Giller winner Esi Edugyan returns after seven years
“Washington Black” is a “post-slavery narrative” that spends most of its time outside the plantation, says the author
TORONTO — When author Esi Edugyan won the coveted Giller Prize for her 2011 novel “Half-Blood Blues,” the literary world eagerly wondered what she would write next.
Her breakout story of black jazz musicians in Europe during the Second World War was regarded as staggeringly original, particularly from the mind of a Calgary-raised author. And so the question started cropping up more often: Was she planning to write another book about jazz music?
“People are interested if you’re going to continue in that vein,” Edugyan says from her home in Victoria. “But I’d said everything I wanted to say about jazz and the Third Reich.”
After a couple fumbled starts on new books, Edugyan decided perhaps it was better to let inspiration strike, rather than force an idea.
She delivered lectures, wrote articles and served on literary juries. At home, she raised a baby daughter who was born just as “Half-Blood Blues” picked up steam, landing on the short list for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Awards.
Seven years later, she’s holding “Washington Black,” a novel sprawling in scope that explores Edugyan’s recurring interest in race, class, and the elements of belonging in society, but does so in a setting far apart from Nazi Germany.
The story follows an 11-yearold slave who unexpectedly escapes a brutal Barbados sugar plantation with the help of the owner’s much kinder brother, an inventor set on creating a flying machine. It’s told through the eyes of protagonist George Washington Black, a young man faced with the guilt of new-found freedom in an era when slavery persisted, and lingering figures who haunt his travels across the globe.
“Washington Black” recently made the long list for this year’s Man Booker Prize, and the book is due for release on Sept. 4.
Edugyan calls it a “post-slavery narrative” that spends most of its time outside the plantation. There’s perilous adventures on the stormy seas, wonderment of a new world in England and the complexities of society in Nova Scotia.
The idea came to Edugyan as she researched the Tichborne claimant trial, a real-life case in Victorian England that involved an aristocratic man shipwrecked at sea and presumed dead. His mother insisted her son was alive, and upon hearing a man in Australia claimed to be him, sent an ex-slave overseas to confirm his identity.
A trial ensued where the man failed to convince the courts of his identity and was convicted of perjury.
But Edugyan found herself more affected by the former slave who was on the margins of the storyline. She wondered what it must’ve been like for him to step into a new society as a black man. She questioned how someone could take agency over their own life after growing up under an oppressive system.
“It was such an interesting story of this man who had been taken from one life he’d known, (one) of great hardship and brutality, and stolen away to work in this completely different society,” she says.
“The inner life of that character made more of an impression on me than the machinations of the trial.”
Edugyan says “Washington Black” started taking shape as she experienced motherhood for the second time, which she initially felt would be impossible to mesh with her deadlines.
Balancing the life of a parent and acclaimed writer is always a work in progress, the 41-year-old admits. She’s taught herself how to write in bursts of thought, but also to accept that not every sentence will make it onto the page.
“It’s a difficult balance,” she says. “Make yourself open to your children, even if that means they disrupt you 15 times in an hour. Your thoughts fly out of your head, you lose your train of thought — all right. You’ll come up with something else on another day.”