Caribbean Studies and African Studies at New College (the University of Toronto) invite you to a conversation on slavery, reading and launch of the book: Blonde Roots. The discussion will be moderated by Professor Christian Campbell.
When: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Women's Studies Lounge at New College on the downtown University of Toronto campus.
Evaristo is an award-winning writer living in London, of Nigerian and British parentage with bloodlines in other countries, which she has written about in her semi-autobiographical verse novel LARA (Bloodaxe, October 29, 2009)
Her published books include one prose novel, one novella, (Hello Mum, Penguin, 2010), two novels-in-verse and one novel-with-verse. Other produced and published works include poetry, short stories, radio and theatre drama.
BLONDE ROOTS is Evaristo's first prose novel.
BLONDE ROOTS takes the transatlantic slave trade and turns it on its head: Africans
enslave Europeans.
Welcome to a world turned upside down. Welcome to the world of Doris. One minute she’s this cute little girl playing hide-and-seek with her sisters in the fields behind their cottage. The next, someone puts a bag over her head and she ends up in the stinking hold of a slave ship sailing to the New World. When she finally arrives on a strange, tropical island, she discovers she is a pig-ugly savage with a brain the size of a pea, whose only purpose in life is to please her mistress.
Doris observes slavery from both sides. As an adult she becomes the personal assistant of her formidable master, Bwana, a.k.a. Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I. She also experiences the horrors of life in the sugarcane fields, where slaves are worked to death under the blazing sun.
Doris dreams of escape, of finding those she has loved and lost, of returning home to her motherland: England.
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