Review: The Book of Night Women
Writing a novel is hard, but satisfying, work. If it’s a historical novel, double the amount of work, to get language and social background correct. The Book of Night Women, by Marlon James raises the standards for historical fiction.
James begins by choosing a setting — the lead-up to a slave revolt in Jamaica at the turn of the 19th century in Jamaica — with enough depth to justify the work invested in writing about it. He uses it to explore the effects of slavery armored in White supremacy on everyone: Blacks, Whites, slaves, overseers, owners, without allowing himself to take sides.
The story, told entirely in Jamaican dialect, unfolds through the viewpoint of fifteen-year-old Lilith, a mixed-race woman born to a slave raped by an overseer. Lilith grows from a naïve but assertive child, to an adolescent who thinks herself privileged because of her light skin, which makes her resented by the other slaves. She is also struggling to understand relations between men and women, made even more confusing in that setting because of distortion resulting from slavery and White supremacy. James achieves one of the best efforts anywhere at creating a believable character of a gender opposite to his own.
When Lilith is sold to a nearby, failing, plantation the sadistic owner attempts to use her as a sex toy. She resists, is able to overcome him, and kills him. She also kills his wife in attempting to escape, and to conceal what has happened, sets the house on fire, unintentionally killing the owner’s two small children, and their Black nurse. She escapes punishment, but not guilt for the death of the children, the nurse, or the other slave who was blamed for the fire and tortured to death. The guilt is manifested as post-traumatic flashbacks that she interprets through a lens of African spiritualism. The child that readers have watched maturing has now realized that she is an adult who chooses her own actions and must own them, if only to herself.
Because of the consummate skill with which James makes it about slavery and it’s knock-on effects rather than race, it didn’t occur to me to feel bad reading this book as a White woman. Over and over we see slavery twist and distort the reactions of all characters, as they contort their thinking either to maintain their belief in White supremacy, or maintain their belief that in the essential evil of all Whites. James consistently keeps the focus on Lilith’s internal conflict, between the efforts of the Black resistance network to recruit her, and her relationships with Whites she has come to know as individuals.
James shows how racism operates, not merely as a strategy to justify and maintain slavery, but class boundaries as a whole, now that slavery has been (sort of) displaced by wage labour. It is exactly this fact that makes racism so hard to eradicate; anyone can recognize the humanity of a person of another race—or will have to perform endless exhausting mental contortions to avoid doing so. But few people with even the most minimal stake in the system are willing to risk social exclusion and material loss to overturn it, especially since the prospects of success are so unpromising.
The post-slavery path of social evolution in other societies was different. Brazil imported far more slaves than America and for a generation longer. They had numerous and formidable slave/indigenous rebellions, but there was never an official ideology of White supremacy. It was easier for a slave to achieve manumission; Brazilian-born slaves seldom joined the revolts, and mulattoes were the militia that put down revolts. At the time slavery was abolished, a current historian has estimated that 30 per cent of the owners were themselves former slaves. (all this via Wikipedia and thus subject to correction) Almost every society complex enough to have a division of labour has gone through a stage of development that involved slavery, but not all of them have conflated slavery with race. What made the difference?
Laura Quainoo had some other questions:
How many generations could you watch this happen before you settled into the idea that that’s just who White people were in that era and that killing them was the only way to freedom or even to bring the slightest relief or satisfaction?
This would be an essentialist argument. Are White people just inherently evil? It’s the same kind of thinking that claims Black people are inherently inferior, and neither one survives acquaintanceship with a variety of individuals of any race. Neither Blacks nor Whites could never ‘settle into the idea’ because they would keep encountering actual people whose existence denies this proposition. James shows this by the struggle his characters have to engage in to maintain the internal beliefs necessary to their identity, with varying degrees of desperation and success.
“If you were held in bondage, your children were sold away, your loved ones strung up and mercilessly whipped or otherwise maimed and tortured, could you take an entire family of White folks out, including children, at the first opportunity?”
Every head of state who has ever ordered an air strike has taken out entire families. We do this all the time when we even suspect the threat of such a fate — we call it war. On an individual, personal basis? Romeo Dallaire has some thoughts on this.
