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Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born. When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch," is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist. He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky; where two people, separated by an impossible divide, might begin to see each other as human; and where a boy born in chains can embrace a life of dignity and meaning. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash's head, Titch abandons everything to save him. What follows is their flight along the eastern coast of America, and, finally, to a remote outpost in the Arctic, where Wash, left on his own, must invent another new life.… (altro)
È abbastanza evidente che questo romanzo non è stato scritto da un*autorǝ bianchǝ, che quando raccontano questo genere di storia tendono a fare della persona bianca che tratta in maniera normale e umana la persona nera in tempi di schiavitù e/o segregazione negli USA un*eroǝ. Edugyan, invece, nel raccontare lo sviluppo del rapporto tra Titch, uno dei figli del proprietario di una piantagione di canna da zucchero nelle Barbados, e Wash, uno dellз schiavз che in quella piantagione sono costrettз a lavorare, ci fa domandare: ma Titch è davvero una brava persona?
La domanda sorge spontanea nel corso della lettura perché Titch è un abolizionista e chiaramente è raccapricciato dalle condizioni dellз schiavз nella piantagione di famiglia, ma allo stesso tempo non si fa troppi scrupoli nel chiedere al fratello (che materialmente gestisce la piantagione) di prestargli una manciata di schiavз per i suoi esperimenti scientifici. Uno di questз schiavз, Wash, instaurerà con lui un rapporto molto stretto che continuerà a interrogarci sulle reali intenzioni di Titch. Che poi è un modo per interrogare noi stessз: quanto è solido il nostro antirazzismo? Quanto del nostro antirazzismo è genuino e quanto è parte della nostra vanità e della nostra velleità di essere le brave persone che sogniamo di essere?
Ecco, il rapporto tra Titch e Wash è abbastanza esemplare delle fratture che il razzismo crea nei rapporti interpersonali tra persone bianche e persone razzializzate: Titch non è cattivo, ma nemmeno buono come probabilmente si pensa. È un uomo bianco cresciuto in una società profondamente razzista e ha scalfito appena la superficie del suo razzismo: non basta posare la frusta per non essere più uno schiavista.
Peccato aver avuto con questo romanzo lo stesso problema che avevo avuto con Questo suono è una leggenda: la storia ha catturato subito la mia attenzione, ma, esaurita la sua propulsione iniziale, mi sono ritrovata in una palude. La parte centrale del romanzo mi ha annoiata terribilmente ed è stata una faticaccia arrivare alla parte finale, dove la storia riprende forza. A questo punto penso proprio di avere un problema con quest’autrice, che scrive di tematiche molto interessanti, ma che non riesce proprio a mantenere desto il mio interesse per tutta la durata della storia. ( )
The reader can almost see what is coming. Since Barbados was under British rule, slavery was abolished there in 1834. This, then, could be a novel about the last days of the cruelty, about what happens to a slave-owning family and to the slaves during the waning of the old dispensation.
The Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan has other ideas, however. She is determined that the fate of Washington Black will not be dictated by history, that the novel instead will give him permission to soar above his circumstances and live a life that has been shaped by his imagination, his intelligence and his rich sensibility....Edugyan is willing to take great risks to release the reader from any easy or predictable interpretations of Washington. She is not afraid to allow him to have thoughts and knowledge that seem oddly beyond his command. That is part of his ambiguous power in the book, the idea that, owing to his unusual quickness and subtlety of mind, Washington can be trusted to know more than he should
Washington Black opens on a 19th-century sugar plantation in Barbados and launches into the horrors of that experience from the child’s-eye view of the eponymous Washington Black, an 11-year-old slave. But it would be a mistake to think that Esi Edugyan’s Man Booker-longlisted third book is an earnest story of colonial slavery....it is clear that Edugyan is coming at her subject sideways, not with gritty realism but with fabular edges, and as much concerned with the nature of freedom as with slavery, both for her white characters and black....The beauty here lies in Edugyan’s language, which is precise, vivid, always concerned with wordcraft and captivating for it...It’s not what readers who are wedded to realism might want, but Edugyan’s fiction always stays strong, beautiful and beguiling.
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For Cleo & Maddox
Incipit
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I might have been ten, eleven years old—I cannot say for certain—when my first master died.
Citazioni
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I had not thought he bore any sort of relation to the master, but now the resemblance rose to sight, like a watermark: the brisk, bright-coloured eyes, the oddly plump lower lips, the way each man punctuated the ends of certain phrases with a languid sweep of the hand, as if the gesture were being performed underwater.
"I will never understand why you seek offence in everything I say. It is only the two of us here, and I have come for a limited stay. Would our time not be better enjoyed if we tried to understand each other?"
My voice seemed to stick to my ribs.
I was surprised by his great need to talk, as though he had gone several years without companionship.
But no secret can be kept for long. It is one of the truths of this world.
"What are our lives but a series of farewells and returns, no?"
What I knew was that a day would come when she would no longer be enslaved, and on that day she would slaughter many before she carried me off to freedom.
I walked to the southern cliff edge and stared at the glittering blue ocean, its pricks of light there like thousands of cane-knives.
Far out at sea, a great flock of seagulls rose and turned, the late afternoon light flaring on the undersides of their wings.
Time seemed to slow, distend around us.
And though they were far away, I imagined I could hear them talking, the scorch of their bronzed voices.
"If I hesitate, I suppose it is only from a general dread of company. We all of us wish for it, in our solitude, but on the eve of a great visit, we shudder."
Swells of dust boiled up off the roads.
Bridge Town seemed to extend forever, to my innocent eye.
Everywhere people called out, their voices bright and harsh; luggage thundered down gangplanks; sweating black porters hoisted above their heads crates of pale new wood. There was everywhere much colour, and great motion.
He had never struck me, but the possibility floated between us like a thread of music.
The cotton had been coated in a thick rubber film, giving it the feel of something once alive, of corpse flesh.
She was much changed, it was true, maimed terribly, grown thinner, the hair at her temples silver as flies' wings. Aged, now, as though decades had separated us. But I was the more changed; that was the uglier truth.
Above us, the birds wheeled blackly in the starched light.
The ship rose again, vertically, coasting up a wall of water. I was staring upside down into the darkness, and it seemed the world had gone mad.
The captain was powerful, all spit and outrage, an extension of the storm itself.
"Freedom, Wash, is a word with different meanings to different people," he said, as though I did not know the truth of this better than he.
Mister Benedikt smiled a thin, vinegary smile.
He reached out and touched the burnt half of my face, drawing his rough hand sharply back almost at once, as if scorched. I was too surprised to move. I stood stunned by the feel of his fingers. His touch had been cool, and gentle, and somehow, though I would never have thought it, filled with an impossible sadness.
THE AIR CLENCHED to ice, stinging our cheeks.
We did not speak of it, but with every league through those waters a sense of lightness, of freedom, took hold in us. It was as though the great emptiness allowed us to forget.
Slowly, like a shadow unattached to any entity, he began to drift towards us.
AH, BUT THE COLD. I dreamed about that cold for years after. It had a colour, a taste—it wrapped itself around me like an unwelcome skin and began, ever so delicately, to squeeze. My healed ribs started to ache. I could not catch my breath.
I listened sleepily to their halting voices, and it was as though both belonged to ghosts, so gauzy and hollow were they.
One day I sat sketching a specimen. And though I had made many a sketch before, I was suddenly astonished at myself—at what I could create with these thin, tremulous fingers with their nail beds lined always in dirt. The image seemed less a drawing than a haunting, a vision of the specimen's afterlife, set down in a ghostly lustre of ink. How far I had come these long months; how much I had grown in both art and life.
But my true study remained, I understand now, the curious person of Titch. He was, I feared, becoming increasingly lost within himself. I suppose there must have been a deep love between him and his father, a love I could get no sense for because of its reticence. But as with most loves, it was shadowy, and painful, and confusing, and Titch seemed to me overly eager and too often hurt.
We stood in that obliterating whiteness, as though the world had vanished.
He entered a white void, and the roaring oblivion of that place closed around him, ate him whole. And so it was that he walked calmly out of his life, and was lost.
I BEGAN TO CRY; the tears froze at once and pulled like sutures at the skin of my cheeks.
I stared at Mister Wilde, his face stubborn as an Old Testament god's, his eyes ferocious and damning, an old man stooped in a bad light, carving away at his worry.
I went every morning with him to check the traps at the perimeter, but it was only to distance my mind from my troubles; we collected nothing and spent most of the hours walking silently, gazing out at the hardened cataracts of ice.
He was not a bad man, I believe. But I sensed he was not a good one either. There were few men in that place, in those years, who had not learned the hard way of living.
SUCH WAS THE WAY of the place, at that time. There was a quiet lawlessness to it all that was often grotesque. The viciousness between the races was bracing enough, but almost as dreadful was the way blacks sometimes treated one another, as if all they had endured in cruelty would be paid back doubly on their brothers. Sometimes it felt as though I had not travelled very far from the rundown huts of Faith.
I heard only the ocean between us, the static hush of the water.
I recalled Erasmus, his thatch of white hair and his pale eyes like steel shavings, the refined, almost cultured cruelty. I did not understand how he could be granted so merciful a death as a fever. However painfully it had struck him down, the release seemed too easy—like a betrayal of the countless men and women and children whose fates he had ended on a whim, because the sky on that day was too blue or they moved too slowly through the field or the moon had kept him up the night previous.
The evening was quiet, the vacant streets echoing distantly with the clattering of far-off carriages.
Stacked by its side was a pile of stained, warped books, as though tea had been poured over them.
The porch groaned, as though ghosts walked back and forth upon it.
"Truth has a way of coming clear," said she.
And so the hours at sea were rich and peaceful, and I thought with a kind of longing of those strange months of drifting towards the Arctic, when the days turned endlessly white and freedom seemed a thing I might live in, like a coat, a warmth I could draw around myself as some armour against the world.
The grounds had a feeling of plenitude, of growth and richness, but there was also a sense of vacancy, as though the place had been abandoned not only by its people but by progress itself. One felt great age, and a silence like a held pause; it was as though everything that could happen here had already occurred, as though you were wading into an aftermath.
His writing was difficult to decipher, the letters like sutures stitched into the page.
She loved me with a viciousness that kept me from ever feeling complacent, with the reminder that nothing was permanent, that we would one day be lost to each other.
As we rounded the corner, the crowd seemed to rise out of the muck like some rabid hallucination.
How easy it is, to waste a life.
Abruptly, night fell. It was as though someone had set a lid over the earth, so quickly did it happen.
In the outer dark, the sand hissed against the windows like human whispers.
Ultime parole
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The wind across my forehead was like a living thing.
Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born. When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch," is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist. He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky; where two people, separated by an impossible divide, might begin to see each other as human; and where a boy born in chains can embrace a life of dignity and meaning. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash's head, Titch abandons everything to save him. What follows is their flight along the eastern coast of America, and, finally, to a remote outpost in the Arctic, where Wash, left on his own, must invent another new life.
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(3.91)
2
La domanda sorge spontanea nel corso della lettura perché Titch è un abolizionista e chiaramente è raccapricciato dalle condizioni dellз schiavз nella piantagione di famiglia, ma allo stesso tempo non si fa troppi scrupoli nel chiedere al fratello (che materialmente gestisce la piantagione) di prestargli una manciata di schiavз per i suoi esperimenti scientifici. Uno di questз schiavз, Wash, instaurerà con lui un rapporto molto stretto che continuerà a interrogarci sulle reali intenzioni di Titch. Che poi è un modo per interrogare noi stessз: quanto è solido il nostro antirazzismo? Quanto del nostro antirazzismo è genuino e quanto è parte della nostra vanità e della nostra velleità di essere le brave persone che sogniamo di essere?
Ecco, il rapporto tra Titch e Wash è abbastanza esemplare delle fratture che il razzismo crea nei rapporti interpersonali tra persone bianche e persone razzializzate: Titch non è cattivo, ma nemmeno buono come probabilmente si pensa. È un uomo bianco cresciuto in una società profondamente razzista e ha scalfito appena la superficie del suo razzismo: non basta posare la frusta per non essere più uno schiavista.
Peccato aver avuto con questo romanzo lo stesso problema che avevo avuto con Questo suono è una leggenda: la storia ha catturato subito la mia attenzione, ma, esaurita la sua propulsione iniziale, mi sono ritrovata in una palude. La parte centrale del romanzo mi ha annoiata terribilmente ed è stata una faticaccia arrivare alla parte finale, dove la storia riprende forza. A questo punto penso proprio di avere un problema con quest’autrice, che scrive di tematiche molto interessanti, ma che non riesce proprio a mantenere desto il mio interesse per tutta la durata della storia. (