"Beloved" by Toni Morrison

It is shortly after the end of the American Civil War and the ending of slavery in the USA. House number 124, isolated on the outskirts of Cincinnati, is  haunted by the ghost of a baby girl, Beloved. It has already driven away her elder brothers, and her grandmother has died; now only her mother, Sethe, an ex-slave and her younger sister, Denver, live there. Then Paul D, who had known Sethe when they were slaves together, arrives. He banishes the ghost and starts a relationship with Sethe. Then a girl calling herself Beloved arrives ...

The book deals with the horrors of slavery. Even though the characters are now free, the psychological  scars remain. Their experiences have shaped them; their experiences have made them the people who they are. The novel is a powerful condemnation of the slave-owners; even the white people who secretly worked to help slaves escape, and who helped them once they had, and still help them, are judged.

As is fitting with a book about haunting, the narrative flits backwards and forwards. It is written in the third-person past tense and sometimes, for example at the start, from an omniscient perspective, although it usually sees things through the eyes of one of the characters, usually a principal character. 

It is a well-written book and an interesting exploration of the principal characters. The back and forwards narrative leading to the slow discovery of what happened in the past means that there is a significant amount that the reader has to puzzle out at the start of the novel. I found this mystery challenging; it motivated me to keep reading.

This book won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Time magazine chose it as one of their 100 best books since Time began. Toni Morrison won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. A list of other winners can be found here.

Selected quotes (page numbers refer to the 2007 Vintage paperback edition):

• "Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it." (p 4)
• "It made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world." (p 7)
• "Except for a heap more hair and some waiting in his eyes, he looked the way he had in Kentucky." (p 8)
• "That was the year winter came in a hurry at suppertime and stayed eight months." (p 34)
• "They had pretty manners, all of 'em. Talked soft and spit in handkerchiefs. Gentle in a lot of ways. You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face." (p 44) They go on to commit rape.
• "To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay." (p 51)
• "Sethe, if I'm here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you, girl. I'll catch you 'fore you fall.Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out." (p 55)
• "The closer the roses got to death, the louder their scent." (p 57)
• "Women who drink champagne when there is nothing to celebrate can look like that: their straw hats with broken brims are often askew; they nod in public places; their shoes are undone." (p 60)
• "Rainwater held on to pine needles for dear life." (p 68)
• "'Today is always here', said Sethe. 'Tomorrow, never'." (p 72)
• "Hey! Hey! Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain't a goddamn axe. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside." (p 81)
• "Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from." (p 86)
• "Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that free self was another." (p 112)
• "Loaves and fishes were His powers - they did not extend to an ex-slave." (p 161)
• "The woman junkheaped for the third time because she loved her children." (p 205)
• "Each seemed to be helping the other two stay upright. ... Making their way over hard snow, they stumbled and had to hold on tight, but nobody saw them fall." (p 205, p206)
• "She couldn't read clock time very well, but she knew when the hands were closed in prayer at the top of the face she was through for the day." (p 223)
• "She is the laugh; I am the laughter." (p 255)
• "She was a practical woman who believed there was a root either to chew or avoid for every ailment. Cogitation, as she called it, clouded things and prevented action. Nobody loved her and she wouldn't have liked it if they did, for she considered love a serious disability." (p 301)
• "She turned to him, her face looking like someone had turned up the gas jet." (p 315)
• "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order." (p 321)
• "Sethe ... me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow." (p 322)

March 2023; 324 pages

Selected by Time magazine as one of the best 100 novels since Time began.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"White Gold" by Giles Milton

 This story of the (estimated) million slaves seized from European ships and coastal towns by Barbary corsairs and enslaved in Moslem North Africa between about 1550 and 1820 focuses on one man: Thomas Pellow from Cornwall, who was captured as a ten year old boy, forcibly converted to Islam, became a house servant of the bloodthirsty ruler of Morocco and later one one of the leading soldiers of one of his armies, was forcibly married and became a father, made several escape attempts, was saved while on the scaffold on one occasion, and finally escaped at the age of thirty-three. It's a brilliant story and it is told with the flair of the author of Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Samurai William, and The Riddle and the Knight, amongst others. 

The Moroccan trade properly got going after 1610, when King Philip III "expelled all one million Spanish Moors from his land" (Ch 1) providing a pool of dispossessed people longing for revenge.

Strangely, the man who ended this trade by leading a British fleet to bombard Algiers, was Sir Edward Pellew who was related to Thomas Pellow.

Selected quotes:

• "The flags on their mainmasts depicted a human skull on a dark green background" (Ch 1)
• "His extraordinary story had just been published in one of the capital's newspapers. Pellow was surprised and asked to be shown the article. ... Almost every detail in the report was wrong." (Ch 12) The standards of accurate journalism are - probably - better nowadays.

October 2022; 280 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Blonde Roots" by Bernardine Evaristo

I am rather at a loss to understand how I should judge this book. It is not a novel in the sense that the works of Dickens or Conrad or Chinua Achebe are novels. Rather, it seems to be an extended satirical rant. I don't really know a comic novel quite like it.

Essentially, it is a story about slavery in a world where Africa is the dominant culture whose wealth is based on the labours of European slaves (this is presented as satire but there really were raids by North Africans to capture Europeans from European coastal regions including Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, England, and even Iceland). The protagonist is a whyte woman slave who seeks to escape cruel bondage.

In books in which a fundamentally different world to our own is to be described, such as in most science fiction, the author is obliged to do what is called 'world building'. This means that time and writing must be spent describing the world. This can get in the way of developing the characters or progressing the narrative. Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, builds the world of Gilead by drip-feeding us with information do that we are not faced with too much too soon. I felt that in this book, there was more world-building than there needed to be and that this was at the expense of developing the characters. The author had a lot of fun depicting the whyte europanes as cabbage-eating peasants ("We were taught how to cook: cabbage soup, cabbage pie, fried cabbage, pickled cabbage, skillet cabbage, scalloped cabbage, cabbage and turnip bake, cabbage and potato casserole, cabbage and spinach cake"; 1.2) living in a northern serfdom and emphasising their backwardness compared to the cultural and technological superiority of the Aphrikans. She had a lot of fun describing the Aphrikan capital of Londolo and all its constituent parts: Kanada Wadi, Dartfor City, "the arsenal town of Wool Wi Che, famous for manufacturing the finwest spears, shields, crossbows, poison darts, muskets and cannons in the world." However, I found the humour rather heavy handed, perhaps because the same joke was repeated again and again.

The characters, as befits a satire rather than a novel, were fundamentally stereotypes. The vast majority of the blak characters were evil: as slave owners and the wives and sons and daughters of slave owners they were viciously selfish, greedy and lustful and violent, and unredeemed by any suggestion of good. By contrast, most of the whyte characters were slaves and the salt of the earth.

The narrator of sections one and three, the protagonist Doris Scagglethorpe, was from peasant stock who had been enslaved. The descriptions of the slave voyage was terrible, the conditions in which she lived were awful, she has been raped and abused ... and yet she didn't seem angry or bitter. Early in the book she complains that her Mistress insists she wears her hair in the 'Ambossan' fashion: "My long blonde hair was threaded through with wire and put into plaited hoops all over my head. I wanted to protest that we whytes just didn't have the bone structure to carry it off." (1.1) Bone structure? This woman who has been abducted and enslaved and raped and abused worries about bone structure. She sounds more like a sulky teenager than an angry woman. Much of the book is energised by outrage but then you find moments of bathos, such as when the rag dolls are modelled after Aphrikan ideals of beauty which "was so bad for our self-esteem" (1.1) When reading a novel one has to suspend one's disbelief and these were moments when, for me, that suspension was made difficult.

I suppose that my fundamental problem was that this is a novel about slavery. Slavery is like the Jewish holocaust of the Second World War. They are huge topics. Unbelievably horrible things happened to people; the people doing these things were unbelievably evil. Except that they were normal people, people who, within the context of their societies, were respectable. To tackle that subject in a novel is extraordinarily difficult. A traditional, character driven novel would explore these issues in depth.  There would be room for moral ambiguity (because humans are defined by moral ambiguity). Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which not explicitly about slavery, was an attempt to do this. (There is one moment when she appears to quote from Heart of Darkness: "What can I say, Dear Reader, but the horror, the horror ..." (2.4; as a further clue to the identification, the chapter is entitled Heart of Greyness).

Blonde Roots is not a traditional character driven novel. It seeks to mine humour from slavery. That is a hard challenge and risks trivialising the horror. So Blonde Roots tries to remind you of all the awful things that happened during slavery. My problem was that because I found the characters stereotypical and because the protagonist was upset at the trivialities leaving little room for her to be outraged, I did not invest in the characters and so, ultimately, I did not care about their terrible experiences as profoundly as I should have done.

There were moments when I worried about the editing:

• "Our shack was constructed out of corrugated iron which was boiling in summer nights." (1.1): It must have been hot if the iron boiled!
• "When I asked for chilli pepper to spice it all up, my gracious host retorted that his palette could no longer take it." (2.5); palette should be palate.

There are some wonderful moments:

• "Dreams and disappointment were inseparable bedfellows." (1.1)
• "Such was the demand for sugar, the price of a sweet tooth was a toothless smile. Such was the demand for coffee, the price of caffeine was addiction, heart palpitations, osteoporosis and general irritability. The price of rum was chronic liver disease, alcoholism and permanent memory loss. The cost of tobacco was cancer, stained teeth and emphysema." (1.1)
• "In this life there were 'fairy-tale castles' and 'peasant shit-houses', and wasn't it a pity not to have a choice." (1.2)
• "I could see he needed a drink now because he kept twitching ... as if flies were landing on different parts of his anatomy." (1.4)
• "Their eyes were flint in the act of ignition." (1.6)
• "The humid air draped itself languorously over the surface of my lungs so that I could barely breathe." (3.4)
• "Real men were so damned sexy women got wet just looking at dat fine-lookin hunk-a-beef ova dere. Women cried, fought, poisoned, even killed over them, but when their real men let them down, they complained about having to put up with dat bastard filandara and dere iz no good man in-a dis place. But the good men - not tall enough, broad enough, well-endowed, sexy, handome, confident, cocky, muscular or sweet-talking enough - weren't real men so they didn't count." (3.6)
• "I had put my childhood in its rightful place, as history to be revisited but not relived." (3.7)

If you want a book to chronicle the effect of colonialism on African society then read the trilogy of novels starting with Things Fall Apart and continuing with No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe. Each one is a great book. If you want a book in which white and black swap places read Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman (but don't watch the TV version which castrated itself by changing the ending). Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is another book about slavery. Sins of the Fathers by James Pope-Hennessey is a slightly old-fashioned history of the slave trade.

July 2020; 261 pages

"Sins of the fathers" by James Pope-Hennessey

A history of the slave trade with rather more vivid description than most.

If the title were not clear enough, the first chapter makes the author's position plain, describing slavery as "that vast complex of international crime by which, in four centuries, a total of fifteen million men, women and children of African blood were delivered into transatlantic slavery, under conditions so hideous that another nine million are estimated to have died during crossing.” (C 1) This is not academic history. This is the position of the prosecution. Swiftly he dismisses the economic argument: that the British transatlantic slave trade came into being because of the labour requirements of the agriculture being developed in the New World and ended because the sugar islands were no longer so important to the British economy. He also denounces the position that the slave trade was a marginal activity: "a trade in which so many Europeans and Africans indulged for centuries cannot have been run exclusively by money-maniacs and pocket sadists." (C 1) In essence the purpose of this book is to know who to blame.

But I found the moral analysis of the blame too narrow and naive. I propose that slavery is wrong and that the transatlantic slave-trade was a particularly nasty form of slavery involving other great moral wrongs such as kidnapping, false imprisonment, torture, mutilation and murder. But from this I would go on to say that, with the exception of the slaves who were victims, all the participants in the slave trade bear some moral guilt. Pope-Hennesey seems to disagree. He excuses the Africans who kidnapped the slaves in the first place and then sold them to the slave-trade captains. He quotes an ex-slave as saying ‘If there were no buyers there would be no sellers’ and comments "that is the crux of the matter, and the final word that can be said on African ‘guilt’.”(C 10.1) Such a point of view is also used to excuse prostitutes, redefining them as 'sex workers' and instead to attach moral blame to their clients. But if this is then extended to the drug industry we are presumably blaming the addicts and excusing the dealers. It seems to me that the African slavers may be less guilty than the slave captains and the plantation owners but they cannot be entirely excused.

Similarly, Pope-Hennesey acknowledges the existence of slavery among the Anglo-Saxons (abolished in England by the Normans although the serfdom with which it was replaced was not much better) and endemic in some African societies but seems to consider these as innocent variants. Whilst I agree that the transatlantic slave-trade offered extreme horrors and extreme immoralities I don't think one can consider any form of slavery as morally acceptable. Furthermore, Pope-Hennesey does not mention the slave trade that existed during the middle ages in the Indian Ocean, possibly involving up to twenty-two million slaves, and the more than one million Europeans captured by Barbary pirates between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. If we start believing that slavery was a one-off moral horror it may make us complacent when we need to be morally alert to any erosion of the freedom of individuals.

This aside, Pope-Hennessey has provided some wonderful descriptions of horrors and many fascinating facts:
“Just as the colour black was, for most Europeans, connected with night, witches and the Powers of Darkness, so, to many Africans, white was often of the colour of devils, and the semaring of the face with white clay was calculated to inspire terror.” (C 3.4)
Many of the plants associated with Africa (eg maize, yams, and coconut palms) were in fact plants from the New World or the Indian Ocean imported during this period. This was partly because the slave traders built gardens around their forts: “To have strange and inadequate, often repulsive, food added to the other health hazards of a lethal climate was asking too much." (C 4.1)
The reason it took so long for the Europeans to find West Africa was that “mariners would not venture beyond Cape Bojador, for fear that they and their ships would plunge over the edge of the world-platform into oblivion.” (C 4.2) I’m not sure this is true. The accepted view was that the world was round (and sailors were always prepared to sail beyond the horizon) but that the temperatures as you progressed south became too hot for wooden ships and humans to bear.
The word ‘fetish’ derives from the Portuguese ‘fetiços’, images; the word ‘ju-ju’ is from the French word ‘joux’, toys (C 5.2)
“You might buy a parcel of youths and girls in the market at Bridgetown, Barbados, or Charleston, Carolina, but you could never really be sure what exact quantity of hatred, hostility and magic you were carting back to the slave-barracks of your comfortable Palladian home.” (C 5.2)
The Oba of Benin was “so heavily sheathed in polished gold that when he rose to his feet he had to be propped up by two slaves, who likewise operated his arms for him when he wished to gesticulate.” (C 5.3)
Portugal retained their fort at Whydah until it was annexed by Dahomey in 1961. “The Portuguese representative at Whydahr burned his motor-car in front of the fort as a protest, whereupon Dahomey issued a celebration postage-stamp showing the charred wreckage of the Citroen.” (C 5.3 fn)
Slaves were branded by their owners: SPG denoted slaves of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (C 6.1)
“To work on ships which often were merely floating coffins - the ships taking slaves to Rio de Janeiro were in fact called tumbeiros from the Portuguese for tomb - was at once brutalizing and nauseous.” (C 7.1)
“The primitive, rickety basis of gracious living in the West Indian Islands required a cohort of house-slaves” (C8.3)
“The first line of defence for any vanquished or occupied nation, as for any camp of war-prisoners, is calculated cunning and deceit.” (C 8.4)
The African concept of style was influenced by the slave-trading ships:
“the upper floor of any two-storied Efik house is still called a ‘dek’.” (C 12.2)
“King Pepple would sometimes sport a pair of scarlet leather boots which seemed too small for him and which caused him to topple over when he was drunk.” (C 13.3)
“Negro proverbs” include “‘If you knock de nose de eye cry’ ... ‘as de ole crow fly, so de young one do too’.” (C 13.1)
Slave girls were inevitably raped. Some slave traders “were thought to have literally worn themselves away copulating in the night dews on the coast.” (C 13.3)

December 2018; 280 pages

"Homegoing" by Yaa Gyasi

A woman gives birth to two daughters in an African village an a land that will become Ghana. The sisters do not know of one another. Both are very beautiful. One is captured and sold to America as a slave. One becomes the 'wife' of the English slave trader. As the African proverb says: “separated sisters ... are like a woman and her reflection, doomed to stay on opposite sides of the pond.” (p 39)

This story alternates between the descendants of these two women. Each generation is given a chapter of about twenty pages. Thus the book is essentially made up of short stories, linked by the ancestry of the protagonists. This story is then intended to encapsulate the society in which they grow. Thus, on the American side of the 'pond', we have a slave, followed by a runaway in Baltimore whose wife is kidnapped under runaway slave legislation and reenslaved, followed by a convict working on a chain gang, followed by a gospel singer, followed by an angry young man who works for the NAACP and becomes a drug addict, followed by a failing PhD student. This makes the people become representative; they are icons. But it is extraordinarily difficult, in twenty pages, to introduce a character and give them a potted biography and link them to their parents and show how they reflect the history of their time and at the same time turn them into a meaningful character. At the start I was prepared to invest in the characters; they felt real. Towards the end the characters seemed just another shell rolling off the production line. They felt superficial and contrived. 

The story heads towards a resolution which, despite the little twist, one knows from almost the start that it will reach.

It is important to tell the history of colonialism, slavery and racism. Wicked things were done by ordinary men and women; terrible things were suffered by ordinary men and women. Somehow people survived. The problem with this book as fiction is that it became didactic. It was a little like watching a Brecht play. I wanted to become involved in the emotional life of the characters, I wanted to suffer with them, rage with them, triumph with them, love with them. But the instruction always kept me at arms length.

Some great moments:

• “Weakness is treating someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.” (p 38)
• “They would just trade one type of shackles for another, trade physical ones that are wrapped around the wrists and ankles for the invisible ones that wrapped around the mind.” (p 93)
• “Anna said ‘there won't be no violence in this house’. Five minutes later, Daly kicked Eurias in the shins, and Anna spanked him so hard he winced every time he sat down that day.” (p 121) A rare moment of humour. There aren't many laughs in this book.
• “Who ever heard of sweeping dust from dust?” (p 179) 
• “Maybe the Christian God was a question, a great and swirling circle of whys.” (p 186)

A drama documentary in book form. January 2018; 300 pages

A review of the audiobook by the Book Chatter blog points out the two-part structure of the book in which "The first half reads like a fable. It is vibrant with the culture of the African people. The story-telling is itself true to the culture of these people, full of their belief systems. ... The second half becomes more straight forward in its manner of relating the stories of the characters, as we get closer to modern day."

But Book Chatter seems to love the book for its informative aspect: "Gyasi depicts a beautifully functioning African culture that becomes fractured by the slave trade. The horrors of slavery and it’s aftermath are put in perspective with this broadly sweeping novel. We are still dealing with the aftermath today, and Gyasi bravely posits the question of where will it end." Well, yes. As an academic work, as the PhD that Marcus is trying to write at the end of the book. But as a novel?

I discussed this book in my reading group. We identified the themes of fire (very explicit, although there were some mentions to its that some of us had overlooked) and scarring. There were a lot of characters with physical scars. There were clearly a lot of issues that could be discussed. But my reading group is made up of aspiring writers and what the book is about are of less interest to us than how it was written. We were intrigued how the prose changed from village rustic in the early chapters to more modern in the later chapters though we were uncertain whether we could distinguish individual voices. Despite the Book Chatter review mentioned above, we failed to appreciate why the book is divided into two halves except in so far as the American Civil War and the emancipation proclamation took place between the two halves. We agreed that there were passages which demonstrated that this young writer really could write. But our verdict was that she had set herself too large a challenge with the structure of this book. There were so many characters who were started but for whom there was insufficient opportunity to develop to their full potential. We wanted more depth.

"Oroonoko" by Aphra Benn

Aphra Benn was a woman playwright and novelist during the restoration. When she was young she seems to have lived in Suriname (before it was ceded to the Dutch by the Treaty of Breda in 1667 following the Anglo Dutch War (the English got New Amsterdam which they renamed New York). This story is about an African slave who led a revolt there.

Oroonoko is a Prince in his own country and very good looking (in fact he resembles a fine young English gentleman except for the colour of his skin). He falls in love with a very beautiful woman, Imoinda but the King, his grandfather, summons her to join his harem. The old King is impotent so Imoinda's virginity is preserved until Oroonoko can sneak into her bedchamber and ravish her. All night. The King finds out and sells Imoinda into slavery. Shortly afterwards, English sailors seize Oroonoko by trickery and transport him to Suriname and sell him as a slave to a very nice overseer called Trefry who treats Oroonoko with all respect. Surpirse, surprise, Imoinda is there (and has resisted all advances). So Oroonoko is reunited with her. But the story doesn't end there. Oroonoko leads a slave rebellion which is put down with great ferocity, despite promises of peace made by yet more treacherous Englishmen. Oroonoko is whipped to within an inch of his life and swears revenge ...

It is really short, only 66 pages, but the prose is long-winded and there is a lot of description. It is remarkable as a history and as an example of the nascent flowering of prose fiction; it is a classic story but the characters are too stereotyped for modern tastes.

November 2015; 66 pages