Review of Conjure Women by Afia Atakora

Conjure Women by Afia Atakora

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is not just another slavery-oriented historical novel based on the author's family tradition. This author was born in England and lives in New Jersey She has no southern roots. Yes, she researched the period meticulously. But then she created an artificial world in which her characters could come alive and thrive despite crushing obstacles. That's what makes this book unique and interesting. It's not about the horrors of slavery. Rather it's about characters caught in a limbo-land between slavery and freedom, who don't really know what freedom means.

There are two interwoven threads of story -- pre- and post- Civil War. The pre- is realistic, with dashes of possible magic and heavy foreshadowing of secrets, lies and their possible consequences. The plantation and the light dialect are not connected to any particular state. It's a generic, plausible, familiar setting for a Civil War/slavery story.

The post- is an artificial world where the characters have to figure out their real identities and their real connections to one another. Through a series of lies for five years after the war, everything continues on the plantation as it had before the war. The characters feel tied to the land, but not by force of ownership and law. The plantation has no known owner and somehow (unexplained) everything continues as before. The implication is that they continue to work as they had before though now there is no owner and presumably no overseer. Somehow, they survive on the produce of the plantation without any need to sell or buy anything. Somehow, no one ever expects the plantation to pay taxes. Supernatural possibilities hum in the background but are never confirmed, This post-war world feels Kafkaesque or scifi.

This novel isn't a hackneyed indictment of slavery. Rather it's an exploration of what happens to people when they are forced to live through extraordinary experiences, how they can relate to one another and how they can both shape and discover their identities. The rough edges, the questions left unanswered or answered ambiguously heighten the interest and make the characters all the more engaging and credible, and tempt the reader to read it a second or even a third time.




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