Book Review: From Jamaica to the US to Ghana
Posted by Deborah - 08/09/09 at 08:09 pm
The Book of Night Women by Marlon James
This was a book that I did not want to read but could not put down. The book was vivid, violent, infuriating and painful. I sympathized with characters I did not want to like and despised the characters that I should have cared about. James doesn’t allow the reader to fall into old patterns of innocence and guilt. Through his rendering of slavery in 17th century Jamaica he shows us that we don’t even know what we think we know about race, gender, sex, violence, culture, slavery or the capacity of human beings to act out their fear and hatred upon each other. As a student of African American literature for some time I am quite familiar with the tradition of slave narratives – both literary and historical. Still, I was not prepared for this. What James says about Jean Rys’s Wide Sargosso Sea can so easily be said about his work:
[the novel] deconstructs the nature of the nineteenth century heroine to reveal her contradictory, fragile and rootless core. The novel exposes the hypocrisies of colonial society and the damage it causes to those who would not conform. It picks apart the Male hero to reveal a vicious center, a man whose strength comes not from his own might, but from destroying a woman’s strength.
Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
I probably shouldn’t have done it but I read this book together with Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women. To say that the dreams I had were vivid during the three days I spent reading these books would be an understatement. Lose Your Mother was written by Hartman, a Columbia University English professor. I read and liked her first book, Scenes of Subjection. I am not sure why but I struggled with Lose your Mother. I found the narrative she constructed based on interviews, conversations, literature reviews and archival research to be interesting and at times compelling. Still, she often lost me in the areas where she speculates about what must have/might have happened. It’s definitely not Hartman’s fault that there is so little archival material available from which to write this history. Where the book held my attention the most was where Hartman discusses the legacy of slavery on west Africans and Black Americans. She describes how Black Americans tend to romanticize Africa –expecting to find a welcoming ancestral home while many West Africans are focused on figuring out a way to survive modern day struggles. What I walked away with is that neither group seems to be willing or able to see each other’s privilege or pain and how these circumstances impact the o/Other.
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