Beyond Victimhood: Explorations of Trauma in Neo-Slave Narratives of Andrea Levy's The Long Song, Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots, and Marlon James's The Book of Night Women

Abstract

Published around the year 2010, three neo-slave narratives, namely Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2010), Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots (2008), and Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women (2009) take their readers to the traumatic past of British slavery. The expansion of trauma studies in the 1990s brought to the foreground the role of literature in the representation of trauma. The strand of trauma studies in literature maintains that literature can imitate the processes of trauma and its symptoms through experimental methods of narration and narrative devices. In line with varied nature of symptoms of trauma, the three novels depict the traumatic stories of their protagonists’ lives under bondage and their equally turbulent roads to freedom. As these are neo-slave narratives, freedom is not represented to be the ultimate goal in these texts as opposed to the original slave narratives. Accordingly, it rarely brings any sense of fulfilment to the protagonists who are psychologically burdened by their experience by the time they are free. The Long Song’s July finds herself unable to leave the grounds of Amity plantation after losing her two children and love interest. Blonde Roots’ Doris realizes that her former lover is a changed man and cannot be together with him after she is free. She lives a quiet life confined to the Maroon town until emancipation. Finally, The Book of Night Women’s Lilith refuses to take part in the revolt orchestrated by the Night Women in order to free herself from the cycle of violence she experiences both as victim and perpetrator. All three novels have women slaves as protagonists because they represent the most disadvantaged group to depict both sexual and systematic violence inflicted on them during slavery. Moreover, slavery is part of a traumatic past which impacted a large number of people and still has impact on how cultural identities are formed in the contemporary world. The three novels form an empowering voice for the inheritors of that traumatic past by stylistically avoiding forming victim narratives.