Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo

Abstract

w i IMIIHmII 1m Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo (RiverheadBooks, 2009) First aired on NPR January5, 2009 Modern Western history turned inside out. African slave-traders raiding Europe and selling their pale-skinned captives to Afri can plantation owners in the New World. That's thepremise ofAnglo Nigerian novelist Bernardine Evaris to's new work of book-length fiction. She calls thebook BlondeRoots. The main character, a woman named Doris Scagglethorpe, a house servantwith a body worn by child birth but inwhose heart the desire forfreedom stillburns, tells most of the story. Her talebegins on a night when she, with the help of some antislavery Aphrikans, makes her escape fromLondolo, theAphrikan capital of theUK ofGreat Ambossa, only to findherself indeeper trouble than she had ever before imagined as a slave. While Doris suffers the Middle Passage across theAtlantic, Evaristo enlightens us with an enter taining parody of a slave-master's rationalizations of his inhumanity? "Dear Reader," one passage comes to us, "suffice to say that running a slaver meant having to be respon sible for thewelfare of the cargo? rather as a parent for its children." In theNew World off the coast of "Amarika," in the colonies of the "West Japanese Islands," Doris finds herself condemned towork in a dan gerous sugarcane mill on an isolated plantation. In thispart of theworld, you get caught tryingto escape and you lose your foot.Speaking in the dialect acquired by English slaves owned by the imperiousAphrikans, a fellow renamed King Shaka says to Doris, "Don't tri buk system becorze system bruk you down furz. Ah beg yu, don't tri eskape becorze nowhere a-go." Evaristo makes all this?Doris's flight, her re-enslave ment, and her ultimate struggle to be free?move along with the liveli ness of a B movie. Nevertheless, her themes are important?slavery, at its root?and she wields language and messes with history with the alacrity of someone having a great timewith a great subject. A lot of that fun rubs off on the reader, too. Evaristo works very close to farce, but none of what she does ever seems nonsensical. Infinity in thePalm of Her Hand byGioconda Belli (HarperCollins,2009) The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys (Delacorte, 2009) First aired on NPRMarch 6, 2009 A novel by a former Sandinista about lifewith Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, and a series of vignettes about the forty times in seven centuries the river Thames has frozen in winter: questions of creation and transformation are dra matized in these two new works of fiction. Creation first, yes? Nicaragua born fictionwriter Gioconda Belli, inher new novel, Infinityin the Palm of Her Hand, treats the subject of our First Parents,which ishow I like to think about them?Adam and Eve, that is?and her book is a sort of biblical science fiction. The pages go from one great first-time event in human life to another?first aware ness of us having minds, firsttime we cry, firstorgasm, and the first onset of menses and the invention of sushi (Adam and Eve discover raw fish),the firstfishingnet (which the first couple cleverly surmises from the shape of a mushroom), the firstclothing and the first work of art (Eve makes a cave painting to celebrate Adam's firsthunting expedition), and then comes the first human experience of winter and childbirth. Belli performs all thiswith a deftness and clarity that often remindsme ofDoris Lessing's inventiveness at its best. After this novel, you won't read the book of Genesis in the same way again. 12 i World Literature Today ...