"A refreshing SF novel"
Early in the nineteenth century, on the French colonial
Caribbean Island of Saint Domingue, three female slave
women, led by Doctress Mer, inter a stillborn baby.
During the burial ceremony, they pray to Ezili, the Afro-
Caribbean Goddess of love and sex, to "use" the
infant's "unused vitality". Mer knows first hand how
Ezili resides inside them as the goddess lives within her
to use her when needed for that is how she has the healing
hands. Ezili employs other female African or Afro descendents as
her channel. In the nineteenth century in Paris, Ezili
lives inside mixed blooded Jeanne Duval, lover of poet
Charles Baudelaire. In the fourth-century Nubian Meritet,
changes from a prostitute to the founder of a religion
when Ezili enters her. However, even Goddess' have fears
that they will expire as Ezili worries will happen to her
now that Jeanne' is dying from syphilis. Escape may be
through Mer's prays, but at a moment when the Saint
Domingue slaves seek freedom at any cost could still
endanger the Goddess. Extremely complex in terms of the time paradox, Nalo
Hopkinson shows why she is the leading fabulist of Afro-
Caribbean mythology, religion, and folk tales filled with
Mojo today. The plot spans time and place yet seems so
right though readers will struggle with non-linear events
(string theory anyone) connected via salt and the
Goddess. The three women are fully developed, but
surprisingly in a mystical sense so is Ezili. Nalo
Hopkinson provides another winner with her insightful look
at Afro-Caribbean mythos. Harriet Klausner
Reviewed by PNR Group Member
Posted November 23, 2003
|
|
Multiple award-winning author Nalo Hopkinson delivers a
triumphant novel in the bestselling tradition of such
literary greats as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.When
three Caribbean slave women gather one night to bury a
stillborn baby, their collected mournings braid into a
powerful calling, and a deity is born. So begins the epic
journey of a spirit who, in a desperate bid to discover her
own nature and identity, defies the limitations of time and
place to inhabit the minds of living women throughout
history. From Jeanne Duval, the seductive black mistress of
19th-century bohemian poet Charles Baudelaire, to a Nubian
prostitute on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 300 A.D., the
spirit gathers the power and the wisdom of the ages, only
to come full circle on the island of St. Domingue. There,
she is reunited with the very women who gave her life, and
who still struggle to survive under the tyranny of brutal
masters.
|
