratives of Black slaves.

The broad concept was both interesting and compelling, but the details were rather shakey for me. It’s such an odd reversal, but a reversal of things that would not exist without slavery. For example, without many Africans of different religions thrown together and force-fed Catholicism, you don’t have Voodoo, so celebrating Voodoomas doesn’t make sense (the -mas from “Christmas” making, of course, the least sense).

Throughout the book, I also felt myself wondering a lot if what we needed was further empathetic identification with white characters. Is Evaristo simply exploiting the fact that we are trained to identify with white people and see through their eyes, making the story of a white slave girl more heart-wrenching? Or is she effectively reenacting this connection? Is the book challenging because it plays out the distant historical facts of slavery in a way that seems new and therefore immediate? Or is it challenging because it plays fast and loose with history, resulting in a confusing hodgepodge? Does taking issue with the style of a narrative like this totally overlook the point of it, or is it valid to feel that the writing got in the way of an extremely useful conceit?

In the end, I felt that this was a pretty solid piece of young adult fiction– which, I want to be clear, is not an insult. I read a lot of young adult fiction and I enjoy it and think that the genre truly does have the power to educate, enlighten, and challenge. Easy-to-understand writing is not a bad thing. After I got more used to Evaristo’s narrative style, the book got more enjoyable. I would love to read more on the same theme because I do think that this book has the ability to really challenge people to see with fresh eyes the inhumanity of the slave trade. It is creative, intelligent, and deep thought and craft obviously went into the world the book portrays. It’s just that the writing never matched for me the sophistication of the idea.

Page count: 270
Page total: 13,392