Bernardine Evaristo

What sparked Blonde Roots?
When I sat down to write about the transatlantic slave trade,  I wracked my brains about how I could write about it in a way that  enabled people to see it afresh. I really didn’t want to write the kind of novel about slavery where the reader knows where they are going emotionally and morally. I didn’t want to be predictable because there’s a safeness to that, a familiarity, cosiness, even, that reaffirms what we know rather than leading us into new terrain and perhaps challenging our assumptions.  I had long been aware that the slave trade is a subject that elicits strong responses including anger, defensiveness, resentment, self-righteousness, guilt, sadness. So I decided to ask the question What if? What if the history as we know it is turned on its head and Africans enslave Europeans for four centuries? What if Africans assume the moral and intellectual high ground and notions of savagery and civilisation are inverted. What if Africans see Europeans as depraved, lesser creatures and themselves as superior, more evolved beings. This idea is not without comic potential, so while the novel is a serious re-examination of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as of the racist attitudes that are its legacy in contemporary society, it lends itself to satire.
 

Please set the scene of the novel for us.
I've created a parallel universe in the novel where Africans enslave Europeans. Most of it is written in the voice of the protagonist Doris (slave name Omorenomwara) who is white and English, and was sold into slavery by the Border Lander people when she was a young girl. At the start of the novel she is living in Londolo, the capital of the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa, as personal assistant to a big African chief, slave trader and plantation owner known as Bwana. The novel charts her desire and attempt to escape and revisits her past as a serf on the Cabbage Coast of England, her journey by sea as a slave to the New World, and her time spent on the plantations of the West Japanese Islands.


Do you have a particular attachment to any of the characters or places in the novel? If so, which one(s) and why?
Doris is close to my heart because I had to inhabit her when I was writing the novel – what she goes through, I imagine going through.  Bwana, her slave master, was interesting to write because he is capable of great cruelty while at the same time convincing himself he's one of the good guys. All the locations are based on real places and I enjoyed the imaginative exercise of turning the UK into an African country, while keeping it recognizably British. The freed whites live in the Vanilla Suburbs and the Africans live in the far superior coco-palmed avenues of the Chocolate Cities. In Londolo the Underground Railroad of America's slave history becomes just that – the city's disused tube network. Crocodiles, hippos and elephants can be found on the banks of the River Temz and the West Japanese islands are modeled on the Caribbean, except that the slaves are white and the plantation owners black.

What are you reading at the moment?
Chehkov's short stories, and loving them. His language and ideas are simple but his characters and their emotional landscapes and impulses are intense and complex.

What are you working on now?
A new prose novel, but I never discuss work-in-progress until it's nearly completed