EXPLORING SLAVERY
‘Imagine the level of depravity’
More than 300 pages into Esi Edugyan’s new novel, Washington Black, her titular hero looks back at the horrors of his early life as a slave on a Barbados sugar cane plantation in the 1830s.
Well into a life of precarious freedom that has taken him around the world, young Washington has a vivid flashback of the instruments of torture and death that were part of his childhood: the metal fangs of a mantrap used to catch runaways; a boulder covered in dark blood where men where whipped to death; a weathered noose hanging from a redwood tree.
It’s a reminder for both him and the reader of the horrors he witnessed and escaped, which Edugyan brings to harrowing life in the early parts of her epic third novel.
“Every single punishment that is written about in the novel is something that is taken from a history book, there’s some historical source for it,” says the Calgaryborn novelist, speaking from her home in Victoria.
“I didn’t invent any of the punishments. They were shockingly a matter of historical record. So people being covered in honey and tied to ant hills — this was actually something that was done. Can you imagine the level of depravity of a person who goes to such lengths to torture another?”
It threw a dark shadow on what is usually Edugyan’s favourite part of writing novels. She became a CanLit superstar thanks to her 2011 Man Booker longlisted novel HalfBlood Blues, which also earned her the Scotiabank Giller Prize. For that book, she delved into the world of jazz in Berlin and Paris during the 1930s and 1940s, offering a decade-spanning story that explores the black experience in Nazi Germany and its aftermath. Like many historical novelists, Edugyan loves doing research. She jokes that writing a novel is an excuse to “read widely and tell everyone you are working.”
But there was nothing enjoyable about her research into the reality of slavery in the 19th century and the British plantation owners who ruled with unspeakable cruelty.
“Reading about it in some ways was harder than writing it,” says Edugyan. There were “descriptions of a man on a slave ship being so full of anguish and desperation that he essentially kills himself with his own nails, by clawing himself at his own throat. I had to step away from that research. It was just overwhelming.
“But I really felt that these details had to be in the book. You can’t flinch away from them. You have to walk the reader through this and bring them to a closer understanding of the ferocity of this life and also what Wash is coming away from and what he survived.”
Wash is born into slavery on the plantation but is whisked away from his hopeless existence by an unlikely saviour while still a child. Christopher Wilde, also known as Titch, is the brother of Wash’s brutal master but also an eccentric inventor and secret abolitionist. Upon discovering Wash’s interest in science and talent for art, he takes the boy under his wing. But after a death in the Wilde family, Wash has a bounty put on his head. He and Titch escape in a hot-air balloon and embark on an adventure that will take our hero from Nova Scotia, to the Arctic, to the streets of Amsterdam and London and the deserts of Morocco.
Wash eventually falls in love and finds purpose in both his art and obsession with marine life. Through it all, Edugyan fills the novel with details that presumably sprang from the more enjoyable research she did in the past seven years. Washington Black is filled with far-flung facts about the science of aerostation and sea creatures and the vagaries of Moroccan dust storms and Arctic blizzards.
But the sprawling geography of the novel is key to its central theme, she says. What is freedom to someone who had never had a sense of it?
“In a way, the book is an exploration of freedom and what freedom means,” Edugyan says. “Obviously, it comes to mean many things in one life. As he moves through the novel and moves through space and moves through time, he starts to understand the complexities behind the notion of freedom.
“There is the sense that he is constantly moving and moving and moving through the world. I think by the end, it’s possible — it’s not written down for the reader, but it’s possible — that he has come to the understanding that maybe to stop moving and stay in one place is not the surrendering of one’s freedom. Obviously, for him, notions of freedom are tied to notions of escape and notions of being able to leave when you want to leave. But this isn’t necessarily the best thing for him in the long run.”
The early seeds of the novel
Every single punishment that is written about in the novel is something that is taken from a history book, there’s some historical source for it. I didn’t invent any of the punishments. They were shockingly a matter of historical record . ... Can you imagine the level of depravity of a person who goes to such lengths to torture another?
actually came from Edugyan researching the famous Tichborne case, a sensational trial in Victorian England that centred on an Australian imposter who claimed to be the heir to the baronetcy of British aristocrats. Their real son, Sir Roger Tichborne, had been lost at sea but his mother never gave up hope that he survived. Edugyan became fascinated with a minor character in the tale named Andrew Bogle, who was born into slavery on a Jamaican plantation before being saved by a member of the Tichborne family.
“He took a liking to this young man and stole him away,” Edugyan says. “I was very interested in this character and this life. This man would have been born and raised in brutality and this would have been all he knew of the world, this world of the plantation.
“(He is) taken very abruptly out of that into a completely different life in a place where the climate is very different and socially things are different and culturally just everything is a complete new world for him. I was interested in how that would play out psychologically.”
Edugyan’s first novel, 2004’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, is the story of an African immigrant in the 1960s who moves from Calgary to the village of Aster on the Athabasca River, a community founded by freed slaves who migrated from Oklahoma in the early 1900s.
When she finishes a novel, Edugyan says her interest in its topic and historical backdrop is generally exhausted. That is what happened with Half-Blood Blues, her Giller-winning triumph that turned her into a literary star. She says she has told a number of disappointed fans that she has no interest in revisiting jazz.
Her love of escaping into new worlds through research came early. Born to Ghanian immigrant parents, Edugyan grew up in southwest Calgary during the 1980s and spent hours every Saturday reading books at the public library. The Central Memorial High School graduate eventually became just as obsessed with writing, saying she has memories of staying up to dawn one night frantically writing her first short story.
“I was just so proud of myself,” she says with a laugh. “I’m sure it was terrible.”
While Edugyan admits she doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the shared themes of her three novels, she says she is attracted to obscure histories and people tasked with “reconstructing their lives.”
“Calgary was a lot less diverse and less multicultural than it is now,” she says of her childhood. “I think that my siblings and I did have a sense of standing out. I think at Central Memorial there were 1,000 students and three of them were black. You do have a sense of difference and a sense of standing out. But maybe that is what formed my interest in the stories like the ones I tell.”