![]() Africa becomes Aphrika, Caucasians are “wiggers” and “Auld Lang Syne” is a field holler. ![]() The Africans don’t only own the Europeans-geography and language are also shaped by their rule. During her journey, Doris encounters a colorful group of characters, from abolitionist natives to stalwart Welsh field workers and the few free whites whose customs and slang imitate those of the dominant Africans.Īlthough the plot is brisk and the tone lively, the story is almost secondary to Evaristo’s imagined world. ![]() The vital culture of the field slaves, whose memories of a shared European homeland permeate their religious practices, chants and foods, engages her, but she still plots her escape. Doris longs for the gray skies of home and escapes, only to be recaptured and sent to a remote plantation where she works in the sugar cane fields. She is sold to Chief Katamba, who brands her, but also educates her enough to keep her as a house slave. Renamed Omorenomwara, she barely survives the journey to the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa. The picaresque story is told in spirited fashion by Doris Scagglethorpe, a young girl plucked from her family’s modest cabbage farm by the sea and sold into slavery. Evaristo turns everything we thought we knew about slavery upside-down: in her book, Europeans are enslaved and Africans are the owners. ![]() ![]() Novelists and historians are often tempted to play the ‘what-if’ game, but few of these attempts result in anything as inspired as Blonde Roots, Bernardine Evaristo’s newest novel and her first to be published in the U.S. ![]()
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