Stigmata

by Phyllis Alesia Perry

A powerful and imaginative debut novel about the legacy of slavery, and the psychological mystery surrounding a troubled young woman.

When Lizzie Du Bose inherits a handmade quilt willed to her by a maternal grandmother she has never met, her life is forever changed. The figures sewn into the quilt tell the stories of Lizzie's grandmother Grace, and Grace's grandmother Ayo, who was abducted from Africa as a girl and sent as a slave to America. As Lizzie learns, the quilt seems to hold the key to a past that haunts her, at first through terrifyngly lifellike dreams, and finally through visions that seem to take Lizzie back in time, fusing her own life with the lives of Grace and Ayo.

One night, Lizzie awakens to find the quilt soaked in blood, and discovers horrible wounds on her wrists and back. Wracked with pain, Lizzie has no memory of having harmed herself, but she believes Ayo's manacle scars have appeared on her own body--as real an inheritence as Grace's quilt. Now Lizzie must decide whether she has begun a descent into madness, or made an extraordinary connection to the past. A compelling and utterly intriguing tale, Stigmata weaves together the stories of three women at once blessed with a powerful vision, and cursed by a shared legacy of slavery, pain, and struggle.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, African American, Magical Realism, African American Literature, Southern Gothic, Speculative Fiction

252 pages, Paperback

First published July 22, 1998

Reviews

[Arnetra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book a while ago. I vaguely remember being horrified. The main character was sometimes possessed by her grandmother or great grandmother. Her present self experienced everything that those two women experienced in the past. I believe that she was the third generation to gain the insight. Her present day family thought she was losing it but in the end she and her family realized that these women spoke to her from the grave so that she may finish something that they were not able to finish.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took this as a really powerful metaphor for intergenerational trauma. Lizzie has visions of her grandmother and great-great-grandmother's (an African girl stolen and enslaved) lives. Lizzie's experiences are misunderstood and she is locked away for many years; silenced. We watch as she reckons with her feelings & experiences and learns to accept herself for who she is, past and all.

[Shirma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phyillis Aliesha Perry is a writer. If this is her first novel, I have to read what she’s written most recently. This is definitely a book for people who like the English language. She says what she has to say so beautifully. Her writing is poetic. The tale itself is a good one. Fourteen year old Lizzie is given a quilt and diary that belonged to her grandmother and begins to have intense flashbacks of her great, great-grandmother, Ayo who was kidnapped from Africa, brought to America and enslaved. The episodes are so strong that Lizzie has physical markings on her body from the chains and beatings Ayo experienced as a frightened, enslaved young woman. Later, Lizzie is sent to mental asylums for 14 years because no one believed she wasn’t hurting herself.

At times in the story though, I was totally distracted from the story itself and found myself entranced in the way the story was being told. Perry’s descriptions are imaginative, moving and caused me to pause. Lizzie narrates the story and on page 60, (Lizzie’s mother is afraid she’s having a relapse and as they talk, she’s staring at her daughter), Perry writes, “But though her face, as always, stays calm, her eyes search mine for a place to hide from her fear.” On page 169, Lizzie and her new boyfriend are getting intimate (as a wonderful metaphor for the reincarnation experiences Lizzie is having) Perry writes, “We make love there for the first time amidst the dust and this seems appropriate; I’m always surrounded by dust, made of it, always caught up in it as it swirls and resettles and rises again and again to worry the living.”

I want to write like Perry. Reading this book is a cherished experience.

[Kasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Multiple voices and stories are told throughout, woven together from different times.
.
I found it hard to get attached to any one of the timelines because they often jumped quite quickly. Lizzie's voice and story was the one I was most interested in and when the focus was on other characters I was not as engaged and found myself losing interest, keen to get back to Lizzie.
.
If the narrative had stayed with her I think would've enjoyed it much more but alas this was a relief to finish. Onwards.

[Saman]

در صورت تمایل، جهت مشخصات فیلمی که بر اساس این کتاب ساخته شده‌ است؛ می‌توانید از لینک زیر استفاده بفرمایید
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145531

[izzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been awhile since I stayed up late to finish a book. I started Stigmata by Phyllis Alesia Perry a few weeks ago, and kept putting it down. It's a hard book to read as a white woman. It details the story of a teenaged girl who is gifted a quilt from her deceased grandmother, which starts a journey of possession and reliving historical trauma. Lizzie is literally gripped by her past as she connects with her grandmother, Grace, and her great great grandmother, Ayo. She lives their lives and feels their pain. She feels Ayo's fear and the brutality she endured as she was stolen from her country and brought into a life of enslavement. She feels Grace's fear of madness as she herself lives Ayo's life. She connects with both of them in a truly visceral way as she relives generational trauma. The experience lands her in the hospital after her wrists are torn to shreds by the manacles that Ayo wore. Everyone assumes it was a suicide attempt, but it happens again and again even under close watch in the hospital. Lizzie bears scars that don't match her experience in the current world - but they appear nevertheless.

There's no real end to the story. No closure. No happy ever after, or even "oh, so THAT'S what happened." Lizzie spends more than a decade in the hospital before returning to the real world. It terrified me to read about her time in the hospital (for obvious reasons), but the open ending seems fitting - while Lizzie grew past her fears, she knows Ayo gripped her mind and body to keep her from forgetting that horrid past. There's no closure in the story because there's no closure for that in our world. Some just try to ignore the gigantic scar where that wound has scabbed over, even though it's reopened again and again.

Stigmata made me uncomfortable. It made me angry. It made me sad. It made me SQUIRM - and that's exactly what it should do. It SHOULD make me uncomfortable to read about those histories. To think about that everlasting and recurring trauma. To stop and think about the ways my white skin has helped me avoid that pain.

Now I just need to find a place to point my rage to make even a tiny sliver of a difference. Rage and discomfort and wrath have their purpose.

[Donyae Coles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was filed under horror but it isn't. It's more science fiction, def Afrofutrism.

At the book's start, Lizzie is just getting out of the a mental hospital. She has been committed for the last 14 years due to seeing and hearing strange visions and claiming to be able to feel and see her ancestors, beginning with her great-greatgrandmoter, Bessie/Ayo, who had been stolen from Africa and grew up as a slave in America.

All of these things happen after she sees a quilt and reads a diary left behind by her ancestor. Besides the visions, she also begins to bleed from mysterious injuries on her back, wrists, and ankles.

These injuries are revealed to be the ones sustained by Bessie/Ayo during her time in slavery. Grace, Lizzie's grandmother is the first to live with Bessie/Ayo's memories and runs away from her family so that her "madness" will not harm them. Her daughter, Sarah, is Lizzie's mother.

Sarah resents her mother for leaving and Lizzie, once is past the pain of Bessie/Ayo, is set on healing the gulf between Grace and Sarah.

This book is about ancestral trauma and moving on from the past. Bessie/Ayo wants her family to remember what happened to her but that knowledge is weighing down the the women and keeping them from moving on.

Lizzie is set on breaking this cycle but also sees the importance in remembering the history. This story is about reconciling the need to remember the pains of our history and past but also moving forward into the future. It's also about not letting the pain hold us in one place.

There were things that I would have love to explore such as the coldness between Sarah and Lizzie that never seemed to be mentioned. The character of Anthony Paul, who seems to know more about the situation was never gone over either. In fact, there were a number of people who seemed to have a bit of what Lizzie carried but they were never discussed.

Still, it was a good book that deals with the pain and joy of Black history in America.

[Lora Shouse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stigmata is a heart-wrenching book about a young Black woman who suddenly began experiencing pieces of her family’s past after receiving an inheritance of a trunk containing, among other things, a diary dictated to her great grandmother by her great-great grandmother and a quilt created by her grandmother. Her parents believe she is crazy and place her in a series of mental institutions over the years, until she has spent over half of her life in such places.

The fragments of the past she experiences are not complete and don’t appear in any particular order. Sometimes the memories are those of her great-great grandmother, Ayo, who was later called Bessie Ward, and sometimes they belong to her grandmother, Grace, who suffered from the same ability to relive the past.

Ayo’s memories are particularly painful, as they involve her being kidnapped from her village in Africa and sent to America in a slave ship. Those memories are too painful for her to tell. But when Lizzie experiences them, the marks made by the chains on her great-great grandmother appear on her wrists.

Lizzie needs people to believe her when she tells them she experiences these visions of the past. And her mother, Sarah, needs to realize that her mother, who left their small Alabama town for Detroit long ago, did not abandon her as she has always believed.

[Passion Y · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a story of reincarnation, mostly. One that made me wonder how many lives do souls actually live and what experiences are carried from one to the next.

The biggest plus about this story was that Lizzie found love and he too was experiencing some minor things that made him realized that he knew Lizzie in another life. His past art captured things of Lizzie’s past that he made before her met her.

⚡️

In the end, Lizzie was able to show her family that she wasn’t crazy but just reliving memories that they only knew about because she wasn’t born when they originally happened.

Lizzie had to learn how to separate the present from the past in order to gain her freedom from the facilities and the trust of her family members - especially her mom.

This story was touching because the more Lizzie understood what was happening to her - the better her relationship became with her parents.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stigmata begins with a scene in which the main character, a black woman from Alabama, is released from a psychiatric hospital after being institutionalized for 14 years because of her belief that she is the reincarnation of her own grandmother and of her great-great-grandmother. That really sets you up for everything that happens in this book.

The narration splits between the story of her as a child and teenager before being in the hospital, her life after release, and short scenes or diary entries of her (great-)grandmothers.

I loved this. The shifting time worked way better than I expected. Knowing that she is headed for over a decade of being in psych wards lends so much dread in the chapters of her as a teenager. And that horror lent more gravitas to chapters of her in her thirties trying to build some sort of life.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the somewhat confusing start, Stigmata manages to evolve into a meditation on the haunting legacies of intergenerational trauma for Black women in America that owes a debt to Octavia Butler’s Kindred without feeling derivative due to Perry’s emphasis on institutionalization, definitions of sanity, and possession. The time jumps may be slightly disorienting at first, but careful enough reading of this book demonstrates why Stigmata received so much praise upon release even if the book has somewhat waned in popularity across the last decades. I am grateful for Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined for making me aware of this book’s existence.

[loli reads a lot · Rating 2 out of 5]

i feel like the story was really interesting but my issue is the dual timeline narrative. it felt really hard to connect with any of the characters when constantly flying back and forth, and i’m not gonna lie i was a little bit confused on the family tree.
a metaphor for generational trauma, an interesting perspective into how we carry our past with us and the past of our ancestors.
this one dragged on a bit im grateful to have finished it

[Tina Grabarek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written. I had to stop many times to just absorb a sentence or paragraph. Very poignant subject matter and an important story to tell. I did find the story telling disjointed and at times found it difficult to follow.

[Kari · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book a lot. Got to learn about slavery, and how the slaves were treated. Good read.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

*Read for my Eng 210 class*

[Moira-ji · Rating 5 out of 5]

a fascinating, powerful story by a master storyteller

[Shauna · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.8

[Laya · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh this book is an underground hit 🙂‍↕️ such an interesting commentary on generational trauma and institutionalization

[Christy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot read or write about this book without wanting to compare it to Toni Morrison's Beloved. Both books make physical the legacy of slavery by embodying the injuries inflicted upon slaves (physical and emotional). In doing so, Morrison and Perry show the impossibility of leaving behind the past; in fact, they insist upon the undesirability of leaving behind (by merely forgetting) the past. The past must be remembered in order to be dealt with, say Morrison and Perry (as well as many other African American authors of this period, including Edwidge Danticat, in Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Octavia Butler, in Kindred).

Many novels would seem flat and uninspired in comparison to Morrison's novel, but the power and beauty of Phyllis Alesia Perry's Stigmata are not diminished by the similiarities between the books. Perry's approach is more straightforward than Morrison's, but her ideas are no less interesting for it (where Morrison deals with ghosts and rememory, Perry deals with stigmata and reincarnation). Nor do her characterization and plot suffer by comparison with Morrison.

In short, I would highly recommend this book. I've been thinking perhaps I want to teach Beloved in my sophomore level literature class, but I was put off by its difficulty and inaccessibility to many readers. Stigmata would be a more than acceptable alternative for teaching. If you enjoyed Toni Morrison's Beloved,, you might also like Stigmata; if you wanted to read Beloved, but were put off by the hype surrounding the book or its density, you might like Stigmata instead; if you didn't like Beloved at all--well, I don't know what to say to you, but you should still give Stigmata a chance.

[Inda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this book and college and decided to reread it. I now remember why it stuck with me even though I forgot many of the details. I love that Perry makes a physical manifestation of the scars of slavery on a contemporary young woman, Lizzie. When she inherits a trunk from her grandmother, she finds an old diary and a quilt that both fascinate her. However, she begins to have visions of a past that seem all too real. Unfortunately, her experiences leave her physically scarred and one of her visions is taken as a suicide attempt. Her parents have her committed to an institution where she spends the next 14 years of her life. Lizzie tries to get her life back together upon her release, but she is also bent on making a quilt to tell her grandmother Grace's story.

What I love most about this book is that it does not question whether or not Lizzie really has the visions. Told entirely from her point of view, she is absolutely certain that things she cannot explain are happening to her. However, there is some tension as to whether or not her mission to complete the new quilt will bring her visions of the past back or if she will continue to live a life that others perceive as "normal." This is definitely a must read for anyone who needs a different take on the slave narrative and wants an exploration of the ways it still affects contemporary life.

[Josephine (Jo) · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very interesting story. Lizzie tells the stories of Grace, her grandmother, Joy her great-grandmother and Bessie or Ayo her great-great-grandmother.
She inherits a story quilt with pictures sewn onto it of the tragic life and unbelievable suffering of Ayo a slave brought to America as a child slave, the inhuman treatment of this child and the scar it leaves on the body and mind of Ayo (renamed Bessie) appear to be so strong that they become genetically imprinted and passed down through the generations of women in her family. The women are afraid to admit what they are experiencing and in the case of Grace try to run from the gift or curse, that they have inherited.
It is a truly sad story which makes you so want to go back into the past and "do something" to stop the awful suffering that was slavery. It also raises the question of whether we all to a certain extent have a genetic memory handed down through the generations of our family.
Heartrending and uplifting.

[Sharmae Gutierrez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book! Although I haven't read its first installment (since I just bought this book from some 'charity-garage-sale'), I thought the book was amazing. The story of the three sisters were touching and quite realistic (if the readers have a sister/sisters, just like me). It was even more realistic when the author added her touch (meaning to say, she written the dialogues using African-Black language) which I thought was interesting.
For someone who has interest about African Black culture, this one's for you!

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting story of a woman whose family thinks her mad because she seems to embody the past, including an ancestor who survived slavery. After she is released from the institution, she still has scars of slavery, a different form of stigmata, although still understood through the help of a priest. A quilt that speaks of her family's heritage helps her to connect with several of her female ancestors and bring a sense of peace. Would be fascinating to teach with Absalom, Absalom! since both deal with the intersection of the past and the present.

[Maicie · Rating 5 out of 5]

garage sale find

I couldn't put this book down. Lizzie inherits a memory quilt from the grandmother she never met. She relives the memories of her great-great grandmother, stolen as a young African girl and sold into slavery in America. The memories are so real she exhibits the wounds from the chains and beatings. Lizzie is committed to several mental institutions by her parents and spends fourteen years trying to get someone to believe in her.

A stunning debut novel.

[Johanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this soon after rereading Kindred by Octavia Butler and the two books are good to compare and to contrast. Beautiful poetic writing style in Stigmata and nice clear voices for each of the main characters. I wasn't quite as emotionally engaged with Grace and Ayo as I was with Lizzie but the writing helped make up for that. This is a book about racial and family trauma and its effects down the generations. The ending is left open which I think works well.

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is for sure an interesting story that will hold your attention throughout and never lags at any point. However, as I find happening with most novels like this, the story sort of falls apart at the end. The final confrontation and resolution was somewhat anti-climactic for me, and I feel like there are still a few loose ends....but that could be the point.

[Elin · Rating 1 out of 5]

It started off interesting, the girl was released from the mental institution and I was eager to know more. Parts of the descriptions were beautiful and the author shifted between then and now with ease. But towards the end I lost interest. I didn't care, the story was too long and if I heared anyone even mention a quilt I'll probably slap them.

So I had to put the book down. It needed more.

[Zoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful. Not quite as traumatic as Walker and Morrison can be, but Perry is definitely an author of the same strain. I really enjoyed this. The literary use of the quilt and the scars was impeccable.

[Karen Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

another good book that deal with african American magical realism. More straight forward than Beloved. People shouldn't be put off by the word Stigmata it is not a christian book

[R. Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was very surprised by this book. A very different/original take on stigmata and slavery...gotta read to understand