Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), 448 pages, ISBN 978-1594484360 (paper).

It should come as no surprise that Marlon James’s second novel, The Book of Night Women, is not an easy text.  We never expect a slave narrative (recalling as it must the old story of brutality and injustice, speaking plainly of what is most abhorrent in human thought and action) to leave us comfortable in our skin.  Nevertheless, even within this seemingly endless body of stories, all devastating the heart of the reader with the darkest moments in the history of the Americas, James’s book is perhaps uniquely exhausting—and uniquely deserving of our attention. (more…)

Reanna Ursin

Andrea Levy, The Long Song (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 312 pages, ISBN 978-0755359417 (paper).

 In her explanatory essay, “The writing of The Long Song,” Andrea Levy describes her fifth novel as an attempt to “breathe back the life of ordinary people into the skeleton of recorded events.” [1] The Long Song relegates documented History to the margins of personal experience, reminding readers throughout that history is not only “made,” but lived. Fixing her gaze on 19^th century Jamaica, Levy crafts her historical novel as the tale of a formerly enslaved woman with a story “that lay so fat within her breast that she felt impelled, by some force which was mightier than her own will” to pass it on to her descendants (3). Though the narrative contains elements of what Levy terms the “morality play” of slavery—rapacious masters, self-important quadroons and brutal overseers all make their requisite appearances—it does not attempt to explain slavery’s existence and eventual collapse. Instead, The Long Song seeks to recover the “chatter and clatter of people building their lives, families and communities, ducking, diving and conducting the businesses of life in appallingly difficult circumstances.” [2]  Where Levy falters is in belaboring History’s fallibility. A few examples: a suicide is documented as murder, the lush background in a portrait renders invisible the blacks in its midst and an essay published in a Baptist magazine proves to be exaggerated for the sake of humor and self-aggrandizement. (more…)

Raphael Dalleo

Chris Bongie, Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 412 pages, ISBN: 978-1-84631-142-0.

Friends and Enemies is an ambitious book that seeks to bring to light the crucial questions that Chris Bongie argues postcolonial studies has too long repressed. Bongie identifies one major turn that postcolonial studies has taken since 2000—a growing suspicion of poststructuralist-influenced textualism and investment in “politics proper”—as well as another turn that he hopes the field will take—a more sustained engagement with cultural studies. Bongie’s methodology is eclectic, seeking to combine sociological insights with deconstructive techniques, and it provides a refreshing willingness to interrogate all of the field’s (as well as all of the critic’s own) basic assumptions. Binary terms such as high versus mass culture, artist versus scribe, “true” memory versus nostalgia, and of course, friends versus enemies, are shown to be everywhere essential to Caribbean, francophone and postcolonial studies and yet everywhere unsustainable as oppositions. For anyone who dismisses deconstruction as a reading strategy unengaged with the social, Friends and Enemies shows how the methodology lends itself to sustained political engagement, though what kind of politics it offers remains as uncertain as the uneasy alliances Bongie seeks to make between deconstruction and cultural studies. (more…)