Book Review: 1666

  By Lora Chilton

• Pub Date: 2023

• Genre: Historical fiction

• Where I bought this book: Joseph-Beth Bookstore, Lexington, during the Kentucky Book Fair 

• Why I bought this book: The author talked me into it  

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    The thing you have to understand about this book, and what affected me the most, is that these were real people who survived the horrors within.

    The PaTow'O'Mek tribe of what is now called Virginia actually existed, and because of the people written about and their descendants, exist again. That is no small thing, considering how America was built on the wanton destruction of the native people and their lifestyles.

    The novel begins with the tribe living in a time of change, when the Strangers have come and expressed an intent to take the land, regardless of the desires of the current inhabitants. Several tribes live on the land, with similar lifestyles but with shifting interests and coalitions. The Strangers take advantage, and with superior weaponry and numbers (not to mention the diseases they bring), take what they want.

    In doing so, they massacre all the male members of the PaTow'O'Mek tribe -- now known as the Patawomeck. They capture the women and children they don't kill, and sell them into slavery in the sugar fields of Barbados.

    The survival story is told in alternating chapters through two women who lived through the massacre and whom we meet again aboard the slave ships. Ah'SaWei and Xo, tribal friends, are split up when they arrived. Xo has the harder enslavement of the two, being regularly subjected to rapes and beatings. Ah'SaWei's enslaver is a Quaker, who is less vicious in the treatment of the people he enslaved.

    Several parts are particularly difficult to read, as the author spares little in documenting the violence inflicted on those who were kidnapped and enslaved. But it's necessary to lay it all out, as it explores the inhumanity of the original colonists, and the suffering of those whose lives and lifestyles were uprooted and destroyed.

    Chilton, the author, is a member of the tribe, and she interviewed tribal elders, studied the language, and researched documents from the colonial era and beyond to put together the tale. It's quite an amazing work that reads like literary history, and marks the trauma, pain, sadness, and eventually triumph.

Book Review: Unfamiliar Fishes

 By Sarah Vowell

• Pub Date: 2011

• Where I bought this book: Last Exit Books, Kent, Ohio 

• Why I bought this book: I read a previous book by the same author and liked her writing style

*****

    It's the final decade of the 19th Century, and the United States is feeling mighty smug about itself.

    That whole Manifest Destiny thing is working out pretty well. The country covers the area between Canada and Mexico, from sea to shining sea, with just a few areas yet to be consolidated into several states. So it's time to look further out, build up its sea power with a big ole navy and widespread naval bases, and start becoming a world power.

    Look to the west. There's lots of oceans and countries to  acquire, starting with the Sandwich Islands. Indeed, it even has a foothold in those lands, called Hawaii by the natives, and it's sure the monarchy will enjoy being part of the Greatest Country on Earth. (r) If the islanders kick up a fuss, it can always remind Queen Liliuokalani what happened to King George III's forces back in 1781 at the Battle of Yorktown.

    And the United States had been muddling around in Hawaii since 1820, when a couple of New Englanders set out to Christianize the population and stuck around, so they and their descendants could change the natives' culture and overthrow their queen.

    It's quite an agenda, and when you read the history books, you realize that before the dawn of the 20th Century, the United States had invaded the Philippines in a war with Spain that started with a bombing (or maybe just an explosion?) in Cuba. It had taken colonies in the Caribbean, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines. It was well on its way to becoming a world power.

    Vowell sees 1898 as the pivot-point of that domination, when all of the United States' meddling and wannabe imperialism came together. Looking back at the islands' history and culture, its geography and politics, she gives a broad oversight about what happened in the 70-odd years the United States nosed around and took control.

    With her trademark caustic wit and satirical asides, she tells about how the Pilgrims and Puritans bring what they see as their superior culture -- particularly their religion -- to a land of lost souls. It's timely reading now, and you can learn how the recent firestorms and deaths are tied to the changes they brought to Hawaii's traditional culture.

Just as the sugar plantations changed the islands' ethnic makeup, they also profoundly altered the physical landscape. We were talking about Maui's central plain before the advent of commercial agriculture. (Gaylord Kubota, director of the Sugar Museum on Maui) says, "Isabella Bird, a traveler in the 1870s, described central Maui as a veritable Sahara in miniature. There were these clouds of sand and dust. That's what central Maui looked like before. . . . (Kubota shows Vowell a photo and points out) a visible line where the irrigated land stops. There the greenery ends, and the desert, complete with cactus, begins.

    The dry climate of the island was covered over. It helped feed the fire of the past month.

Book Review: Here Comes the Sun

 Here Comes the Sun, by Nicole Dennis-Benn

    Poverty and despair, combined wth judgmental Christianity, do not bode well for a society.

    Especially when it is comprised of people of color whose ancestors were enslaved by the European colonizers who already had killed off the indigenous population. After a few hundred years of this treatment, they live on a Caribbean island where catering to weathy tourists is their major source of income.

    Thus, we see a society -- at least the one portrayed in this novel, written by a Jamaican woman -- where the exploitation of others seems to be the norm. Striving to be something other than what you are runs a close second.

    It's not a happy novel about reggae music and lolling in the sun smoking weed. Instead, it depicts people struggling against themselves, their families, and their heritage, to achieve what they have been taught they need -- and discovering they have to exploit and betray not ony their loved ones, but their very souls.

    This is Dennis-Benn's first novel, written in 2016, and it's a good one. The writing is superb, rich in language and history. Many characters speak in Jamaican Patois -- except when they need to impress someone richer or whiter than they are -- and while it's sometimes difficult for a reader to disentangle, it adds a sense of realism.

    The main character, Margot, uses power and sex to climb up the corporate ladder of the hotel where she works. She controls the future of her sister, Thandi, by wielding promises to pay for her education. Thandi wants to be an artist, but Margot persuades her she wants to be a doctor. Thandi also participates in her own exploitation by literally trying to be whiter than she is -- using lightening creams provided by a respected elder, Miss Ruby, and wrapping herself in plastic, despite the hot sun -- to erase her blackness.

"Remembah to stay outta the sun like ah tell yuh," Miss Ruby says. "'Cause you and I both know, God nuh like ugly."

    Others in the book routinely manipulate those around them. Miss Ruby encourages the uses of creams to make them paler. Margot's and Thandi's mother, Delores, sells them to older men. Those men rape and assault the woman around them.

    It comes to a head as a new hotel arises on the banks of their small community, the fruition of Margot's dream. But Thandi revolts to an extent, and as their futures play out, we learn the trauma and abuses of their pasts, partly explaining their actions.

Book Review: Girl, Woman, Other

Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo

    This book is additional proof that the Booker Prize never leads you astray.

    It also shows the benefits of reading literature.

    The 2019 winner of the British-based prize, by Evaristo, an Anglo-Nigerian writer, was cited for "a gloriously new kind of history for this old country."

    Indeed. These seemingly random, but ultimately interconnected profiles of women -- mostly of color, but young and old, cis and trans, gay, straight, and bi -- are a wonderful collection of tales from groups who seldon are heard from and less often listened to. But these women deserve to be seen and heard, and noticed.

    And they are. And it is good.

    These vignettes tell the stories of women's lives. They demand that people like me -- a white, older male -- listen to their struggles and their success. The show me their cultures -- old, new, and joined. 

    Some show why they left their African or Caribbean homes for a difficult if more prosperous life in England, and how they fought to survive, adapt, yet hold on to their past.

    The descriptions connect mothers and daughters, or grandmothers and granddaughters, or descendants to their ancestors, and show us the lives of several generations. 

    One woman clings to her Nigerian heritage, but has no plans to return to her native home. Despite the racism and the poverty, her home and her life are now in England, and she cherishes being British. Another dreams of returning home, but cannot see a future for her there. Another not only lives her Nigerian culture, but desires to pass it, unchanging, to her daughter. But her daughter prefers her own Britishness, which she has fought hard to accept and be accepted in.

    The book's format allows for a full telling of an individual's prosopography. First, we hear from one woman, giving her background, her experiences, and her views on her life and work. A following chapter will tell the story of another person, until it slowly dawns on us that she is related -- by blood, marriage, or heritage -- to a previous person in the book. Then another individual's profle is told, and that person gives insight into previous -- and perhaps a future -- character.

    It's a compelling collection of tales, full of surprises, evocative yet pointed in its writing, colorful in its descriptions, and sensitive in its narrative.While it may not show the full panoply of women's views and stories, it tells a wide and impressive range.