I have read a few of Evaristo’s books now and have enjoyed them all. This is one of her earlier ones but I think this is her most different.
At first I really didn’t get on with this novel, I felt the concept was too tired and perhaps too farcical sounding to be believable, then something switched, I found it clever, funny and most of all, hard hittingly poignant.
The Concept
It might have or might not have been done before, but I argue that it hasn’t been done as cleverly and with such wit as this. Evaristo, reverses the Slave Trade. We are first introduced to blonde English girl, Doris Scagglethorpe. She has been enslaved by the colonising and ruling race, the Ambossan’s of The United Kingdom of Great Ambossa or UK for short…. Which is the centre of the African empire (getting it yet?)
Doris is brutally ripped from her quaint English village life from a family of Cabbage farmers to the harsh life as an enslaved person, first working as a plaything for a rich Ambossan girl, and then to the sugar cane fields of the ‘West Japanese Islands’.
Just from this description of the plot alone you can see the craft that has gone into Evaristo’s poignant reversal of history, but she goes far further than this.
Clever, clever, clever
As I said, some sort of reversal of this terrible part of history has been done before but no one has done it with such satirical wit as this. At the same time you’re laughing at the reversal, you’re also going ‘ouch’ at realising the truth in the history behind it.
It is this feeling that makes it a successful satire. Satire is successful when the reader laughs while not realising they are the butt of the joke!
For instance, Doris is actually given an African name. The biting joke being, the ‘slave masters’ can’t pronounce the weird English names of ‘Doris or ‘Sharon’. Sound familiar?
It’s horrible - that’s the point
If it was just a straight fictional reversal, I think Evaristo couldn’t have been so explicit with the true details of the actual Slave Trade. Satire allows more shock factor and more explicitness, and through that can tell the hard to hear, often glazed over truth.
We are with Doris as she travels on the Slave ship, where the captain’s greed takes over and he packs triple the number of enslaved people in to turn a larger a profit (yes this happened). The scene is horrific and difficult to read. The captured women are raped nightly, there is disease, and all bodily fluids flowing everywhere. Over three-quarters of them don’t make it and are thrown overboard…
If you survived this, worse was yet to come on the sugar cane farming fields. Doris is placed with second generation enslaved people, who were born into slavery, never having known a country of freedom. Aside from the work, there is harsh punishments of bodily mutilation.
Don’t be shocked ?
The point of it is, that it is all true and should shock the reader. What no one wants to accept as a reader of this is that we are centrally shocked at seeing our recognised western culture, being ‘othered’, punished and belittled by a ruling and foreign elite.
But the harsher truth is that this is exactly what the British Empire (and other European nations) did to countries in Africa (and elsewhere). They colonised, kidnapped and tried to extinguish the culture in these countries.
This is not to say, that before reading this we didn’t find the Slave Trade a terrible chapter of history. She makes the familiar European names like Sharon, blonde hair and cabbages alien things to be ridiculed and then erased by the invading ruling culture.
But Evaristo’s reversal, to a largely western audience goes ‘HA how does it feel when it’s your culture and your people!??’
Hey, thanks, it doesn’t feel great…
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