Evaristo, Bernardine - Blonde Roots

[oyceter]

In the world of Blonde Roots, the people of Aphrika have enslaved people of Europa, which lies in the Southern Hemisphere. The Middle Passage runs from the Cabbage Coast of Europa to New Ambossa and Little Londolo in the West Japanese Islands, and then back to Aphrika, particularly the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa.

Doris Scagglethorpe was kidnapped from her home and sold into slavery; she has since borne several children, all whom have been torn away from her, and is currently trying to escape. While Doris is the main character, the focus is Evaristo's worldbuilding. Europa is the Gray Continent; whytes try to flatten their noses and perm their hair to emulate blak standards of beauty; skience says the prominent jaw of blaks indicates their forward nature while the flatter skulls of whytes indicate smaller brains and less capacity for emotion. "Beating the hide of a Caucasoi is more akin to beating the hide of a camel to make it go faster."

It's a great concept, and sometimes the way Evaristo turns about tropes is brilliant. I particularly love the way Europa is exoticized and made Other, from cabbages to clothing to religious rituals to superstitious beliefs. The book is set in the past, I think, although there are the occasional mention of skateboards and trains, but it reminds me more of the deliberate anachronisms in The Emperor's Babe. But because it's set in the past, I feel the point might not get through to some readers, that they too will look at things like witch-burning and drawing-and-quartering and corset-wearing to be foreign and Other, and it will be all too easy to miss how those views and cultures shaped the views and cultures we have now.

On the other hand, I really don't know what Evaristo could have done about that, given that when Doris is at home in Europa, there's also a sense of familiarity instead of Otherness for me, probably just because of what I grew up reading. And there are some pitch-perfect moments, like when the whyte slaves sing old songs from their homeland such as "Happy Birthday" (a song once sung to celebrate a child's entrance into the world) and "Auld Lang Syne."

The narrative itself is brutal in parts, but not surprisingly so, given the subject matter, and the ending was actually happier than I thought it would be. I also love Evaristo's voice, which slips between historical and modern (more frequently modern), and is both tongue in cheek and dead serious at the same time. I wish I knew how she did it.

I don't think the concept entirely succeeds, but honestly, this is the best version of the black/white flip that I've seen, and I say that as someone who is not sure the concept will ever entirely succeed (not because of authorial skill, but just because of how difficult it is to Other the familiar and the multiple levels and complications that have to be addressed to not simplify things or to make it so "Oh, anyone can be racist!"). It's a very impressive reconstruction of the institutions of slavery, not just story of one slave.

Comments

[oyceter]

I just did and spent all weekend thinking about my reaction to it. skywardprodigal's comment on the review crystallized things for me:

"How do you live with knowing that the precondition of your being is the rape, abduction, murder of your ancestors?

I don't. Because the shame is not mine. My question is how do YOU live with the knowing that your current existence is built on rape, war, and slaughter for obscene wealth?"

Like skywardprodigal, I had a big problem with the final paragraph of the review. I particularly had a problem with how it reframes the quote at the beginning from "what to do" to "how do you live." Because that implies that being a product of unwilling slavery and rape and abduction is a shame, and Skyward Prodigal gets it right when she says the shame is not hers. It reminds me a lot of the language used around rape and how it always focuses on the survivor (except they're usually called "victim" in the paper), how the rapist usually get erased from the picture. I am not, of course, saying rape and slavery are the same, but I do think the rhetoric surrounding them have similarities and that those similarities arise for the same reason.

I have problems with Jones' statements: "the exercise of taking the blame a release" and "Take a rest from the horrible burden of your innocence" for the same reasons. I really don't understand why taking the blame and being the enslavers and murderers and rapists is somehow a "release" from a "horrible burden."

I read the book largely as something meant to be educational to white readers—read about slavery when it's your customs and your history—and funny to black readers—I for one was vindictively pleased by how African culture is finally seen in a good light and the satirization of all the justifications for slavery, although I think that response is possible without also identifying with the enslavers. I am not sure about readers of other races; one of my main questions was if Aphrika had colonized India and addicted China to opium the way the British Empire did.

I read Jones' review as written by someone who hasn't had to think about being the product of colonization. Frex, I spent most of my adolescence and college years thinking about the colonization of China and why there was the very prevalent idea that it was "inevitable" and that China was "weak" and Britain was "strong" (again with the caveat that the colonization of China was nowhere near as devastating as the colonization of Africa). I liked the idea of inevitability and that no one was to blame very early on, because I had internalized that China was to blame for its own colonization. After reading more and learning more, I discovered that my anger and my sense of injustice and my outrage is leveled not at China for being colonized, but at the Western European, USian, and Japanese powers doing the colonizing.

So it feels to me as though Jones is still in the mindset that the colonized are weak and that innocence is somehow "horrible."