Blonde Roots
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Wednesday 24 February |
Introduction
First up for discussion is Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Blonde Roots, a re-imagining of past and present history in which the slave trade is turned on its head: Africans are the masters, Europeans their slaves.
Described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘A bold and brilliant game of counterfactual history, Evaristo keeps her wit and anger at a spicy simmer throughout.’
Blonde Roots follows the story of Doris, plucked from her cottage in England and thrown into the hold of a slave ship for the passage to the New World. Sent to work on a tropical island, Doris is labelled ‘a pig-ugly savage with a brain the size of a pea’, her only purpose in life being to please her mistress, before she becomes a personal assistant to a slavemaster.
Award-winning Bernardine Evaristo was born in London to an English mother and a Nigerian father. She has written novels-in-verse, coedited Granta’s New Writing 15, and has also written for The Guardian, The Times, and the BBC. She is a fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Arts.