Customer Reviews

Blonde Roots

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In Blonde Roots, Benardine Evaristo's latest novel, an alternate universe exists in which Aphrikans (Africans/Blacks) are the dominant race and the slave trade imports Europans (Europeans/Whites). The author has redrawn the map of the world as we know it. A graphical depiction provided in the opening pages shows Londolo, a capital city of the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa, located directly below the equator and immediately off the coast of Aphrika. The puns and acerbic bites of satire are not solely reserved for the cities and kingdoms, the character's names, cultural references and comparisons in art, clothing fashions, language, religion, and courtship are all fair game for clever commentary.

The novel opens in the anti-abolitionist offices of The Flame, a pro-slavery publication, printed by Omorenomwara's owner, Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I (note the irony of his initials: KKK). Omorenomwara, a trusted, literate, 30-something year-old slave, is editing the latest issue when given a note informing her that she has been selected to begin her journey back to the Motherland (Europa) via the Underground Railroad. It is then, via a series of flashbacks, that we learn that Omorenomwara is really Doris Scagglethorpe, who spent an idyllic cabbage-farming childhood in an Europan serfdom shared with her parents and three sisters. Innocence is lost when, at age 10 she is snatched by a Viking during a game of Hide-and-Seek and sold to the blaks. While the races maybe reversed in the novel, the horrors, cruelty, and inhumanity of the trade is the same. Doris's recounting of the Middle Passage, enslavement, loss of identity and self-esteem, as a result of her servitude as a playmate to the plantation's spoiled "miracle baby," are aligned and echo actual experiences. Her botched escape, recapture, punishment, and relocation to a sugar cane plantation allows the reader to experience the harsher side of slave life and the ways by which slaves adapted to the back-breaking labor and coped with the inhumanity of it all via song, reverent prayer, inner-strength, and inter-family dependence. Doris's story has some contrived bitter-sweet moments, but I like that the author paved the way for some semblance of happiness for her character.

The novel is complete in that it taps the common taboos by covering the gamut of superstitions (both races), nuances in tastes (spicy vs bland foods), perceptions on beauty, etc. While the author attempts to infuse comical anecdotes and witty retorts (some are quite good), the somber subject matter dampens the humor. The Slave Trade is a stain on the fabric of humanity and its waves are still reverberating some 400 years later. This book would be a great educational tool and potentially a great device to kick-start race-related discussions.

Reviewed by Phyllis
January 25, 2009
APOOO BookClub

The premise is that back in the day of slavery ships and wealthy slave owners, the roles were reversed. African's owned lands in Ambrosia where European indentured servants were transported (yes, middle passage and all). Europeans take on the exact role that Africans really did have in history. They are viewed as being dumb, ugly, savage-like, and not having human ties to their offspring.

Blonde Roots follows one Englishwoman (Doris) who is kidnapped from her family of cabbage farmers while playing outside with her siblings. She is taken to Ambrosia and only dreams of getting back home. She is torn from her family and displaced into slavery and the bonds and ties that brings. Half way through the book (or part way) we hear the story for a little while from the perspective of the slave owner, Bwana and then back to Doris, the slave for the conclusion.

Bernardine Evaristo wrote this portrayal in a modern way, using modern slang and things that would not have existed at all then, which is acutally something I partially appreciated. The writing is interesting, and the concept is stunning. The idea of the novel is strong, but in my opinion not well executed. I felt it horribly lacking in power. I never felt connected to Doris, the other slaves or the slave owners...and I wanted that! I didn't care really if they even made it that is how much I just felt her writing fell flat thus not allowing me to form emotional bonds with the characters.

One thing that I did find interesting is that over and over I had to remind myself that the slaves where Europeans! Whenever I am reading a book I have an image in my mind of the characters and what is happening. In Blonde Roots I kept realising that in my mind's eye I kept reversing the roles to the way that they actually were. I felt bad at first that I kept switching it back and didn't know if that would make me look horrid to confess that on here. I thought about it and really came to understand that my mind just was stuck in a rut, as it is really hard for me to imagine the roles reversed! And yet, that is the way it could have been!

There were many good things about this book, but as I am an avid lover of good character development and well formed plots....I can't say I feel that Bernadine Evaristo ended up giving her novel the potential that it had in concept. I felt immensely confused and disconnected against my own will.

This really is a wonderful book. If a better one is published this year, I'll be amazed. It's got everything: a story that builds and builds so that you can't wait to know what happens next; characters so vividly realized that you feel you know each of them personally and care desperately about what happens to them; an incredible amount of humor, even though its subject matter is far from trivial; and an awareness and understanding of how people behave that challenges and changes how you think. A book about slavery that is funny, lively, makes you cry and provides a completely different slant on what being "black" and "white" actually means - I never thought it could or would be written!

I bought this book after reading the author's interview in the Wall Street Journal. I almost never buy books based on reading things in papers, but I found that I kept thinking about that interview again and again. The book was not what I expected-- the style is much more casual than I'd anticipated, and the sarcastic tone is a bit uncomfortably paired with the brutality of the content. As I was reading it I was not sure if I "liked" it. But four months later, I find that I still think about this book quite often. I now understand the problem that I and perhaps many readers faced, which is that I almost missed a crucial element of the story. Ms. Evaristo created this character and this alternative world even more cleverly than is apparent when you first read the book... by setting the book in MODERN TIMES.

Many readers seem to have missed this. But there are many hints in the book that, no, this is NOT taking place in the 19th century, but NOW (or anyway, in an alternative NOW). The (very British) joke of the "underground railroad" being a defunct subway system ought to make that totally clear, even if the reader missed the kids listening to techno music and other modern references. But trust me that this is not ambiguous. I interpret this to be part of the author's alternative history-- that is, since slavery does still exist in parts of contemporary Africa, an alternative-history world where African nations were the enslaving superpowers might as well have those nations still be slaveholding today (as some of their real-life counterparts actually are).

In that case, Doris's character and her voice, which feel disconcertingly contemporary, are in fact a very deliberate technique that the author is using to bring an empathy for the experience of slaves to those who are most distant from the experience of slavery. On the surface, this would appear to simply mean "white people." But of course the experience of slavery is thankfully not all that familiar to black people either, or to anyone else-- that is, it is unfamiliar to pretty much any person who might pick up this book, simply because we are living in the 21st century (and since slaves in the Sudan probably don't make it to the bookstore much). So this book is really an act of imaginative empathy in more than the obvious way.

I have been surprised by how often I think about this book long after reading it.

In Blonde Roots, Bernadine Evaristo imagines what it would be like if slavery took place in a modern-day dystopia and was perpetrated by blacks upon whites. The idea itself is not bad, albeit perhaps unoriginal. The problem is that Evaristo banks on her idea being so clever as to sustain an entire novel and keep her readers' attention piqued without any support from compelling characters or plot points. Were this a short story, it might have worked. As a novel, it is a monotonous and wholly uninspiring waste of time, money and paper.

I reccomend 'Farnham's Folly' by Heinlein instead, Its a much better book with very similar theme in fact this book is a poor imitation. The writing was aweful the characters stereotypes. If you read my review of Farnham's you will see that I refute the claim that his characters are racist stereotypes, this book I would have to say is the opposite. Where FF is using things like Canibalism as metaphor This author just has her characters acting like the worst pre-50's Black boogiemen that used to terrify racist old ladies.

I heard about this book on NPR and it got favorable reviews. I cannot fathom why.

I didn't find this book "genuinely original and profoundly imaginative" as touted on the back cover. I've read other stories with a similar premise. Evaristo does however, make her point (or the point I think she was trying to make); that "absolute power corrupts absolutely", that there's no such thing as a "good master", and that slavery is wrong no matter which way it goes.

A couple of things bothered me about the book. Evaristo depicts the white slave culture virtually identically to fictional depictions of black slave culture. Her slaves even speak a patois that sounds, when read aloud, very much like South Carolina Gullah (spoken by slave descendants on the offshore islands). I wonder whether white slaves would have developed the same patois or the same customs since they came from different roots.

These concerns aside, I did enjoy the book. Evaristo draws wonderful characters and paces her story so you want to read just a bit more, and a bit more, until the book is finished.

"Blonde Roots" is an alternative history that carries a lighter tone than "The Man in the High Castle" and is more readable than "Pavane." What this satirical take on the slave trade lacks in comparative gravitas, it makes up for with Evaristo's keen, yet subtle observations of the complex relationships among social classes. Slave, or just poor, there's little difference; the rich, empowered are masters to them all. To feel the full impact of the reversal of roles between Africans and Europeans, read the map before you jump into Doris' and Chief Katamba's stories. (Yes, slave and master have two, very separate visions of Truth.) The map shows a geographically twisted world where Africa and Europe are flipped into their opposite hemispheres. Besides setting up land masses that are parallel to our known world, the writer does something unique with time. There are no anachronisms because there is no firmly set time period in which to place them. Viking raids, pina coladas, dance raves, the Crusades, skateboards, Neighborhood Watch - all are meshed. From one sentence to the next you can be any where in a four-century time span. No one is spared regardless of his or her religious tradition or cultural practices. Evaristo does this so cleverly that you may miss when you're on the barbed end of a lampoon. Her parody of Conrad is so on-target that you won't be able to read him again without laughing out loud. Because we're given just a dose of them, late 20th Century Valley Girl and Texas accents are delivered realistically; however, the slave dialect gets tiresome and more difficult to interpret as the story progresses.

Book One, which Doris, the slave narrates is the best part of the novel. When Chief Katamba, her master takes over in Book Two, there is great promise that he can carry the weight that Doris shifts to him. His voice is reminiscent of the wily, cowardly Flashman, the eponymous non-hero of the series. Like Flashman, Katamba sees himself as much put upon; unlike Flashman, Katamba has a surprising capacity for cruelty. At this point, the story turns abruptly darker. It also starts to weaken so that by Book Three, the story winds down to a predictable tie-it-up-neatly, the-end. I expected a stronger conclusion, yet without it, this is still a provocative, bold and believable piece of fiction.

The horrific trans-Atlantic slave trade that brought so many Africans to the Western Hemisphere has been the subject of innumerable scholarly articles, books, and histories, as well as a great deal of fiction and film -- much of it quite compelling. But just when you think a subject is exhausted, along comes a new talent with a fresh perspective, and for better or for worse, that's exactly what this book is. The author has basically taken the races and flipped them, so that feudal Europeans are the ones captured by cruel "Aphrikan" slave traders and put to work at home and in the trans-Atlantic "West Japanese" sugar cane plantations. (It should be noted that in addition to remixing global geography, the story isn't set in any particular time period, as it mixes elements of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.)

The result is a relatively engaging satire that forces the reader to revisit the physical and psychic horrors of slavery through a different skin pigment. The first part of the story follows English farmgirl Doris, who is plucked from the woods by slavers, packed aboard a slave ship, and manages to rise to a relatively lofty position in the service of a wealthy family living in the Aphrikan capital of Londolo before plucking up the nerve to try and escape via an Underground Railroad (literally). Next is an overly long interlude comprised of the strident eugenics-based writings of her owner, who expounds on the various physical and mental flaws of the "whyte" race. This section is kind of one note struck over and over, and it's hard not to feel like it was more fun to write than to read. The story then returns to Doris, who ends up on a West Indian-type plantation with a cast of colorful characters, including some from her past.

Doris' story is pretty much what you'd expect from any slave adventure narrative, replete with highs and lows, intrigues, loves won and lost, a few surprises, and more than a few sorrows. But in the end the book isn't so much about slavery as it is about power and the disturbing idea that those with power will always seek to exert it over others, sometimes in the most extreme form. Indeed, history provides plenty of examples of mass white slavery, such as the British sending white criminals, debtors, political malcontents and others to work on colonial plantations (which is the hook for the classic pirate adventure Captain Blood) or the trade in European slaves by Arabs in the 16th-18th centuries. But it's one thing to read the history, and another to find it expressed by an artist through a human story. Although the story can be a bit uneven and predictable, there's plenty of wordplay, humor, and heart to make it worth checking out.

For hundreds of years Europeans carefully cultivated the myth of European invincibility as part of the psychological warfare inherent in militant imperialism. The startling fiction of Blonde Roots should act as a reminder that in fact white Europeans HAVE been enslaved en masse, during the Mediterranean slave trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It might certainly bring the horrors of slavery a little closer to home and help engender an empathy for victims too often seen as unfortunate and distant 'others'. It is a reminder that slavery is alive and well and that our common humanity is still undermined by this ancient scourge, and that no one should be allowed to comfortably forget the past and current victims who haunt our modern societies. Well worth a read in conjunction with the BBC's unsettling introduction to 'British Slaves on the Barbary Coast' by Professor Rees Davies.