Tag: slavery

1666: A Novel by Lora Chilton

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1666: A Novel by Lora Chilton

I read it all in one night. I couldn’t stop until I learnt what happened to Ah’SaWei. NePa’WeXo, and their children MaNa’AnGwa and O’Sai WaBus. I had to know, I couldn’t sleep without knowing.

Afterwards, I found I could not sleep, now knowing.

1666 was a hard book to read, even for me, a historian of decolonization. I teach students about the Doctrine of Discovery every semester. I highlight resistance to systems of oppression, especially colonization. Still, for all that I know, 1666 eviscerated me. I continued to read it because it is a work of resistance, because the women of the Patawomeck/PaTow’O’Mek tribe deserve to be read and seen and remembered. Awful as it is for me to read it, that in no way compares to the pain they lived and the pain that continues in indigenous communities today.

The story begins and ends with the PaTow’O’Mek women and it is told entirely from their perspective; it is the narrative of the massacre of their people, their enslavement, and their resistance against the British who destroyed them. Readers who were moved by Beast of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala, Elie Wiesel’s Night, The Bird Tattoo by Dunya Mikhail — or more topically pertinent — Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau will find 1666 an equally powerful read.

As an educator, I consider 1666 a valuable college level read. It is ideal, lengthwise, for an undergraduate course (at just over 200 pages, and with glossary and explanations of terms). Harrowing as the subject matter is, it is highly relevant and provides a number of points for discussion, historical examination, and resistance in the classroom. Chilton’s writing is also highly accessible, her prose smooth and flowing, her characters full of depth and humanity.

In the Upper Country: A Novel by Kai Thomas

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In the Upper Country: A Novel
by Kai Thomas

I was very excited to read this, and it did not disappoint. In The Upper Country offers readers a new perspective, one of many histories, of the Underground Railroad, and the people who traversed it, were borne out of it. This is a story about ancestry and descending, the diverse and convergent ways in which histories flow, often beyond our control and understanding.

Several stories, seemingly disparate, come together here to bring a fleshiness to a spectral kind of history.

The story is set in Dunmore, a town in Canada were black people who have escaped slavery can be free — and yet, of course, not, living as they are within a white world. An event shakes the town, the criminal refuses to be cowed and the result is a tense struggle between generations to grapple with North American chattel slavery and the concept of freedom. The result is a portrayal of the tragically disjointed and yet deeply connected lives of black slaves and free blacks. Lensinda was born free. But she must still live with the past. The past must learn how to reconcile itself.

This is the kind of story that must be read and re-read, the reader accepting that with each re-reading a different understanding of the characters and their ideas of freedom and bondage will become visible.

The Bird Tattoo: A Novel by Dunya Mikhail

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The Bird Tattoo: A Novel by Dunya Mikhail

This novel devastated me. From its start to its end, I could not look away, though I wanted to put it down so many times, needed to put it down so many times for my own peace of mind. The pain of the characters was so real and tangible that I felt if I put down the book I was doing them an injustice. If I could — and I did — put down this book, that is proof I am privileged enough as to be able to switch off their suffering. And that really is an important point here because the subjects of this story and their histories is not a thing of the past. Mikhail’s tale is not a fiction, but the reality of a several thousand women in the world today.

The Bird Tattoo is about suffering and war, and what happens to women and children in times and places of war. The main character is a young wife and mother, a Yazidi woman who is kidnapped from her home in Iraq and sold into slavery, to be passed over and over again as an unwilling wife among the Islamic militants who have taken over her country. In her agonizing wait for rescue and her journey to freedom, both she and the reader encounter other women and children who are enslaved — and the men who enslave them. The conflict that the novel is premised is on is not made explicit; it doesn’t need to be. What is important is that it is contemporary and could be one of so many that are happening right now. That is Mikhail’s point in fact.

You are reading the words of someone’s life right now.

Some of the men who rule this cruel war-torn world are as expected: cruel and indifferent. Others are kind, in relative terms. Each are trapped within a terror not of their own making, the terror of states and governments bent on power and hatred. Some of the women are equally as surprising; some have developed Stockholm Syndrome, some are defeated and have given up, others are defiant. They are prisoners all the same. They, like the men, exist at the whims of others — for them, at the whim of their male masters, their new husbands. There are children too, some of the women are not women at all, but are children.

The novel is about the trust and the lack of trust between these individuals. It is gut-wrenchingly sad, but it is also hopeful. It is about resilience of the human soul and the human drive to survive. It is about resilience of humaneness and the power of kindness.

The Bird Tattoo is like so many classic novels (indeed, I think it is destined for that category) in the vein of Elie Wiesel’s Night or Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation: necessarily painful to read. The pain the reader will feel is the liminal ritual, the necessary rite of passage that allows us to recognize hope and the privilege of being alive and safe. Books like these make us thankful for the peace in our lives.

Books like these also inspire us to action. That is the manifestation of hope.

If there is one book you read this year, read this one.