I didn't know what to make of this. If it were written by a white person I would just think it was unintentionally racist. It's written by a Black CamI didn't know what to make of this. If it were written by a white person I would just think it was unintentionally racist. It's written by a Black Cameroonian, though, and the publisher says it's satire...ok...but what does it mean to call a novel a satire when it's about a real historic tragedy, and when, at the same time, the writing sounds something like a cross between a badly overwritten Edwardian novel and a Tarzan screenplay? Is the stilted writing part of the satire? A fault of translation? Something else?
"The truth would come out but for now he had more urgent worries in his mind."
"Hate-filled black faces burst from the huts."
"The villagers froze and all eyes converged on the white woman...then a wave of servile smiles soon reassured her."
"Were it not for her pygmy guide, she may have ended up six feet underground."
"Slender half naked young girls jumped and danced unselfconsciously while muscular boys stared intently at the white woman."
So.
I have the same feeling I have sometimes at a contemporary art exhibit where the work makes no sense until I read the liner notes that explain its political context and its artistic intention.
If I get just one person to read this novel who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it, I will feel I've done my job here on Goodreads. I'm still quite oIf I get just one person to read this novel who wouldn't otherwise have heard of it, I will feel I've done my job here on Goodreads. I'm still quite overwhelmed by what I just read, but let me try to give you a sense of the novel.
Léonora Miano has written with a singular purpose: to document what it must have been like, at the start of the Atlantic slave trade, to live in a village within easy reach of the coastline. What it must have been like to be living in exactly the way you and your people have always lived, and then to have this terror, this violence, this unthinkable and incomprehensible disruption of your reality, come into your lives.
Miano begins in medias res just after several young men disappear from a village. We readers know they have been kidnapped to be taken to the coast and sold. But to their people, they are just gone. And the people don't know how such a thing could have happened. People can die, or be born, or commit crimes, or marry, and these happenings are part of the rhythms of village life, and are well understood, and everyone knows what is to be done in each case. But when men disappear? In this case no one knows how to react. Are the men dead? Then where are the bodies? If there were bodies then the people would know to mourn. But there are no bodies. No one knows what to do. A hasty plan is made to isolate the men's mothers from the rest of the village--because maybe it has something to do with the mothers. But no one really believes that. And when one woman drifts back to her home, no one is sure what to do next. It takes days for the village leaders to decide to ask a neighboring village if they know anything about the men's disappearance. It takes far longer--not until it is too late--for anyone in the village to suspect the truth.
I can't capture for you the perfection of how Miano paints this village and its inhabitants; its rituals and its hierarchies. The way she reaches through history to recreate a pre-literate, pre-colonial culture that is on the brink of losing everything that they trust is true about the world. We know it happened. We know this history in a theoretical way. But we don't have access to the voices of the people that faced this terror. Miano gives them voices. I'm in awe of how deeply she imagines these people, even to the point of making their utter lack of guile, in the beginning of their story, completely believable and heart-rending....more
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