John and Rosianna discuss Blonde Roots by Bernardine Evaristo. This episode was originally released to subscribers in July 2020.
In Blonde Roots, Bernardine Evaristo imagines a history where “Aphrikans” enslaved “whytes.” What systems would be different, and what would remain similar? In this episode, John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas discuss what it means to reframe historical narratives and the difficulty of asserting one’s personhood when structures of power refuse to acknowledge one’s humanity.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in July 2020. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
John Green: Hello and welcome to the Life's Library podcast. Thank you so much for being part of Life's Library, and I'm so excited today to be joined by Rosianna Halse Rojas to discuss her most recent pick for Life's Library's book club, Blonde Roots.
Rosianna Halse Rojas: Woo! That was—I was—been very excited to talk about this one. Hi, everyone. We are recording this on the 22nd of June, which is in—Windrush Day in the U.K. The day that the Windrush arrived in the U.K.
John: Oh, wow.
Rosianna: So it feels very—it feels very momentous. And also we have—at the time of recording this—the Q&A with Bernardine Evaristo coming up on Thursday, which I'm really excited about.
John: I am, too. Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I'm really, really grateful to her for taking the time to do a Q&A with us. It's really exciting.
Rosianna: Yeah, it's really exciting. And she's had an amazing—amazing run of it. So she won the Booker Prize in 2019 for her most recent novel, Girl, Woman, Other, and that's just topped the fiction charts. And I think it's—I believe it's the first book by a Black British writer to top the non-fiction charts.
John: Wow.
Rosianna: It's been—
John: That's exciting.
Rosianna: Yeah. It's one of those things, also, that's like—it's a strange time to talk about that. The writer Reni Eddo-Lodge was saying because her book, I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race, has topped the non-fiction charts. And she was saying it feels like a strange thing to like, you know, celebrate that in any way.
John: Right.
Rosianna: At the same time, obviously it's great to see bestseller lists just looking very different right now. Lots of Black writers on bestseller lists, which is very exciting to see.
John: Right, but the circumstances and context of it makes it difficult to—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —celebrate because it is often people buying books because they're struggling to understand the way that—and maybe that's great news, that people are—more people, especially more white people, are struggling to understand the role that systemic racism plays in their own communities and also in their own lives and in their own families. So yeah, it feels weird to be like, woo!
Rosianna: Right.
John: And I understand that, but at the same time, when you're a writer, of course, you hope that your work will find a broad audience and that it—people will respond to it with thoughtfulness and care and generosity and it's—it has been encouraging to see some of that happening.
Rosianna: Yeah. And Evaristo—this isn't her only two books. She's written, I think, eight or nine other books. I've read some of them. I haven't read all of them. But I was just telling Sanne, my flatmate, that when I did my couple of weeks work experience at Penguin right before we started working together, I think, John, that was like—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —what, twenty? I don't know. The past. 2013? I—one of my jobs was to create the signs for the author event.
John: Oh, nice.
Rosianna: For Mr Loverman, which is another one of her fantastic novels. And I was just remembering how awful I was at sticking back the—it's like a sticky-backed plastic print or something and you had to stick it exactly flat and you couldn't get any bubbles on it. And I was so, so bad at it and it just really stressed me out. But the book's fantastic, as well. It's another really brilliant one. So yeah, I've been really excited to talk about this. When we came up with the idea for Life's Library, this was one of the first books that I wanted to read and discuss. But yeah, we waited until this year to do so and the timing with the Black Lives Matter movement right now and specifically the George Floyd protests—a lot of people have said it's really a kind of incredible timing. This is happening at the same time. But something I've said, and I think I've mentioned a couple times online, is that part of the reason why I picked it is because this book is always going to be relevant.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And here in the U.K., as I think I said in my letter, we don't have much education at all about huge aspects of our history and the education that does exist around the empire—the British Empire—and colonialism, was—especially when I was young—obviously, I haven't had that education for some years, but I'm hearing from other students the same—pretty much the same. Just really leaves out all the damage that we did.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And the cruelties of it. And when it was covered, when we did the transatlantic slave trade, it was very much in terms of America, to be honest.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Tt was very much—sort of washing our hands of it. So that's a big part of why I picked Blonde Roots, as well, because it speaks to the stories that we don't tell as part of our education system.
John: Yeah, it is a brilliant book. This is one of the best books I think we've read for Life's Library and I mean, we could, you know, examine the endless layers of satire for months and years and never get to the bottom of it. But at its core, it's a book about slavery and slavery—chattel slavery as it was practiced by Europeans and white Americans was one of the greatest horrors of human history and we don't grapple with it very meaningfully.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like most Americans learn that slavery happened and that slavery was bad and then learn that it ended.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: But the way that it's presented by us is not dissimilar from the way that it's—the story is told in the U.K., which is that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves combined with largely white abolitionists, and that in a way makes history palatable because—
Rosianna: Right.
John: —it makes it seem as if white people realized that their way of doing this was wrong, and so they changed. But that isn't the story, really. Like what really happened is that enslaved people and formerly enslaved people made the case for their humanity, you know?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John:And eventually it became untenable to continue slavery and the Civil War resulted—came as a result of that. But I didn't read, in school, many accounts written by enslaved people or formerly enslaved people. I did not read often from that perspective.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: So when I think about the books I read about slavery when I was a student, I think about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was written by a white person. I think about Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was written by a white person, and there were—it's not like there are no primary sources. Like we do have many accounts—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John:—of life in enslavement written by enslaved or formally enslaved people.
Rosianna: Yeah. It's just—it feels stark now, looking at it, the absence of it from—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —the education system. And as with so many things and as with so much of the kind of experience of people living in the world, like a lot of that education of whatever your family history is comes at home and what your country or community leaves out of the history they teach you will come from members of your family. And I'm always struck by—you talk about this really well, John, like how recent it was and how recently it happened, how recent slavery was. And how many generations people are away from slavery and I find that very—yeah, I find that very striking, especially because of the way it was taught for us, which was so distant and it was like actively trying to distance it from us.
John: Yeah. When I was reading this book, I kept thinking about the way that the so-called like triangle of the Atlantic slave trade with—between Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The way that it starts to look different if you reframe the historical narrative.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: I mean, obviously this does—this reframes the historical narrative in part by imagining an alternate history that is so plausible.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like, it's so—part of what makes it so compelling is that it is utterly plausible that it could have gone that way, to me, instead of the way that it went. But I kept thinking about a conversation I had with a friend in Sierra Leone who pointed out that from his perspective, the triangle looks quite different because people who were enslaved in Jamaica were then sent to Canada and then eventually resettled in Sierra Leone.
Rosianna: Mm.
John: The the Amistad rebels who took over a slave ship after having been enslaved in Sierra Leone and taken to Cuba ended up in the United States and then eventually returned to Sierra Leone. So the way I've always imagined that triangle might look very different than it does to somebody who lives in Sierra Leone and can trace their ancestry back to Canada or to the United States or to South America, or to Europe as part of this, you know, involuntary movement of people that occurred for 350 years.
osianna: Yeah. And I think the—thinking about the position we look at history from is immediately put in the spotlight when—because the book begins with a map?
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Which is a big marker of power and who has power. Who draws the maps and who draws the borders of them and who names what's on the map. And you know, I always think of that episode of The West Wing where they suddenly flip the map upside down or what I would call upside down.
John: Right.
Rosianna: And people in Southern Hemisphere wouldn't, or they look at different projections of it and just highlight the distortions in the map. But really, closely parallels distortions in power. And it was interesting to look at this map because I kept trying to almost get my head around it and sort of figure out, you know, where the U.K. is and how it's there and I just saw my brain trying to put it into the existing map and then I just had to give way to realizing this is an alternate world.
John: Yeah. There's such an urge when reading this book, I think, at least for me, for the first like a hundred pages or so, to try to map the narrative or to connect the narrative to historical reality.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And so to say like, "This is this and that is that." And slowly that fell away for me as I continued to read and instead it became about, you know, primarily about the horror of enslavement and the horror of having absolutely no protection from, you know, from any kind of mistreatment. I mean, that—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: There's so much that's horrifying about it, but having your children taken away from you, is that—I thought that scene—the way that that she wrote about it was gut-wrenching. And then I found—
Rosianna: Yes.
John: —the Middle Passage description gut-wrenching, and really deeply in line with descriptions of—the descriptions we have of the Middle Passage. It was every bit as horrifying as it's portrayed here, but then eventually, in the second half of the novel, I guess, especially when we have the—I'm going to try to do this without spoilers—especially when we have the shift in point of view and perspective?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: It, for me, became less about the satire and more about the horror of enslavement and the ability that we all have to tell ourselves these stories about why it's okay.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: That these horrible things happen or really that we do these—why it's okay to do these horrible things, to participate in these systems that are so profoundly unjust.
Rosianna: Yeah, and just—and the things that we tell ourselves and each other to justify them. Like I think—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I was rereading it a little bit this morning, because I knew we were doing the podcast and the scientific angle—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —of scientific in massive air quotes—really stood out to me this time in a way that—in a new kind of way, I think, because, you know, I just, I think about that whole period of again, massive air quotes, like the Enlightenment—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —and that classification period of who is human and who isn't—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —and how that continues now. And like so many people I recently rewatched, Ava Duvernay's amazing documentary 13th and just that sense of like constant classification of—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —who isn't human has—it feels like moved from faux scientific language to now, like faux civil social contract language, almost?
John: Yeah. Although there's still a lot of faux scientific—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —language, too.
Rosianna: But I mean, like, fake science has not gone away.
John: Yeah. I don't think that stuff is entirely part of our past, either. I mean, if you look at the sort of way that, you know, PragerU talks about race and racism, it's in many cases using the same fake science and—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —faux scientific language that has long been used to dehumanize others.
Rosianna: Yeah. And it's very—it's got this sort of not quite coded, wink wink, element to it, as well.
John: Right, right, right.
Rosianna: Which I think is, as you say, in the second half of the book—like that tone very much comes through.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: Like when you think of who that narrator is talking to specifically.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: And yeah, I thought that was so effectively done. Just—I mean, the book's just—I think it's a masterpiece, honestly. I think it's brilliant.
John: Yeah, no, it's really special. It's been a long time since I was that deeply moved by a book that was also so, like, masterful, like as a—you know, as sophisticated work of art?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like a lot of times I can marvel at the artistry of a novel without being very, you know, deeply moved by it, but this book had me in all the different kinds of awe.
Rosianna: Yeah. The whole range of awes.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I, as a Londoner, really enjoyed all the—I mean, this is part of the joy of the alternate world, alternative history kind of stuff. I loved the different names for like imagining the Tube stations as different and different parts of London as different. Because it—what it so effectively did for me was remind me how many things in my city and in my country are named for enslavers.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: These just very, very wealthy people who have so much of the country and roads and parks and so on named for them.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And yeah, the pervasiveness of that.
John: I did not get most of those jokes.
Rosianna: Yeah. I really liked them. My favorite was, the mountains—the hills on the way out of London are called the Essex Massive—
John: Oh.
Rosianna: —which I really liked. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of there's a lot of in-joke stuff that—
John: Yeah. Well, I—
Rosianna: It's just a joy.
John: One of the things that I just loved about this book was the way that it tells European history?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: You know, as a series of extremely violent, animalistic clashes between insignificant clans.
Rosianna: Yes. Like the Scottish.
John: Right, like who the heck can make a difference between the Scottish and the Welsh and the English and—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: All these distinct—can you believe that they make these distinctions when we all know that, you know, white is white.
Rosianna: Right.
John: And that is so reflective of the way that we still tell historical stories. I think that's starting to change, hopefully, but—I mean, if you look at the amount of attention in American history classes that is paid to the War of the Roses or the amount of—and that's starting to change, but like the amount of attention that's paid to these, you know, battles that happened, you know, between relatively small groups of people over—if we—we could pay that same amount of attention to the empires that were rising and falling elsewhere in the world, and we just don't, because it's clear where we want to get our historical roots from, where we want to imagine our historical roots as having come from.
Rosianna: Mm. That's so interesting. And that's also true because I remember talking to American friends who were going through school at the same time as me and would know so much more about European history than I would, and mine was even more of like small and shrunken—my history classes were, you know, mostly about the Tudors.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Did the Tudors so many times.
John: Yeah. Well it's—I mean, it is—and I loved the descriptions in this book of—I mean, they were awful, but they were very well drawn—of the ways of state-sponsored killing that happened.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And how crazy and animalistic it seemed to draw and quarter people—
Rosianna: Yeah!
John: —or to behead them or to light them on fire because they might be witches and that was common. I mean, tens of thousands of women died in Europe during the craze in which there was widespread belief that witches and witchcraft were happening all throughout Europe. And I mean, tens of thousands of women were executed by the state and we never talk about it!
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Because it is inconvenient for our historical narratives that during this time when we were, you know, when the Enlightenment was dawning on the horizon and, you know, knowledge and reason were coming to Europe, they were burning women—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —for participating in witchcraft.
Rosianna: Well, I remember, you know, when you first hear that they would put women in the river and if they drowned, they weren't a witch and if they survived, they were a witch.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Like, that sounds absurd to every single child who's heard it and like that—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —you know, I think they go through that rite of passage of being like, "Can you believe that?" But how that's told and how that's framed as this anthropological, like, puzzle of what it means to be from this area and are they human or not.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I mean, that's also part of it, too, just how it's used. How many things go into dehumanizing a person or a people or a community or just a landmass.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Again, as you say before, to justify this heinous crime that isn't a crime legally.
John: Right, and can't be a crime because these are not people like we are people.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: This is a savage society and we are saving the, you know—if anything, it's a blessing that we're save—I mean, in the second part of Book Two, especially, you see this over and over and over again. This justification by way of explaining that "this is our—this is a way that we can help civilize."
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: "This is a way that we can—we're helping these people. This is a blessing." And that is still very much an undercurrent in narratives about slavery.
Rosianna: Yeah. I mean, there's also a passage that really stood out to me that I sort of flagged to read, and it's from the Middle Passage section. "Two men rode out to sea, muscles pumping hard, four oars chopping up the waves, ignoring the squirms of we poor captors wedged in between their legs. There were the strange blak men who had taken control of our shipment on the beach, I noticed. Not of my own kind. My own kind? If I had to pinpoint a moment when the human race divided into the severe distinctions of blak and whyte, that was it: people belonged to one of two colors, and in the society I was about to join, my color, not my personality or ability, would determine my fate." So I think another thing that I find, you know, compelling, I suppose is the word, although it seems kind of trite here about this book, is that Doris is an observer and she's seeing this process happen. Like it's not something that's just happening to her. She's seeing both the way in which she's treated shift in change and morph.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: But she's also aware of her own position changing and her own kind of hardening over time as her body physically—
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: —hardens and, you know, later when she's horribly whipped, as these kind of physical scars represent something additional that's going on within her. And what it means to live in a society that does not think that you are human.
John: Yeah, one of the things I kept coming back to in the passages narrated by Doris, especially, is how difficult or impossible or complex it is to assert and establish your personhood when every structure of power is saying that you are not a person.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And all the things that, you know—kinship, family, all of that is being constantly ripped away from you. Your children are ripped away from you. Your parents are ripped away from you. And then you build these, you know, these deep relationships like Doris does, even in the slave ship on on the Middle Passage. And even those relationships are ripped away from you.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And so it's so—and that's the story of emancipation in the United States, to me, is a story of people who were told that they were not a person by every structure of power in the United States—the legal structures and everything else, and still continued to find ways to assert their humanity, to resist, and eventually, to assert their humanity to such a degree that the structure of power was forced to change to acknowledge that reality.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And—
Rosianna: It wasn't about a white savior.
John: No. I mean, that's not—it's just not the story. Like even, you know, the story of the Amistad, which was this slave ship that was captured by the enslaved people and sailed to the United States, and then the captives spent like a year and a half inside of a jail trying to prove that they were not legally enslaved. Basically trying to prove that they were legally human. And it wasn't until they had a interpreter, named James Covey, who was able to directly interpret the voices of the people who had been enslaved. And once those people had a direct voice, that's when the U.S. legal system had to acknowledge their personhood. But even when I was a kid and I was told that story, I was told that it was mostly about this former U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, and his very eloquent defense of the Amistad captives before the U.S. Supreme Court and blah blah blah blah blah, which was important and which is significant. But the core of the story is formerly enslaved people taking over a ship, sailing it to the United States and consistently asserting their personhood to such a degree that the U.S. legal system eventually bowed to that reality.
Rosianna: Yeah. I mean that—that's another really key example of how how we tell a history and who we center at it and how it has always been, frankly, it has always been the effort of people rather than the figurehead, you know?
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Yeah. So I mean, I'm really glad you loved it. Have you read any of her other books?
John: No, but I will now. I mean, I was just blown away and I was also kind of astonished that I had never heard of this book before?
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Which maybe speaks to my own American-centric-ness with reading, but—
Rosianna: Well, so I think I said this in my letter, but my friend Clarissa gave this book to me for my 23rd birthday and that was the first book of Bernardine Evaristo's that I'd read. And then after that I just got really, really hooked. So it's a real testament to giving friends books you love.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Which I hope we can do a little bit of on Life's Library as well.
John: Yeah. I'm so grateful to you for introducing me to this book. And also all the members of Life's Library. I hope y'all loved it as much as I did it. It seems—other than the problems that we had with actually getting you the books—
Rosianna: Yeah
John: —those of you who live outside the U.S., it seems that a lot of people have responded to it as positively as as I have. And so I'm glad that it's been a facilitator of big and good discussions.
Rosianna: Yeah, and thank you to everyone for your patience with the shipping. Obviously, that's—yeah, complicated by the pandemic right now. But—
John: It is.
Rosianna: Really hard. We are doing our best.
John: Yeah. So we're—
Rosianna: And we are continuing to address it in the ways that we can for future shipments. But thank you so much for your patience and your kindness about it. We've seen so many lovely messages on the Discord and just really appreciate that. Yeah.
John: Yeah. We appreciate it. We're working on it. I'm excited to read our next book together, Rosianna, which is Paige Lewis's wonderful book of poems, Space Struck. Our first book of poems.
Rosianna: I'm so excited to do poetry and I haven't read it before, either, so. Yeah.
John: Oh.
Rosianna: Really excited.
John: Well, I don't want to overplay it, but Space Struck is the first book that I've read in many years where I found myself crying and I didn't know why.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Which is my favorite experience, my favorite reading experience of all. I really, really— really just—I love it when a book moves me and I can't—I don't know why it's doing it, because that's when, to me, work feels like magic. Like art feels like magic.
Rosianna: Cried at a squirrel the other day. Because I was just like, squirrels are so cool.
John: Well, yeah, I should also add that this was before Covid, because since Covid I'll cry at anything.
Rosianna: Yeah. I've become a massive crier and I'm like, where did this come from?
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Before that I was like, Cameron Diaz in the film The Holiday, who hasn't cried in nineteen years. So yeah, it's a new thing.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: Well, thank you for talking about this book with me. Really excited for Q&A.
John: Yeah. I'm excited to continue the conversation about Blonde Roots and thanks to everybody for being part of Life's Library.
Rosianna: Yeah. Take care of yourselves out there.
John: Yeah. Thanks for being here with us.