![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The world of Blonde Roots, in which young Doris Scagglethorpe (known by her slave name of Omorenomwara) must attempt to escape from her master if she hopes to see her family again, is not a straightforward parallel of the 18th-century landscape of the slave trade’s heyday. The epigraph she takes from Nietzsche underlines the point of such a reversal: ‘Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.’ In Blonde Roots, ‘whyte Europanes’ are enslaved by ‘blak Aphrikans’ and shipped either to the plantations in the imaginary West Japanese Islands (so-called because a famous Aphrikan explorer was sailing round the world in search of Asia when he landed there, and the name stuck) or to serve wealthy blak families in the island of Great Ambossa, where the plantation owners live. But how do you maintain that shock over atrocities 200 years old without people feeling they have heard the story before?īernardine Evaristo, of British and Nigerian descent, has come up with an ingenious way of refreshing the horrors of the slave trade: by creating a photographic negative of historical reality, where what was black becomes white and vice versa. ![]() F ew people who read Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots, which told of his African slave ancestor Kunta Kinte, will forget the shock of those descriptions of the slave ships and the brutality of the plantations, nor the shame and anger that accompanied it. ![]()
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