“In memory of the ten to twelve million Africans taken as slaves to Europe then to the Americas… and their descendants, 1444 – 1888”: this is the epigraph of “Blond Roots”, a fable by Bernardine Evaristo, the first woman black to have obtained the prestigious Booker Price, considered the heiress of Toni Morrison.
blonde rootsimaginary story by Bernardine Evaristo, activist, British playwright, president of the Royal Society of Literature, whose French translation was published on February 2, by Globe editions, immediately poses the following theme: “What if Africa had conquered the world? What if the masters had become slaves?”
blonde roots was published 15 years ago, in 2008, under the same title, in English. It was one of the first novels by Bernardine Evaristo, an academic writer born in London in 1959, of an English mother, a Nigerian father. Since then there have been many other books, and she received the Booker Prize, the British equivalent of the Goncourt for girl, womananother, novel that takes us inside the heads of British women of all ages, but almost all black.
Bernardine Evaristo has written extensively on this theme of racism, and on black life in the UK. A very committed author, activist and playwright, she therefore imagined in blonde roots a planet where Africa has conquered the world, and where white people are often enslaved.
We thus follow the fate of Doris, the daughter of English farmers, kidnapped by traffickers and resold to Aphrika, bought by a wealthy family to keep their daughter company, then sold to a powerful landowner. Doris has become this master’s indispensable secretary. She is part of the envied elite of slaves. But growing up, of course, she dreams of freedom underground, in the corridors of a forgotten metro. A resistance has formed.
Former slaves and black humanists organize the return home of the most courageous. But Doris is taken back. He is sent to work in the fields, on distant islands, as a form of punishment. And it is there that she discovers the culture of plantation slaves, and paradoxically unexpectedly reconnects with her roots. Everything is told with great precision.
An uchronic fable
An imaginary world, where we find all the myths but inverted from the world of slaves in the United States, like this underground metro which refers to the famous underground “rail road” which was nothing like an underground train, but was made up of the roads, the networks actually taken by the slaves who fled their condition. The American novelist Colson Whitehead recounts it in a novel, Underground Railroad.
So with great precision, Bernardine Evaristo reverses the history of whites and blacks. And in the midst of untold cruelty, it’s even sometimes funny, especially when the author goes all the way to physical details – the canons of beauty in this world are black – white people want to look like them, black people like it. white exoticism, etc.
The language of Bernardine Evaristo is very rich, a story that can only question the reader about the legacy of slavery and racist prejudices.