(no subject)
Jan. 10th, 2011 11:36 amI've read at least one book before with the general premise of "let's reverse the historical direction of black/white colonization and slavery and see what happens!" and I'm generally aware of several more. I think it's a valuable idea to read about, but the problem with historical AUs in general is that too much of the time they get bogged down in the kind of logic-puzzles of counterfactual history - you know, where the author is like "look, I snuck in counterfactual Da Vinci, aren't I clever!" and you're like "yes, but counterfactual Da Vinci would probably never have been born," like that - and I find that kind of thing more jarring in serious and thought-provoking AUs than I do in, say, NAPOLEONIC WARS WITH DRAGONS, which you can only take so seriously anyway.
Anyway, my actual point is that I just read Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots, a what-if-slavery-was-reversed alternate history that just leapfrogs over all the problems of being an AU history by creating a completely satirical, deliberately anachronistic universe. Counterfactual worldbuilding is not the point of this book, and I actually think this works much better for the premise; it's definitely the best take on it I've read. Because you don't have to get jarred out when the worldbuilding doesn't make sense. You just sort of acclimate early on to the fact that the book has Europeans enslaved in African households in an alternate version of nineteenth-century plantations, and at the same time white slaves on Haiti are rebelling, and at the same time teens are zooming to raves on their skateboards and Doris Scagglethorpe, our protagonist slave, is complaining about how notions of beauty are shaped by Afro-haired Barbie dolls that all the little girls play with, and then you can start to appreciate what Evaristo is doing. It's all the consequences of slavery and privilege being skewered at once, and the way she uses contemporary culture to do it means that even though the skin-tones and ethnicities are reversed, no one is actually let off the hook, even for the span of the book.
Sometimes Evaristo gets a bit heavy-handed, but on the other hand, given the number of reviews I see on Amazon that completely miss the point, I'm not sure I can complain about that - and many other times it's sharp and clever, and often hilarious, in a harsh sort of way. Other times it's unabashedly brutal, as slave narratives inevitably are. The shifts in tone can be startling, but she does a good job balancing the two, and I don't think the book would be complete without both.
Anyway, my actual point is that I just read Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots, a what-if-slavery-was-reversed alternate history that just leapfrogs over all the problems of being an AU history by creating a completely satirical, deliberately anachronistic universe. Counterfactual worldbuilding is not the point of this book, and I actually think this works much better for the premise; it's definitely the best take on it I've read. Because you don't have to get jarred out when the worldbuilding doesn't make sense. You just sort of acclimate early on to the fact that the book has Europeans enslaved in African households in an alternate version of nineteenth-century plantations, and at the same time white slaves on Haiti are rebelling, and at the same time teens are zooming to raves on their skateboards and Doris Scagglethorpe, our protagonist slave, is complaining about how notions of beauty are shaped by Afro-haired Barbie dolls that all the little girls play with, and then you can start to appreciate what Evaristo is doing. It's all the consequences of slavery and privilege being skewered at once, and the way she uses contemporary culture to do it means that even though the skin-tones and ethnicities are reversed, no one is actually let off the hook, even for the span of the book.
Sometimes Evaristo gets a bit heavy-handed, but on the other hand, given the number of reviews I see on Amazon that completely miss the point, I'm not sure I can complain about that - and many other times it's sharp and clever, and often hilarious, in a harsh sort of way. Other times it's unabashedly brutal, as slave narratives inevitably are. The shifts in tone can be startling, but she does a good job balancing the two, and I don't think the book would be complete without both.