From prize-winners Esi Edugyan and Marlon James to debut novelists such as Sara Collins, a new generation of novelists is exploring a painful pastTwo hundred years ago, slave narratives seemed one of the few routes to publication for black writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Autobiographical accounts written by former slaves such as Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass proved enormously popular with readers, who were captivated by their gothic horror and the possibility of redemption. Their stories of escape were frequently as inspiring as they were unfathomable. How could Jacobs have hidden for several years in an attic room whose ceiling was so low that she could never stand up? Did Henry `Box` Brown have second thoughts before he sealed himself inside a wooden crate and had it mailed to Quakers in Philadelphia?Novels based on slave testimonies, such as Toni Morrison´s Beloved and Fred D´Aguiar´s The Longest Memory, later superseded the hundreds of true-life stories. And though the fictions of black writers are rich and varied today, those descended from the enslaved are increasingly drawing on their history, to great acclaim. Recent debuts, including Yvonne Battle-Felton´s Remembered, longlisted for this year´s Women´s prize for fiction (and reviewed on page 27), and Sara Collins´s The Confessions of Frannie Langton, a historical novel published early next month, set partly in pre-emancipation Jamaica, have taken slavery as their central theme. `Whether I liked it or not the idea of slavery stuck like a bur,` says Collins. `It was a kind of obsession that needed to be exorcised.` Continue reading...
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