Set in the
1830s, this novel, shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Giller
Prize, covers about eight years in the life of its narrator, George Washington
Black (Wash).
Wash was
born into slavery on a sugar plantation in Barbados. When he is 11, he is rescued from the
brutality of field work when chosen by Christopher Wilde (Titch), a naturalist
and inventor and the brother of the plantation owner, to be his manservant and
to assist him in his scientific endeavours.
Wash’s intelligence and his aptitude for drawing pique Titch’s interest
so he nurtures his talent and introduces him to the wonders of the natural
world. The death of a man leaves Wash
with a bounty on his head so Titch and Wash flee the island. This is the beginning of Wash’s travels as he
eventually finds himself in far-flung locales as he tries to make his way in a
world, “trying my best . . . to be my own free man” (231).
In some
ways this is an adventure tale. Wash travels
the world: Virginia, the Arctic, Nova
Scotia, London, Amsterdam, and Morocco.
He gets to fly in a hydrogen balloon, sail the sea and dive into its
depths, and see the high Arctic and the desert.
It is also a coming-of-age story showing Wash’s psychological growth from
youth to adulthood. Most importantly, it
asks the question, What is true freedom?
As a child,
Wash asks his surrogate mother, “’What it like, Kit? Free?’” She tells him, “’When you free, you can do
anything. . . . You go wherever it is you wanting. You wake up any time you wanting. When you free . . . someone ask you a
question, you ain’t got to answer. You
ain’t got to finish no job you don’t want to finish’” (9). As a slave, Wash has no freedom; his owner even
takes measures to ensure that his slaves aren’t free to choose death by
suicide. So Wash dreams of freedom,
though Titch warns him, “’Freedom, Wash, is a word with different meanings to
different people’” (154).
When Wash escapes
the plantation and Titch offers him freedom in Upper Canada, Wash admits, “’I
was terrified to my very core, and . . . the idea of embarking on a perilous
journey without Titch filled me with a panic so savage it felt as if I were
being asked to perform some brutal act upon myself, to sever my own throat”
(182). This reaction reveals that Wash
remains a slave; he knows no life but being the property of someone else,
though it upsets him when Titch, to avoid confrontation, tells someone, “’Indeed,
the boy is my property’” (140). In a
telling comment, Titch laments, “’You will never leave me, Wash . . . Even when
I am gone. That is what breaks my heart’”
(216).
Eventually,
Wash must live on his own. Once he is
forced “to leave behind Titch’s coddled world,” he discovers he will never be
free of “the brutality of white men. To
be called nigger and kicked at in disgust like a wharf rat” (231). Though he is technically a free man in Nova
Scotia, he hides from a bounty hunter he fears is looking for him. Though he becomes an accomplished illustrator
and a pioneering zoologist, he cannot get the recognition he has earned: “in the end my name would be nowhere”
(385). At one point, Wash makes a
conclusion that his time with Titch “had schooled me to believe I could leave
all misery behind, I could cast off all violence, outrun a vicious death. I had even begun thinking I’d been born for a
higher purpose, to draw the earth’s bounty, and to invent; I had imagined my
existence a true and rightful part of the natural order. How wrong-headed it had all been. I was a black boy, only – I had no future
before me, and little grace or mercy behind me.
I was nothing, I would die nothing” (165).
Just as Wash
always carries physical scars of his slavery, he can never be truly free of the
psychological trauma of his enslavement.
For example, he has difficulty trusting people; whenever he meets
someone, he remains suspicious: “Despite
his general mildness, I feared him, of course” (80) and “no part of me did
trust him” (177) and “But it is also true that there was something in him I did
not fully trust” (234). After he lives without
Titch in his life, he feels he has no identity because he had one only in
relation to Titch: “I became a boy
without an identity, a walking shadow” (230).
His sense of wonder at the natural world and his sketching of it cover
his fear and loneliness because he remains a lost soul with a “sense of
rootlessness” (400).
Of course,
the concept of freedom is examined through other characters as well. Does Titch’s father stay in the Arctic to be
free of familial ties? Titch is an
abolitionist who believes “Slavery is a moral stain” which “will keep white men
from their heaven” (105), but in order to do his research and create his inventions,
he requires access to money made by the sugar cane plantation where slaves
labour and are inhumanely treated so he can never be truly free of family
duties. Though Titch has more personal freedom than
his family’s slaves, feelings of guilt haunt him, and he is like Wash who
cannot be free of his past. Wash recognizes
that “wounds had arrested [Titch] in boyhood” (416) and because of Titch’s background,
Wash even speculates that perhaps for Titch “any deep acceptance of equality
was impossible” (322).
The cover
of my copy has a sketch of an octopus which proves to be a symbol in the
novel. On a diving expedition, Wash
finds an octopus that “swam directly into my hands” (274) and he wishes to keep
it alive and protect it. The octopus is,
of course, an exotic creature, and Wash sees himself as an oddity: “a creature . . . a disfigured black boy with
a scientific turn of mind and a talent on canvas, running, always running, from
the dimmest of shadows” (230-231). When
taken captive, the octopus becomes ill in her tank; “I looked at the octopus,
and I saw not the miraculous animal but my own slow, relentless extinction”
(337-338).
There are
some elements in the novel that irritated me.
For instance, there are quite a few coincidences where people appear
almost magically. Wash’s narration also
bothered me: though he is obviously
intelligent, he is an uneducated boy born into slavery who struggles with
learning to read, yet he has such an extensive vocabulary?
Though not
perfect, this is a book I can see myself re-reading. It has a depth that invites a second look.
No comments:
Post a Comment