As in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, language is not only a marker of cultural difference, but an assertion of it a volitional act. At the heart of Evaristo’s writing is a constant battle with language a “panga duel” as Dambudzo Marechera once described such a battle. This “postcolonialist” project is sometimes eclectic, sometimes humorous, sometimes partially successful, but always daring and challenging. Prior to this, Evaristo had written another novel, Lara, again in verse, again dealing with the ambitious subject matter of slavery, history, and bi-racialism.Įvaristo’s intentions could be said, to quote Sarah Adams in her review of Evaristo’s Soul Tourists, to speak ‘for the bevy of under-exposed black figures from “white” western history’. Zuleika, the narrator, is the daughter of Sudanese immigrants in London in the very early third century she is married, aged eleven, to a senator, and several years after starts a relationship with the visiting emperor, Septimius Severus. In an earlier novel, The Emperor’s Babe, she placed a woman of colour, a Sudanese girl, in a position of power in Roman London. In Blonde Roots she took on the narrative of the transatlantic slave trade, but with whites as slaves and Africans as slave owners. Evaristo’s stock-in-trade has always been to revise history in a subversive, irreverent way.
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