In Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Blonde Roots the audience read about a parallel universe where The Africans are the colonizer and The Europeans are the colonized. Evaristo knows that reality is relative, and it can change. People can only create reality through their knowledge, thus Evaristo uses History to create her mirrored reality. She explores the notion of what people consider truth depends on how they look at it. This paper will argue how she created this version of reality and how she constructs a social criticism through the protagonist’s psychology.
Evaristo creates a universe where she implies the importance of naming. The ones who have the power to name will be the determiner of the rest of the history for creating the archetype. For example, Christopher Colombus named the new continent because he was the first one to ‘discover’. Although that continent existed for millions of years, the old world had the power to name the ‘New’ world. Evaristo names the island where slaves worked in plantations New Ambossa as for being the property of the Great Ambossa.
We know from Freud and Lacan that the self is defined through the other. Thus in dichotomy when one side tries to destroy the other, it destroys itself. Evaristo constructs this destruction in her parallel universe. For example, on page 34, Doris explains this by saying that every demand of the colonizer came with a price for being a disease in the colonizer. Moreover, page 75 is important for showing the turning point for the protagonist when she realized the division between ‘her kind’ and ‘the other’. She realizes that the only thing that defines her kind is color and she will suffer for it.
The second book shows how ‘the self’ is glorified through the interaction with ‘the other’. It could be said that the second book is written with the objective of reports and letters of the first Europeans such as Hernan Cortes, Peter Martyr, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Thomas Hariot who narrated early contacts of Europeans and Native Americans.
The Europeans were furious to see that there were another way of living without laws, time, and judges- without complexities. Their worst assumption was that natives did not have a culture. The Euro-centric knowledge concluded that ‘white man’s burden’ was to carry ‘the civilization’ to natives who accepted as savages, as a child who has to learn about the ‘true religion’. Bwana’s narrative ironically mirrors real-world history. It shows that when one comes across something out of ordinary, one either shocks or disgust. In disgust, one chooses to marginalize the other. Evaristo’s witty narrative mirrors history perfectly; the narcissistic point of view which tried to justify colonialism and genocide is satirized in Bwana’s accounts. Because he is a ‘reasonable man’ he explains why The Caucasian is the dominated race and why The Negroid are the dominant based upon ‘scientific facts’. Bwana dehumanizes natives by mocking the way they speak, the way they dress, and by the color of their eyes. Their practices are looked down on by the ‘superior’ race. The use of the guillotine, witch trials, and superstitious beliefs of the natives looks so primitive that it almost legitimatize Bwana’s theory about Negroid being the evolved race.
According to the theory of intertextuality, every work of literature includes intertextual quality in terms of carrying the literature legacy in their contexts one way or another. Evaristo uses this theory to make allusions in the novella. For example, the reader should know about the canons like Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad so that they could understand the multiple references made by Evaristo in the chapter Heart of Greyness with close reading. The other canon mentioned is Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet B. Stowe on page 231 to Uncle Tom who is a loyal slave satirized by Doris implying King Shaka.
According to Bhabha and Lacan, mimicry appears when colonized society imitates the culture of the colonizer. This metonym could happen as to ‘camouflage’, or could happen as the outcome of the colonizer’s desire for ‘recognizable other’. Evaristo uses this theory to show the colonizer’s effect on colonized in the various places in slaves’ lives. It can be read on page 30 when Doris explains that White women fashion themselves to look like Ambossan women. They wore braids and earlobes, insert brass discs, and shot chicken bones through their noses like an Ambossan woman. Moreover on page 19, Doris tells how her straight blonde hair was threaded through with wire because her master Madame Blessing wanted so.
Evaristo constructs social criticism through the issues of identity crisis, dehumanization, and urge to freedom. Identity crisis is issued with the protagonist, Doris whose name is changed by her owners to Omorenomwara (which ironically meant ‘This child will not suffer’), and what belonged to Doris; her family, her home, her country, and her identity died so that she could survive in her new identity. On page 191, she explains how on Little Londolo she had to control herself all the time for she was surrounded by masters, however, in the plantation where her race is majority she thought she could be herself but she did not know who she was. Evaristo shows how the colonizers smashed the souls and the bodies of the colonized so that they could shape them up as they like.
Dehumanization could be seen in the multiple practices of masters, however, it could be argued that Evaristo draws attention to one specific problem that the slaves are made to believe that they are not worthy of love, good health, or happiness. On page 188, Doris believes that no one will love her again because of her wounds and how ugly it looks. She is made to believe that she did not deserve motherhood and the pain that it created could be read on page 197 when Ye Meme is playing with her daughter. People can survive the hardships of life way easier if they know that they are loved. Doris does not have a lover or a family to get the strength she needs thus she easily falls into the valley of despair.
The last issue is the urge for freedom and fort that Evaristo chose to end the novel with an escape. The slaves who were born in slavery believed that the life they had was the only way of living thus they did not suffer from the memories of a once gone freedom. With Doris’s plans to escape again, Evaristo shows that there will always be someone who does not submit and changes history.
In conclusion, Bernardine Evaristo creates a universe where she includes multiple voices, different points of view, and different perceptions to show the audience that the problem is not in the race or the color of that race. The problem is how people go through times and spaces with hatred and greed that they create the collective unconscious filled with violence and cruelty. Evaristo’s end shows that at any time, in any universe, tables could turn with the last thing that is left in Pandora’s box.
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