Sherley Anne Williams's 1986 novel is an imaginary encounter of two strong women who were involved in two actual accidents, as the blurb informs: In 1829, in Kenucky, a pregnant black woman was sentenced to death for helping to lead an uprising of a group of slaves headed to the market for sale. In North Carolina, in 1830, a white woman living on an isolated farm was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. In "Dessa Rose", the author asks the question "What if these two women met?". The title character is a whip-scarred pregnant slave waiting in jail until the child is born to be executed for committing crimes against white men (namely for attacking the wife of the master who killed her plantation lover and for raising a rebellion of chained coffle slaves who killed their white captors and broke free).
Told in three narrative voices which represent different points of view, the novel develops in three parts. "The Darky" presents the dominant master's text of Adam Nehemiah, a white author who wants to gain fame by writing a coherent and lucid analysis of "Odessa's" crimes; "The Wench", which means a low, vicious young woman of ill fame, presents the point of view of the white woman, Ruth Elizabeth (Ms Rufel) Sutton, who gives shelter to the runaway slaves and, finally, makes friends with Dessa. At last, "The Negress" reveals Dessa Rose as a full first-person narrative voice. Such an arrangement of the narrative voices allows the reader to follow Dessa's gradual escape from the white man's control, visible here as a misreading of her (he constantly misnames her "Odessa"), to freedom, associated here with Dessa's capability of self-expression. The writer explains her intention in the "Author's Note" as follows: Afro-Americans, having survived by word of mouth remain at the mercy of literature and writing; often, these have betrayed us... I know now that slavery eliminated neither heroism nor love; it provided occasions for their expressions.
However, Dessa Rose is for me first of all a novel about women in the antebellum South, both black and white, who managed to survive thanks to friendship. It is a novel about female bonding and the possibility of creating a women's community in the effort to support each other because, after all, all women - regardless of skin color - were exposed to the same threats and oppression. In this the novel very well illustrates the black feminist critic Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's suggestion of analysing black women's discourse as dialogue with black men (visible here in the creation of a black community based on the African call-response patterns included in the narrative) and with white women (the community created is based on the shared experience of white men's oppression, and the fact that Dessa was whipped on the inside of her thighs and her intimate parts suggests a symbolic rape).
Dessa Rose ponders on this in her narrative, when she is lying awake after a white man ("bad Oscar") attempted to rape her defenceless mistress, Ms Rufel: I laid awake a long time that night while she snored quiet on the other side of [her] baby. The white woman was subject to the same ravishment as me; this the thought that kept me awake. I hadn't knowed white mens could use a white woman like that, just take her by force same as they could with us... I slept with her after that, both of us wrapped around Clara. And I wasn't so cold with her no more. I wasn't zactly warm with her, understand; I didn't know how to be warm with no white woman... But really, what kept me quiet was knowing white mens wanted the same thing, would take the same thing from a white woman as they would from a a black woman. Cause they could. Highly recommended:)
P.S.1 On Wednesday, Feb.25 TVN7 shows (again) Spielberg's The Color Purple, which is an adaptation of Alice Walker's novel. I recommend the movie because it was Whoopi Goldberg's debut and because The Color Purple will appear in a TOP OF THE TOPS review, when I finally get to writing about Beloved;)
P.S.2 I hear Bill Bryson's hilarious Notes from a Small Island is due to appear in Polish on March 3rd, which is great news. I've read the fragment published in the Dziennik's cultural supplement and liked it a lot. However, I still think that nothing can beat the original version: after all, Bryson's "English" humor and irony taste best in English;)
Winner of 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction Junot Diaz wrote a very contemporary story about love, which corroborates the pop-song phrase "love hurts". Oscar is an overweight lovesick ghetto nerd, who devours fantasy fiction in the hope of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. Because of an ancient curse, fuku, he will finally die in the name of love, beaten to death by a gang of bandits, such as those who are in the service of Dominican tyrannical President Trujillo. In an interview, the author himself defined the subject of his novel as follows: It’s the quest story of this young Dominican guy Oscar, his quest for love, for a safe place in the world, which is what love is. It’s not only his quest, but it turns out to have been his entire family’s quest. If nothing else speaks to the human condition, it is that quest. You could expand it, of course, another degree and just say that that’s really what this whole thing that we call humanity is about: each of us trying to find a place where we’re safe and where we can know love. The rest of it is, in the end, kind of garbage.
Universal though the story's theme is, Diaz is a very demanding writer, exposing his readers to the multiculturality of his characters by peppering his narrative with many (unitalicized) Spanish words and expressions. In this way he seems to repeat the gesture of many bicultural writers - for example Gloria Anzaldua - who emphasize their rich and complex border identity by mixing two languages. This constant crossing of linguistic borders reflects the mixed identity of Dominicans, who are of African, Taino and Spanish descent. Despite such heterogeneity, all of them are subject to the Curse and Doom of the New World - fuku, brought about by an Admiral, who was both its midwife and one of its great European victims. In this way Oscar Wao's cursed life reflects Dominicans' history shaped by bad luck, and a sense of doom is perceptible from the very beginning of the story. However, despite the fact that the story is so sad and tragic, it is also very entertaining: the narrative is funny, also in the footnotes supplied For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history. A passage about Trujillo will sufficiently illustrate Diaz's fierce style: Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States.All in all, with its absorbing narrative - rich and playful thanks to its shifts in language and point of view - the book is a wonderful read and deserves a place on every book shelf. Only one thing disturbed me as a woman reader: the narrator's uncritical attitude to machismo, so pervasive and taken for granted (natural, some might say) both in the culture that he depicted and in his narrative. 
Ernest J. Gaines's Lesson Before Dying won the 1993 National Book Critics Award for a reason. This piece of solid realistic prose poignantly portrays a small town's life in Louisiana in the 1940s, where African Americans still suffer from segregation and are expected to show respect and submissiveness to whites despite the fact that slavery is long over. The narrator, Grant Wiggins, is a university graduate working as a teacher of the Negro plantation school. Although he returned to the town to help his people improve their life, he has lost all hope for the possibility of such improvement. Another African American young man, Jefferson, has been accused of and charged with murder of a white shop owner. His complicity in the crime is dubious (he was only an innocent bystander), but the prejudiced white community leads to his conviction and execution on an electric chair.
The verdict and the ensuing sentence may as well have been the result of the incompetent defense, and a passage from the advocate's speech will illustrate white people's attitude to the members of the black community. In his final speech before the jury the advocate focused on undermining Jefferson's humanity, which supposedly made him incapable of committing the crime: Gentlemen of the jury, look at him--look at him--look that this. Do you see a man sitting here? I ask you, I implore, look carefully--do you see a man sitting here? Look at the shape of this skull, this face as flat as the palm of my hand--look deeply into those eyes. Do you see a modicum of intelligence? Do you see anyone here who could plan a murder, a robbery, can plan--can plan--can plan anything? A cornered animal to strike quickly out of fear, a trait inherited from his ancestors in the deepest jungle of blackest Africa--yes, yes, that he can do--but to plan? To plan, gentlemen of the jury? No, gentlemen, this skull here holds no plans. What you see here is a thing that acts on command. A thing to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your corn. That is what you see here, but you do not see anything capable of planning a robbery or a murder. ... I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.The lesson mentioned in the title begins when Grant is asked by Jefferson's grandmother to teach the boy that he is not a hog and to make sure that he goes to his death like a man. The task seems impossible since at first Jefferson, who is mentally slow and barely literate, refuses to speak to Wiggins. In the course of the two men's weekly meetings Grant manages to transform Jefferson into a hero, who is the strongest man in the courthouse when he walks to his electric chair. However, it seems that Jefferson is not the only student here: Wiggins, who hates himself for having to teach black children on white people's terms and for the necessity to compromise his pride in the constant struggle over whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be, also learns from Jefferson a lesson in heroism (a hero does for others) and humanity. Jefferson, who in the novel is compared to Jesus (analogies can be easily drawn though they are not too obtrusive), proves his manhood by accepting with dignity the plight that befalls him, and teaches Wiggins to accept his own, and do the utmost for the bettering of his people's condition. In this the novel seems to endorse the lesson preached by the famous black nation's leader from the turn of the twentieth century, Booker T. Washington: cast down your buckets where you are. In the reality in which black people are constantly humiliated (for example, Wiggins can enter the sheriff's house only through the kitchen door, and has to wait over two hours for the sheriff to finally come to the kitchen and speak to him), preserving one's dignity is subversive enough to be perceived as fighting for civil rights. A great book: poignant, moving and eye-opening.
P.S. After reading this book one can't fail to realize that the recent inauguration of the American President marked a historic change, perhaps comparable only to the inauguration of George Washington. President of the United States Barack Obama - I still have to repeat it to myself over and over again to make it sink in.
Posts
