Of Roots and Reckonings: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, by Adele Newson-Horst

Book Reviews The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Photo by Steven Taylor / Flickr The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s first novel, is textually connected to the works of Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, to name a few. Forthcoming from HarperCollins on August 24, the novel recounts the stories of the women who saw the displacement and massacre of the Original People, the enslavement of Africans, the birth of a new nation, and the perils of the nation in modern times. The story is told alternately from the perspective of the Original People, an omniscient narrator, and individual characters. Deceptively, though, it begins with a boy, an African who finds his way to a Creek village. It also employs passages from the works of W. E. B. Du Bois to guide the reader’s thinking throughout various time periods and the action of the novel. Through the many generations of people who mostly inhabit the area in central Georgia, the author demonstrates just how interrelated people have become and at what cost. The novel is actually a judicious study of American history that humanizes its participants through exploration of their stories. The narrator reveals early that “the original transgression of this land was not slavery. It was greed, and it could not be contained” (4). So it begins with a village of Creek Indians and intertwines their fates with abducted... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2021-08-18 20:12:10 UTC ]

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