This memoir told in seventeen stories of the author's brushes with death, each chapter heading an organ of the body and a year, one that doesn't folloThis memoir told in seventeen stories of the author's brushes with death, each chapter heading an organ of the body and a year, one that doesn't follow a chronological order, but is almost like a jigsaw puzzle, that as we read, begins to reveal something more as each experience is understood.
I thought it was brilliant and I Am as much in awe of how it's been put together, as I Am of the insights she shares as each brush has its impact and adds to her knowledge of the body, mind and her own purpose in being here.
The first encounter is thriller-like and anyone who's ever felt their inner warning system go off when in the presence of a would be predator, will recognise the signs and shake their heads at the response she gets when trying to report the event to the police. Her going over the conversation wondering what else she could have said for there to have been a different outcome.
How could I have articulated to this policeman that I could sense the urge for violence radiating off the man, like heat off a stone?
It occurs to me that we humans perhaps have more lives than cats, these brushes with death can occur without us even realising. It will make you pause and think back to some of those near misses you too might have had. And then others, like the first one she shares are pushed down so deep, never again mentioned, except that one time, when it was necessary to make someone understand and accept a behaviour change.
It is a story difficult to put into words, this. I never tell it, in fact, or never have before. I told no one at the time, not my friends, not my family: there seemed no way to translate what had happened into grammar and syntax.
Some stories/brushes forewarn of another that is still to come in the narrative, so that in this way, there is an invisible thread connecting them, we come to an encounter later in the text, having already been made aware of some of the underlying facts that have formed this life.
A near drowning at sixteen is as much about the inclinations, boredom and despondency of adolescence, as it is about the consequence of having lost a sense of direction underwater.
It is all these things and more that propel me to my feet. At sixteen you can be so restless, so frustrated, so disgusted by everything that surrounds you that you are willing to leap off what is probably a fifteen-metre drop, in the dark, into a turning tide.
A Latin class school trip to Rome and Pompeii at seventeen was a turning point O'Farrell describes as being like receiving a blood transfusion, the assault on all the senses of the sights, sounds, tastes, the contrast to what was familiar so great, it was painful to consider leaving.
It was the beginning of a love affair with travel and gave a focus to her innate restlessness, a way to satisfy it, the only thing besides writing that can meet and relieve it.
She quotes Mark Twain, who after travelling around the Mediterranean said that travel was 'fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness' and tells us that neuroscientists have for years been trying to understand what it is about travel that alters us, effects mental change.
Professor Adam Galinsky, an American social psychologist who has studied the connection between creativity and international travel, says that 'Foreign experiences increase both cognitive flexibility and depth and integrativeness of thought, the ability to make deep connections between disparate forms.
One of the most gripping chapters for me was the second to last, CEREBELLUM 1980, when a headache that becomes a significant marker on her life path, a period of hospitalisation and subsequent rehabilitation and re-education as she recovers from encephalitis, a debilitating inflammation of the brain probably caused by a virus resulting in muscular atrophy, a long period of immobility and several ongoing, invisible side-effects.
Apart from the more obvious physical issues, enduring a chronic condition also had a kind of mystical quality. The way she writes of convalescence, where weeks slide by without your participation, ironically, has some resonance with what we are experiencing with lockdowns/confinement.
Fever, pain, medicine, immobility: all these things give you both clarity and also distance, depending on which is riding in the ascendant.
The insight that really stood out though, was the development of ,and her living in a state, of fearlessness.
Coming so close to death as a young child, only to resurface again into your life, imbued in me for a long time a brand of recklessness, a cavalier or even crazed attitude to risk. It could, I can see, have gone the other way, and made me into a person hindered by fear, hobbled by caution. Instead, I leapt off harbour walls. I walked alone in remote mountains. I took night trains through Europe on my own, arriving in capital cities in the middle of the night with nowhere to stay.
These insights were so remarkable and familiar to me, when I reflect on the way my daughter lived her life, that they help me understand something I was so fearful of myself, her fearlessness and familiarity with death, and her artistic conversation with it.
It was not so much that I didn't value my existence but more that I had an insatiable desire to push myself to embrace all that it could offer. Nearly losing my life at the age of eight made me sanguine - perhaps to a fault - about death. I knew it would happen, at some point, and the idea didn't scare me; its proximity felt instead almost familiar. The knowledge that I was lucky to be alive, that it so easily could have been otherwise, skewed my thinking.
Fortunately for us Maggie O'Farrell lived far enough into her life for this thinking to change, the birth of a child is magical in so many ways, her indifference stopped the minute she became a mother. And then even greater challenges would arrive, situations that the life she had lived until then, unwittingly had been preparing her for.
If you are aware of these moments, they will alter you. You can try to forget them, to turn away from them, to shrug them off, but they will have infiltrated you, whether you like it or not.
A work of incredible merit, highly recomended....more
Brilliant. This short novel evoked so many thoughts and memories and dug up so much that has been buried within me, that it was at times difficult to Brilliant. This short novel evoked so many thoughts and memories and dug up so much that has been buried within me, that it was at times difficult to concentrate on the story. So I reread pages and deliberately took my time, scribbling in the margins, remembering stories and experiences from from schooldays, from participation in marae activities, attendance at the funerals of elders, learning to weave flax, learn poi dances, using sticks (made from rolled up magazines), the legends, the gods, the taniwha.
Potiki is the story of a family and the encroachment on their lives of the now dominant culture that is trying to usurp their way of life. In some ways it has already suceeded, through education, as divisions occur within the community and some are enticed by the greed of the capitalist mentality.
In three parts, the story is narrated by Hemi, his wife Roimata and the son they bring into their family Toko raising him with their three. Grace depicts the family in ways that remind us of the Maori creation myth, of Rangi and Papa and the time of darkness before the children push them apart and bring in the light.
Each of them have their own stories and their stories had a tendency, James's of the earth, and the universe, Tangimoana's of the sea, Manu, in fear of disappearing could not find his stories.
Roimata worries for Manu when he is due to start school:
What would be right then for a little one who called out in sleep, and whose eyes let too much in? What would be right for one who didn't belong in schools, or rather, to whom schools didn't belong?
Rather than go out and become a teacher, she becomes the keeper, teller, listener and sharer of stories, a writer and reader of stories, an enactor, a collector and maker of stories.
Then I knew that nothing need be different. 'Everything we need is here. We learn what we need and want to learn, and all of it is here,' I said to Hemi, but he had always known it. We needed just to live our lives, seek out our stories and share them with each other.
Their home, their land and community is under threat from outsiders, who covet their location and do everything they can to entice them to give it up, to sell, using the offer of money, then more threatening measures to get what they want.
Two cultures collide, but only one side is listening, the other is used to getting their way, is used to the usual tactics winning over. This family and community understand too well what they will lose if they let go of their land, they have already witnessed it. And though it is not them that fight, for their way is to talk openly, there are others from outside who will intervene. Hemi worked the land in his youth but went out to work when his grandfather passed on. Now there is no job, he is back to caring for and caretaking the land.
They still had their land and that was something to feel goodabout. Still had everything except the hills. The hills had gone but that was before his time and there was nothing he could do about that, nothing anyone could do. What had happened there wasn't right, but it was over and done with. Now, at least, the family was still here, on ancestral land. They still had their urupa and their wharenui, and there was clean water out front.
It is a new era, there is more determination which created hope, that turned into confidence and created an energy.
Things were stirring, to the extent of people fighting to hold onto a language that was in danger of being lost, and to the extent of people struggling to regain land that had gone from them years before.
Land, their homes, the meeting house, the foodhouse, the cemetery are all part of a lifestyle and community that allows people to leave and return, to be independent, but to know that they can return, a place for family to come together, a refuge for the lost and broken.
Toko is visionary, a child that almost wasn't, one with a special gift, who sees the stories changing and will become part of the story that is carved into the meeting house, remembered in wood and in these most eloquent and meaningful words, Patricia Grace's beautiful reflection on the death of an extraordinary one.
We have known what it is to have had a gift, and have not ever questioned from where the gift came, only sometimes wondered. The gift has not been taken away because gifts are legacies, that once given cannot be taken away. They may pass from hand to hand, but once held thay are always yours. The gift we were given is with us still.
Emezi's Freshwater was an incredible read and a real insight into a cultural perspective, taking you inside it and experiencing it, so I was very muchEmezi's Freshwater was an incredible read and a real insight into a cultural perspective, taking you inside it and experiencing it, so I was very much looking forward to this next work.
Though we learn that Vivek is dead from the cover and in the opening pages, the novel is in a sense a mystery as the details around the death are not revealed until the end. The novel is set in Nigeria, in a community of mostly mixed race families.
The narrative is multi perspective, told through the voice of Vivek, his cousin and close friend Osita and a third-person omniscient narrator. The first chapter is one sentence:
They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.
The market burning down provides a beginning, a middle and an ending, it features in exactly those places, here as a marker or a clue, in the middle as an observation by a previously unknown character whose wife runs a stall in the middle of the market and at the end, when Vivek's final day is shared.
The first half of the book we get to know the families, Chika, his brother Ekene, married to Mary, then later Chika's Indian wife Kavita, parents to Vivek. The narrative tells the story of their marriage, of how they try to raise their only child. Kavita is part of a group of women referred to as the Nigerwives.
She had learned to cook Nigerian food from her friends - a group of women, foreign like her, who were married to Nigerian men and were aunties to each other's children. They belonged to an organisation called Nigerwives, which helped them assimilate into these new lives so far away from the countries they'd come from. They weren't wealthy expats, at least not the ones we knew. They didn't come to work for oil companies; they simply came for their husbands, for their families.
Through the friendships of the mothers, Osita and Vivek become friends with JuJu and Elisabeth. Among themselves, away from school or family and outside of society, they are already a group who is different, and with each other, they are accepting, able to express themselves, though they have each inherited varying degrees of conditioning from their mixed parentage.
Vivek is sent away to school, about which we learn very little, we know he is unhappy and bears scars.
The narrative explores the development of their friendships and sexuality, interspersed with the present day obsession of Kavita, determined to find out how her son's body mysteriously turned up on their front veranda wrapped in a fabric.
Chika didn't want to ask any question. Kavita, though, was made of nothing but questions, hungry questions bending her into a shape that was starving for answers.
Maybe it was intentional, but in creating the element of mystery, much about the character of Vivek is held back, perhaps to recreate the effect of what the parent might have experienced, but for me personally, I found it disappointing that the character of Vivek was compromised and an opportunity missed to inhabit that character more.
The deliberate obscuring heightens the effect of the reveal, but sacrifices the opportunity to share something more profound with readers. It's difficult to develop empathy for a character, when so much is held back and when the potential is clearly there.
That was why they'd kept it from their parents, to protect Vivek from those who didn't understand him. They barely understood him themselves, but they loved him, and that had been enough.
It's a novel of secrets and lies and the debate of truth versus respect, in that belief that the two can't coexist. And the safety inherent within a fear of judgement by some, versus the danger of a lack of fear in others. A theme that is likely to continue to be explored by Emezi.
"Look," she said, "eventually all secrets come out. It's just a matter of time. And the longer it takes, the worse it is in the end."
As I read, I can feel what I am bringing to the narrative, where I want the author to go and by the end they do go some of the way, but not all. And that is on me, it is asking an already courageous writer to go further, to places that us readers, like sports fans, might never go ourselves, but from the benches we shout in encouragement. So I leave the last words to the author, as a reminder to us all of what this is.
I had to remember why I was making this work. I wasn’t making it for institutional validation. I was making this work for specific people — all the people living in these realities feeling lonely and wanting to die because they’re like, this world thinks I’m crazy and I don’t belong here. All the little trans babies who are just like, there is no world in which my parents will love me and accept me. There’s a mission to all of this. Akwaeke Emezi
Totally engaging characters and storyline all the way through, sad to have left them all behind.
Such a tough line Solo, the son of Betty takes, too yoTotally engaging characters and storyline all the way through, sad to have left them all behind.
Such a tough line Solo, the son of Betty takes, too young to know what preceded him, and a mother's dilemma of not wishing to cast her son's father as a villain, while suffering the son's judgement of her, having cast her as the 'baddie' instead.
And the delightful, lost Mr Chetan. Living in a country where he is unable to be himself, yet finding a way to make the lives of those around him better. Cast out from his own, he is everyone's friend....more
This was a short read and as the author herself says, it's more of "an informal chat" than any other label one might put against it.
Isabelle Allende lThis was a short read and as the author herself says, it's more of "an informal chat" than any other label one might put against it.
Isabelle Allende looks back over her life from the viewpoint of her gender, as a woman and looks at how the family she was born into, and their circumstances contributed to her own growth and development and attitudes.
Her mother Panchita was abandoned by her husband in Peru with two toddlers and newborn (Isabel), forcing her to return to her family in Chile. It is this circumstance she ascribes her rebellion against male authority to. A fear and darkness in childhood, a pre-verbal trauma and conscious frustration as she aged, that ensured she would do everything in her power not to inhabit that vulnerable space women so easily fall into.
Of course she is thwarted by her own passion(s) and marries a number of times, but she becomes obsessed with justice, develops a visceral reaction to male chauvinism and is so shocked by an experience she had in India, a random roadside breakdown event, that she creates a foundation for vulnerable girls, today run by her daughter in law.
At times the commentary seemed superficial, almost as if written too quickly, there were gaps, assertions without the facts, anecdotes, generalisations etc about women, men, feminism, the patriarchy, but then there were the silver linings, the moments of truth when she'd strike a chord that vibrated and made one pause.
Being in the later years of her life, she also reflects on that era, on the post retirement years and her attitude towards them, how she sees that she has changed, what she is and isn't prepared to compromise on.
It's provocative, insightful and an invitation to join the conversation and the action, to continue the work towards empowerment of women on their own terms and not as defined by the other. An optimist who drives a hard bargain, she also is one who says yes to life, prepared to take risks and then manage the consequences.
Though it was a galley and I shouldn't quote from it, and it's difficult to anyway as every 'fi' is removed and often the beginnings of sentences, I finish with her thoughts, which were inspired by her reading or perhaps listening to Jampolsky on forgiveness.
More energy is needed to sustain ill feelings than to forgive. The key to contentment is forgiveness of others and ourselves.
And asks the question "What kind of world do we want? ...more
"If life is but a passage, let us at least scatter flowers on that passage."
What a refreshing read to end 2020 with, a novel of interwoven characters
"If life is but a passage, let us at least scatter flowers on that passage."
What a refreshing read to end 2020 with, a novel of interwoven characters and connections, threaded throughout the life of Violette Touissant, given up at birth.
When I was born I didn't even cry. So I was put aside, like a 2.67kg parcel with no stamp, no addressee, while the administrative forms were filled in, declaring my departure prior to my arrival. Stillborn. A child without life and without a surname.
When we first meet Violette, she is an adult, she introduces us to her neighbours and many of their characteristics in common (a list of the things they are not), they are an intriguing lot.
My name is Violette Toussaint. I was a level-crossing keeper and now I'm a cemetery keeper.
Her neighbours are the dead and she lives in the heaven of the living, at the mid-range of life having been through plenty of pain and suffering to get there. She is now being rewarded, she has found her place and her people and those who deserved to be part of it, have found her too.
My present life is a present from heaven. As I say to myself every morning, when I open my eyes. I have been very unhappy, destroyed even. Nonexistent.Drained. I was like my closest neighbours, but worse. My vital functions were functioning, but without me inside them.
The 94 short chapters all begin with a thought provoking quote, the narrative seesaws back and forth to moments in that life, sometimes revisiting the same moments, but seeing them from the point of view of Violette, her husband Philippe and the many other pairs of characters we meet, through their connection to those neighbours.
Since taking on the job of cemetery keeper, after meeting one of the most life-changing characters, Sasha, she records details of the events that take place in the cemetery, like diary entries, references that she is able to refer back to when people stop by to have a cup of tea or something stronger, looking for the resting place of someone important to them, not always family, but people with connections that weren't always able to be fully expressed in life.
Death never takes a break. It knows neither summer holidays, not public holidays, nor dentist appointments...It's there, everywhere, all the time. No one really thinks about it, or they'd go mad. It's like a dog that's forever weaving around our legs, but whose presence we only notice when it bites us. Or worse, bites a loved one.
We are taken back to her early adult life, from the age of 18, already married, the year she discovered an 821 page novel that would stay with her all through the years, L'Oeuvre de Dieu, la part du Diable a French translation of John Irving's The Cider House Rules, a book known to open minds and hearts, eliciting compassion for a set of circumstances no one really thinks about, making the reader look at the world in a slightly different way. Which is in part, what Fresh Water For Flowers does, taking characters in unconventional circumstances and sharing their stories, watching how those stories can shock and then enlighten others.
Violette too will have to deal with death. A death that develops into the more significant mystery at the core of the novel. And with it, innumerable twists and turns, suspicions and revelations.
Life is but an endless losing of all that one loves.
Every summer she spends time in the chalet of her friend Célia, in the calanque of Sormiou, Marseille, the landscapes of Marcel Pagnol's trilogy. A place of refuge and rejevenation, that Perrin too brings alive and elicits the recovery this nature protected part of the Mediterranean offers humanity.
It's a gentle novel because even though there are moments of tragedy, they are seen through the eyes of the most empathetic character, so even the most villainous, unlikable characters are given a generous, understanding hearing.
The details of the life of a keeper, whether it's the level crossing or the cemetery are so realistic, evocative and visual, it wouldn't surprise me to hear that this book will soon be turned into a series; it's too long for a movie and with so many interconnecting lives, it even feels like it could have continued, just as life and death does, always someone arriving, someone departing, and someone there to soothe the way through those transitions.
It is an interesting reading exercise to have read an author's work of creative nonfiction before reading either of her two novels, so I come to Sara It is an interesting reading exercise to have read an author's work of creative nonfiction before reading either of her two novels, so I come to Sara Baume's novel, knowing her as a sculptor of birds, an acute observer and thinker about migrations, someone who spends her mornings at her writing desk and her afternoons evenings working with her hands, accumulating and gathering things around her, writing about objects and things, a ponderer.
So when I meet the 57 year old man in Spill Simmer Falter Wither, it takes me a while to think of him as that, because seeing through his eyes and listening to his inner conversation with OneEye, the undisciplined dog he has just adopted, I can tell this character has been sculpted with as much care and detail as one of her many and varied birds in Handiwork.
Her incantory style of storytelling, the repetition of words, the focus on certain words are all giveaways. I loved it, Handiwork was such a sliver of a book, it was over so quickly, like small morsels, often only a paragraph to a page, so it was delightful to go on a journey, once we were able to get him out of the house.
What great characters, what eccentricity gently portrayed, what clever use of the first and second person narrative, what a revelation, what tension, what joy that finally here is a relationship of unconditional love, even if it causes him such anxiety for much of the time.
I think the title and structure are brilliant, only a lover of words and perhaps a scrabble player or reader of the dictionary or thesaurus could have come up with four words that represent the four seasons and almost begin with same two letters and just mildly suggest what the four sections of the book are going to experience. In total awe.
What an unexpected pleasure this was. I spent a week reading it, always looked forward to picking it up and loved the shared narrative between father What an unexpected pleasure this was. I spent a week reading it, always looked forward to picking it up and loved the shared narrative between father and son as they travelled around the world on a research ship, during 8 months, revisiting the sites of Renzo's architectural designs and his memory of the creative process, of the people he met with to understand their needs and that of the community his structures would serve and the incredible cultural immersion all those projects have given, this now 80 year old architect and father.
Renzo and Carlo set sail from Genoa one late summer day, and from the blurb, would have us believe:
guided by the ancestral desire felt by many explorers before them to find Atlantis, the perfect city, built to harbour a perfect society
It is as much a conversation as a travelogue and one that takes place when 80 year old Renzo is still contemplating retirement, this revisiting of his projects and the reflection they invite, the inspiration of old, the dissatisfaction with things he might have done different and the provocation and scandal that his early work, (Beauborg - the Centre Pompidou in Paris) caused.
Sins of Youth After the Paris adventure he spent years defending himself against people who feared they would put pipes up everywhere. Rogers suffered the same fate, a fate reserved for heretics in the Middle Ages.
"I see Beauborg as a joyful urban machine, which inspires more than a few questions."
The son Carlo questions and muses and creates the narrative structure within which his father responds and reflects and by the end I can't even say whose narrative I prefer, there is such a wonderful synergy and relation between the two, Carlo is able to dig further than an interviewer might, because it is his father he knows so well, referring to him by many names throughout, the Explorer, the Constructor, the Old Man. Does he call him the Philosoper? I'm not sure, but he is, his subject creativity and beauty.
Having educated us in how the word 'beauty' differs in Italian, French and many other languages, something that means 'good and beautiful, intrinsic in the essence of something' he reminisces with his staff on their collective purpose: (in a letter he writes on the ship to them on the day of his 80th birthday)
"The pursuit of beauty. The word is hard to articulate. As soon as you open your moth, it flies off, like a bird of paradise. Beauty can not be caught, but we are obliged to reach for it. Beauty is not neutral; pursuing it is a political act. Building is a grand act, a gesture toward peace, the opposite of destruction."
I found the entire book engaging, their journey and revisiting the building projects along the Tames and the Seine, in New Caledonia and New York, San Franciso and Osaka Bay and finally to Athens, providing just enough information and context to keep the narrative interesting and intriguing, with the addition of that element of humanity that only two people who know each other as well as these two could bring.
A light touch allows you, even at your most determined, to listen to others and seek to understand them. A heavy tread you're better off without. Lightness is key to understanding places, and, in that sense, an architect must inhabit the places where he works. I have been a Parisian, a Berliner, a New Yorker, a Londoner, A Kanak. All the while remaining who I am. I think an architect who does not recognize himself in the place he is building cannot capture its soul.
I read this because it was referenced in the last pages of Leila Aboulela's excellent The Kindness of Enemies and is set in the same location as the hI read this because it was referenced in the last pages of Leila Aboulela's excellent The Kindness of Enemies and is set in the same location as the historical part of her book, 1850's Caucasus. Aboulela's book centres on the kidnap of A Russian Princess and her time in captivity under the protection of the Highlander Shamil Imam. He wishes to trade her for his son, help captive by the Russians for more than ten years.
Tolstoy was in the Russian army for a time and clearly witnessed many missions. One of the events he had knowledge of and wrote about, though this novella was published post-humously by his wife, was the defection to Russia and subsequent killing of one of Shamil Khan's chieftans, another Highlander, Hadji Murad.
Though I'm not a huge fan of the classics, there are some exceptions and I did enjoy Anna Karenina, however having read Aboulela's version which really brings the characters alive and highlights their dilemmas so openly, I found it hard to connect with Tolstoy's tale, which rarely touches on lives other than the soldiers and noble decision makers.
The opening scene though is brilliant, the ploughed field, bereft of life, everything turned over, leaves only one sturdy thistle, half destroyed but for that one stalk still standing tall, the flower head emitting its bold crimson colour.
The land was well tilled and nowhere was there a blade of grass or any kind of plant to be seen; it was all black. "Ah, what a destructive creature is man... How many different plant lives he destroys to support his own experience!" thought I, involuntarily looking round for some living thing in this lifeless black field.
It is the scene that brings back the memory of this man Hadji Murad and compels him to write out those pages, perhaps purging himself of a ghastly memory.
"What energy!" I thought. "Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants, yet this one won't submit." And I remembered a Caucasian episode of years ago, which I had partly seen myself, partly heard of from eye-witnesses, and in part imagined.
It does make me think that he had intended not to publish it, that perhaps it was written for another purpose altogether. Particularly as, at the time he wrote it (1896-1903)
he was spending most of his time writing his virulent tracts against the art of fiction and denouncing some of the best writers in the world, including Shakespeare.
In conclusion, it highlights to me the importance of reading various perspectives of history, not just one side or the other, but also across gender. It is refreshing to read a female historian's fictional version of an age old conflict, inhabiting characters who observe from positions of lesser power, of oppression, for their powers of observation are that much stronger than the privileged, it being one of their necessary survival instincts....more
When I opened I, Tituba to begin reading, on the first page there is a quote from the author Maryse Condé that reads:
Tituba and I lived for a year on
When I opened I, Tituba to begin reading, on the first page there is a quote from the author Maryse Condé that reads:
Tituba and I lived for a year on the closest of terms. During our endless conversations she told me things she had confided to nobody else.
It gave me such a good feeling to read that, to know that Condé was doing here, what she does in her novel (though she calls it a work of non fiction) Victoire: My Mother's Mother, when the grandmother she had never met, would awaken her from her dreams and talk to her from the corner of the room, chastising her.
Sometimes I would wake up at night and see her sitting in a corner of the room, like a reproach, so different to what I had become.
‘What are you doing running around from Segu to Japan to South Africa? What’s the point of all these travels? Can’t you realise that the only journey that counts is discovering your inner self? That’s the only thing that matters. What are you waiting for to take an interest in me?’ she seemed to be telling me.
But that book won't be published until 20 years after Condé is having conversations with Tituba.
I, Tituba is the first novel written after Segu and The Children of Segu, historical masterpieces that disrupt and provoke, however the initial reaction was such that she'd declared she would never write about Africa again.
Tituba came to me or I came to her at a period of my life when really I wanted to turn toward the Caribbean and start writing about the Caribbean.
Tituba existed, she was accused and ultimately set free, however, though there were shelves of books about the Salem witch trials, there is very little factual information about her, about who she was, or who freed her, or her life after release from prison.
I felt this eclipse of Tituba's life was completely unjust. I felt a strong solidarity with her, and I wanted to offer her her revenge by inventing a life such as she might perhaps have wished it to be told.
If we look for her story in the history of Salem, it isn't there. Condé too, looked for her history in the colonization of the continent and found silences, omissions, distortions, fabrications and fleeting, enigmatic insinuations.
Review On a ship sailing for Barbados, Christ the King, young Abena was raped by an English sailor. Tituba was born from this act of aggression. Sold to a planter along with two male slaves, she was employed in the household until her pregnancy discovered whereupon she was banished to the cabin of one the male slaves Yao.
A short reprieve, they would find comfort in each other's company and Tituba would be named and loved by a man, more father to her than any other. But that joy in Yao that lightened and lit Abena's life, was seen by the master, who desired it for himself, she struck back, was hung for it and for his concubine's crime, Yao was sold.
Driven off the plantation, Tituba was taken in by an old woman, Mama Yaya, still grieving for her two sons, who had cultivated the ability to communicate with the invisible.
People were afraid of her, but they came from far and wide because of her powers.
Mama Yaya teaches her everything she knows, all her herbal remedies and after meeting her own mother in a dream:
Mama Yaya initiated me into the powers of knowledge. The dead only die if they die in our hearts. They live on if we cherish them and honour their memory, if we place their favourite delicacies in life on their graves, and if we kneel down regularly to commune with them.
And so Tituba is given a past, skills and knowledge and might have remained in that life, had she not grown into a young woman with desires herself and fallen for the man who would become her husband John Indian, who belonged to Goodwife Susanna Endicott in Carlisle Bay, who we encounter in the opening scene of Ann Petry's Tituba of Salem Village.
After a short period in that household where John has lived most of his life, things deteriorate and in an act of revenge the mistress sells them to Samuel Parris, even though Tituba is no slave, but for her husband, whom she could not leave.
In Boston, with the mistress unwell and in a room upstairs, Tituba spends time with the daughter Betsey and orphaned niece Abigail, who makes trouble for her, trouble that spreads like a contagion to other young girls in the community, as they fall prey to strange fits and mass hysteria.
I also recognized Abigail and Betsey's companions in their dangerous games, those young girls whose eyes were shining with excitement. They were dying to roll on the ground too and to attract everybody's attention.
And so the bad behaviours of girls are given credence, turning into accusations of witchcraft against Tituba and others, they are jailed and many lose their lives, until the Govener writes to London for advice on legal proceedings concerning witchcraft resulting in a general pardon and Tituba is condemned to live.
Prison costs mean she can only leave if someone pays and a man with nine children who has lost his wife claims her. And it is through this relation that she will gain her freedom and return full circle.
If the first part is written from compassion and revenge, the second part initially seems strange and challenges the reader, in its use of parody. I found this part difficult to understand, the reader isn't given the satisfaction of a gratifying ending, yet reading further into the essay and interview, I find myself confronted with my own subconscious bias and lack of understanding, a clever and deliberate intervention by the author.
And so Tituba is granted her revenge. We are all complicit.
I found that reading the book and then the few days of thinking about it after reading the interview resulted in a deeper reading experience and consideration. My feeling while reading was no doubt heightened by having read Ann Petry's sympathetic youth version first, Condé hadn't written a story to give hope or courage to today's youth, she was reckoning with the past.
I suggest that though Petry's version was written 30 years before, it might be better to read her more optimistic version last, if one wished to end on that note, despite the fact that her novel is as much fantasy, as Condé's is parody.
Like Condé, who knew and knows nothing of witchcraft, (she uses lots of literary inventions in the glossary at the end), I have decided to read a contemporary book next, one published in 2020, to see what's going on in the world of witchcraft today.
I read this for two reasons, one I've been wanting to read Ann Petry for a while, The Street and The Narrows were republished in 2020, so I'm looking I read this for two reasons, one I've been wanting to read Ann Petry for a while, The Street and The Narrows were republished in 2020, so I'm looking forward to reading them, but the main reason I chose this title is because I'm an avid reader of Maryse Condé, who wrote I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem having been inspired by Ann Petry's book.
I've read nothing about the witch trials before, though I'd heard of them, but I'm glad that this was my introduction, to see this little segment of American history, through the eyes of an innocent black slave, Tituba and her husband John.
As the book opens and Tituba and John are in the kitchen of the Barbados home they live in, the scene is so evocative, you can't imagine how their lives are going to change so abruptly, having been so stable for so long - but then the harsh reality of them being commodities, sold like jewels, to pay a debt, their lives irrevocably changed, within 24 hours they are on a ship heading for the Bay Colony of Boston.
Petry's descriptions of the environment are so evocative, the contrast so great, from the warmth of the island to the damp, unwelcoming cold climate of Massachusetts.
Tituba is a wonderful character, depicted with compassion and understanding, put in a situation where young people are drawn towards her but unable to overcome their own inner hurts, exaggerate and invent scenarios, combining imagination and superstition creating drama that spirals out of control into very real consequences for those accused of "witching", until the farce that it is, becomes all too clear, though not without lives having been lost....more
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