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Book Review: Invisible Chains by Michelle Renee Lane

Invisible Chains by Michelle Renee Lane

Haverhill House Publishing, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-949140-03-3

Available: Hardcover, paperback

 

Jacqueline, an enslaved Creole growing up on a Louisiana plantation in Michelle Renee Lane’s Invisible Chains, learns all too soon what it means to be black and female. She is beaten, raped, and terrorized but manages to survive by using the secrets of Vodun her mother taught her and by tapping the powers of the vampire and werewolf who assist her on the flight toward what she hopes will be a rescue.

Even though monsters help Jacqueline, she is still threatened by them and in constant danger, even from love. Lane uses these relationships, including a flirtation with the vampire, to highlight the suffering, marginalized groups depicted in this novel. This includes enslaved people and monsters but also mixed race people, Spanish Jews, Irish immigrants, circus performers, Gypsies, seers and couples in interracial relationships. People who are considered different by the larger white society are powerless and can survive only by appeasing and imitating their oppressors or using magical or supernatural powers against them.

Although the book often moves quickly from one terrifying event to the next, Lane effectively traces Jacqueline’s growing sense of her own talents and strengths. Jacqueline learns that each horrific experience enhances her abilities as a conjurer and intensifies her understanding of herself, thus making it possible for her to voice her demands and choose what she needs to live. She also learns that she must protect her mind and soul most of all and that she has a certain power in knowing the future in which her true freedom will never be a reality. However, she continues to be brave, heroic, and unstoppable. Recommended.

Contains: Graphic violence including rape and torture; sexual situations

 

Reviewed by Nova Hadley

Editor’s note: Invisible Chains was nominated to the final ballot of the 2019 Bram Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in a Novel.

Posted on April 12, 2020 by , Reply

Book Review: The Deep by Rivers Solomon

 

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

Saga Press, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1534439863

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Yetu is the historian for the wajniru, underwater beings created when slave traders threw pregnant African women overboard into the Atlantic Ocean. Although the women drowned, their children, born in the deep of the ocean, were transformed and have founded their own underwater society. As historian, Yetu carries the memories of all the trauma the mothers of the wajniru and the succeeding generations alone, to protect the others, and has done so for sixteen years, suffering tremendously from taking the burden alone. Once a year, she gets a three day respite from the memories when the wajniru hold a Rememberance ceremony. At that time, she carefully lets the memories wash back into the entire population so they can feel it collectively. The experience is physically as well as emotionally traumatic– author Rivers Solomon describes it as a seizure– but all the wajniru go through it together, and once they have absorbed the memories and can take no more, Yetu takes them back. Carrying all the history, violence, and trauma of her people has emotionally, mentally, and physically damaged and weakened Yetu, and since she has been carrying these memories since she was a teenager, they have overwhelmed her ability to establish her own identity. This time, after giving the wajinru’s memories back to them, Yetu decides to escape so she does not have to take on their pain again and can have an opportunity to discover who she really is.

Swimming to the surface of the ocean, away from her kind, Yetu is injured and washed into a tide pool. Thanks to nearby humans, and especially the prickly Oori, she begins to heal. An awkward friendship develops between Oori and Yetu, out of discussions about the ocean, family, and the past. Oori, the last of her people, does not know her history, and the fact that Yetu gave hers up is upsetting to her and causes Yetu to rethink whether she can really develop an identity without any knowledge of her history. It becomes clear to her that the increasingly stormy weather is probably due to the wajinru’s group anguish and that she must return to them to retrieve their history.

This story powerfully brings the point home about the physical, mental, and emotional effects of generational trauma that many Black people still experience, even generations after the end of slavery. The situation that created the wajinru is also not the only negative impact the “two-legs” have on them, even down in the deep of the ocean, as drilling for oil not only has a negative impact on the environment but causes the violent deaths of enough of the wajinru that they rise up to wash it away in a tidal wave.  The Deep is not fast paced, as for much of it Yetu is trapped in a tide pool, but it is a story that can be felt deep in the gut.

The Deep is the third iteration of storytelling based on the premise of an aquatic people born from drowned pregnant African women kidnapped to be enslaved(although each version can stand on its own).  A musical duo called Drexciya first imagined it, and their music created a mythology for an underwater utopia born from this terrible oppression. The hip-hop group clipping then wrote their own musical version, “The Deep”, a haunting song about underwater beings who rise as a collective against the “two-legs” after they begin drilling for oil, leading to dramatic climate change and destruction of the oceans, that won a Hugo Award for best dramatic performance. This novella takes the repeated line “y’all remember” from clipping’s song and focuses on the effects of history and collective memory that follow the uprising, While I’m not familiar with Drexciya, both clipping’s song and Solomon’s novella tell powerful, complementary stories about the violence and horror caused by white supremacy and enviromental destruction. Recommended.

I received this as a complimentary ARC from Saga Press through NetGalley.

Posted on November 13, 2019 by , Reply

Musings: Frankenstein and Race

Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor by Elizabeth Young

NYU Press, 2008

ISBN-13: 978-0814797167

Available: Used hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

 

With this being the bicentennial of the publication of Frankenstein, we can look forward to a year of interpretations of the text. Of course, you can read the novel as if it was produced in a blank space if you just want entertainment(this seems unlikely since the framing device is deadly dull, and almost anyone who picked it up and just read the first page would probably put it back down), or you can run with the romantic version of the summer party where the novel was first inspired, but Mary Shelley, even at 18, was an intelligent woman who listened well and was familiar with literature, philosophy, and the issues of the time.

The easiest way to look at Frankenstein is to consider her life circumstances as the gifted and passionate daughter of a prominent and provocative feminist who died giving birth to her, and a freethinking, progressive father who educated her to want more than she had.  She had already been a mother herself, and watched her child die. The creation and destruction of life must have often been on her mind. In that way, Frankenstein is deeply personal to the author. But for the book and its characters to have survived so long and been recreated in so many ways and such a variety of media, it’s about much more than her own circumstances and emotions. She touched a nerve in our culture through her insights about her own life and times, and even if she never expected that her creation would continue to be relevant as time passed… well, it has been, and continues to be.

Frankenstein centers on reactions to physical and mental difference– monstrosity– and oppression and rejection of the “other”. It is a text that can be used both to justify oppression and to critique it. I was surprised to learn recently that the novel had been used in an argument against the abolition of slavery. This made me want to look further into it. In 1824, British Foreign Secretary George Canning did, in fact, refer to Frankenstein’s creature in a rebuttal to pro-abolition forces in Parliament, saying:

“We must remember that we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength … would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” (Wolfson)

I can’t imagine that Shelley was anything but appalled to have her work manipulated to support slavery.  I learned from an online excerpt of Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein that that support crossed the ocean to America (this seems like a cool book, if you like certain kinds of academic reading, which I do, but I haven’t had the opportunity to read the whole thing). After the Nat Turner revolt, American Thomas Dew quoted Canning’s reference to Frankenstein in a long pro-slavery essay. (Young, 19)  In 1860, Frederick Douglass wrote that “slavery is the pet monster of the American people”, and it is still one we’re grappling with today. A century later, civil rights activist Dick Gregory observed that James Whale’s movie told the story of  “a monster, created by a white man, turning on his creator.” (Young, 4) In fact, race played into the visuals of the movie, with the filming of the mob scene at the end created to evoke a lynching. (Wolfson) Frankenstein may have started out as a nineteenth century British Gothic novel, but it’s made a home for itself in American culture. With race at the forefront of our issues today, now is a great time to consider Frankenstein in a new light.

 

Wolfson, S. “What makes a monster?” New York Public Library. Retrieved from http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/outsiders/outsiders/essay/essaywolfson

Young, E. (2008) “Introduction”. In  Black Frankenstein: The making of an American metaphor.  New York: NYU Press.  Retrieved from https://nyupress.org/webchapters/9780814797150_Young_intro.pdf)

 

Posted on January 4, 2018 by , Reply