50books_poc | #16: Unheard Voices, edited by Malorie Blackman (Reply)

#16: Unheard Voices, edited by Malorie Blackman.

I was looking for Noughts and Crosses in the library; they didn't have it (though they did have the second and third books in the trilogy, which is bloody typical), so I came home with this instead: it's a collection of stories, poems and first-hand accounts on the subject of slavery, put together to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. The pieces are of variable quality, as is probably inevitable. The non-fiction excerpts are all fascinating, and superbly written -- I now have all four excerpted books on my "find and read as soon as possible" list: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The History of Mary Prince, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, and The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. (God, I love 18th-century titles. "Interesting Narrative". How's that for an understatement?)

The fictional pieces (and I include the extract from Roots in that category, since it's written like a novel and is full of stuff Alex Haley couldn't possibly have known) are less impressive. I didn't like the James Berry piece much, found the Roots excerpt almost unreadable, and was interested but underwhelmed by the extract from Lalita Tademy's Cane River and by Sandra Agard's "Runaway". I was wondering, with a sinking heart, whether they were all going to be as much of a slog; fortunately, the next fictional story in the collection was "The Last Words of Cato Hopkins" by Catherine Johnson, which was terrific. Blackman herself has a story in the collection, "North", which was pretty good, though not so much as to make me eager to read further work by her. And I really enjoyed the extract from Gary Paulsen's Nightjohn.

The poems are somewhere in between -- less disappointing than the stories, not as riveting as the non-fiction. Two are by Langston Hughes (whom I can take or leave), two by the always-awesome Benjamin Zephaniah (who refused an OBE because he wouldn't let the establishment compromise him -- respect!), and one each by Daniel Aloysius Francis, John Agard, Grace Nichols, Grace Quansah and James Berry. The Francis, Agard, and Quansah poems were a bit meh; the Nichols I really liked; and the James Berry, "In Our Year 1941 My Letter to You Mother Africa", is terrific.

I found this collection a bit uneven and frustrating, but worth reading. I suspect its main value for me is as a prompt to find the original slave narratives and maybe also read some more Zephaniah.