Blonde Roots, black history: History and the form of the slave narrative in Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between literary form and the representation of history in Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008). The text is premised on an ironic racial reversal of the Atlantic slave trade. As such, this single moment in international history is mobilised, brought into different contexts and demonstrated to be inherently malleable. In addition, Evaristo makes a critical engagement with the slave narrative form and highlights its limited and limiting nature. Blonde Roots is self-consciously full of narrators and narratives and contradicts any sense of a fixed historical vision of Atlantic slavery. Evaristo’s novel mindfully disrupts this history in order to demonstrate the myriad ways in which the Atlantic slave trade is relevant to a contemporary context. Although Blonde Roots retains Atlantic slavery as its central moment, it is a radical re-vision of its familiar history, and the texts which narrate it. Through these distortions Evaristo’s novel paradoxically demonstrates both the unreliability of the historical event and the shockwaves that still resound from it, and calls into question easy constructions of black British identities that are based upon the history of Atlantic slavery.