blonde roots
by Bernardine Evaristo
Translated from English by Françoise Adelstain
Globe, 320 p., 23,50 €
It is with the flamboyant nerve that characterizes her novels that Bernardine Evaristo reverses the situation, reshuffles the cards. In blonde roots, the Africans (here called Aphrikans) conquered the world and enslaved the Europeans (Europans). The daughter of a modest English cabbage farmer, the fiery Doris Scagglethorpe, 10, aspires to become a traveling silk merchant. But during a game of hide and seek with her sisters, she is kidnapped by a stranger in a kilt. He carries it away from his family, to an enclosure where ladies like serfs, children like adults, are sold to merchants. After a long walk to the coast, these slaves, dazed with incomprehension and helplessness, embark on a long journey on a ship steered by black-skinned men.
“If I had to specify the moment when the human race was divided into two extreme categories, the white and the black, it is this: in the society I was about to join, my color alone, neither my personality nor my abilities, would determine my destiny. » Upon arrival, Doris, who was one of half of the survivors of this crossing at the bottom of the hold, was renamed “Omorenomwara” by Chief Kaga Konata Katamba 1is, enriched by the trade of the whites and the sugar they produce for him. Her owner’s initials tattooed with a poker on her skin, she becomes the official slave of Petite Miracle, the adored daughter of KKK of the same age as her. Two girls, two species.
Awarded the prestigious Booker Prize in 2019 for girl, woman, other, the Anglo-Nigerian Bernardine Evaristo is the author of a work of sharp intelligence, alert writing and invigorating laughter. At the same time as they publish his autobiography, ManifestoGlobe editions deliver blonde roots published in 2008. From her English childhood to her sale, from her escape to its consequences, the story of Doris, whose powerful voice is distinguished by her corrosive humor, is cut in the middle by the delirious texts of Kaga Konata Katamba, adversary virulent abolitionists. Bernardine Evaristo irrigates this alternative history with her delightful imagination. A vertiginous mirror, his fable effectively renews the view of human trafficking and its monstrous incongruity, to better touch the essence of slavery brutality and awaken our memories.