Blonde Roots [Hardcover]

 

 

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I came to this book with a sense of anticipation after reading Bernardine Evaristo's previous works, especially 'Emperor's Babe'. Great storytelling, a wonderful deployment of satire, and deep knowledge of her subject matter are, in my view, the triple gifts of this writer. When combined - as they are in Blonde Roots - they make for a brilliant work. Prize-winning stuff!

I am a big fan of Alex Haley's roots and therefore was curious to see how Evaristo would adapt it. This is a very well written book, with very clever observations and it manages to touch on very sensitive racial subject without ever souding racist. It is very funny but not for the faint hearted, as it depicts the horrors of slavery. Love it.

Blonde Roots is set in a parallel universe, where African, not European, cultures use shipping and weapons technology to create colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean, and to kidnap millions of people and enslave them to work on sugar plantations. Residents of the Atlantic coastal fringes of Europa - the English, Irish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Scandinavians - are particularly at risk of being stolen away from their families, regardless of rank or priviledge, and crammed into slave ships bound for the New World. The reader knows from the outset that this is not alternate history of our own universe, because the author has included a map showing Aphrika in the North, Europa in the South, and the Carribean islands unchanged, but renamed the West Japanese Islands.

The idea is interesting, and has been explored by other authors (such as Mallory Blackman, in whose Noughts and Crosses series it is taken for granted that the dominant culture is that of black people, and white people are treated as inferior). Unfortunately, in White Roots the execution of the idea is rather muddled and extremely illogical. For a start, why is there any need to have altered geography? The slave/sugar trade triangle could just have easily worked with geography unchanged, but Africa as the pivotal point of power. Linguistically, the novel is very puzzling; the slaves speak a kind of Patois, but the author seems to assume that in the White Roots universe there would be little difference from real life Caribbean Patois. We are repeatedly told that the slaves are from a mixture of European countries, and logically therefore the Patois would be an blend of Abrossan combined with elements of grammar and vocabulary from Germanic and Hispanic European languages, but there is no evidence of this at all, and we get a phonetic representation of what sounds to me like contemporary Jamaican patois. Even when two slaves discover that they are from the same country, they do not speak their native language together - even when this is English.

Most puzzling of all is the question of when the novel is supposed to be set. Various pointers (not least the "what happened next" postscript) suggest the early twentieth century at the latest; the slave ships appear to be sailing boats, and there is no electricity, although there is a disused Londolo Underground. The turns of phrase used by high status Aphrikans echo 18th or early 19th century real life discourse on slavery, and the Europeans clearly operate a system of workers on land-owners' estates. Yet characters use skateboards; they "airpunch"; and the young male Whyte slaves call themselves names such as "Bad Bwoy" or "Totallee Kross." Evaristo appears to be trying to cram current issues of identity and social exclusion among black youth in modern day Britain or America into a analysis of 18th/19th century attitudes to race and colonialism, and it simply doesn't work.

It's a pity, because there are sections of the novel which are much more thought-provoking, but these are lost in the overall lack of logic. Book Two, in which Chief Kaga Konata Katamba gives us his memoirs of his first trip to the Heart of Darkness which is the Cabbage Coast, and describes his first encounters with the backwards-seeming natives of England, is well done. It reminded me somewhat of Body Ritual Among the Nacirema in its ability to dismantle our own cultural assumptions with the eye of the outside, and I couldn't help feeling that had the novel as a whole been writted in this vein, it would have been much harder-hitting.

Overall, however, if you want to read about the real horrors of slavery from the point of view of a slave woman, I'm afraid you are much better off grabbing a copy of Andrea Levy's The Long Song.

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1.0 out of 5 stars Poor quality uninspired narrative that disappoints all round
I was so surprised by the number of positive reviews for this book that I felt obliged to post a review. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Praslinoise

1.0 out of 5 stars Awful awful book
Oh my goodness. Where to start. I hated this book. It is the story of what life might have been like if the white people 'whytes' were enslaved. Sounds promising. Read more

Published 9 months ago by pinkdodo

4.0 out of 5 stars Captivated, intrigued, entertained, shocked and appalled throughout
I heard about this book a few years ago on the BBC World Service; earlier this year I stumbled across a copy and grabbed it. And I was not disappointed. Read more

Published 20 months ago by I. Holder

5.0 out of 5 stars Blonde ambition
Blonde Roots is a sharp satirical novel which revolves around the fascinating conceit of a world where Africans perpetrated the slave trade on Europeans rather than the other way... Read more

Published 24 months ago by Oracle

4.0 out of 5 stars A clever, readable and thought-provoking 'what if' novel
In Blonde Roots we are introduced to an alternative reality, where black Africans from the kingdom of Ambossa have colonised the new world and shipped over enslaved 'backwards'... Read more

Published on 9 Feb 2010 by BookWorm

4.0 out of 5 stars Very creative, well-thought history lesson
Very enoyable little book that provides a different way of looking at the appaling treatment of Africa and Africans by the west in the last few hundred years. Read more

Published on 11 Jan 2010 by Z. Anthony

4.0 out of 5 stars Slavery - Upside Down
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... Read more

Published on 12 Dec 2009 by A. Ross

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating idea - mixed execution...disappointed.
Brilliant idea which starts strongly. However it suffers from a lack of follow-through and seems to lose steam about a third of the way through the novel. Read more

Published on 16 Oct 2009 by DaisyBelle

5.0 out of 5 stars Brave and spellbinding work
I read this book in two sittings as I found it so hard to put it down. Not only does it have a thrilling story line, it is also devastating and subversive in the most compelling... Read more

Published on 8 Sep 2009 by KemKem

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow
Have you ever heard of a book you really wanted? The topic wasn't one that you were especially drawn to and it wasn't the usual type of thing you read, but something about it... Read more

Published on 5 July 2009 by Anna

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