‘Yonder’ a vital addition to slavery literature
Tracing one’s lineage starts off with wonder, fueled by intellectual curiosity and the overwhelming desire to belong. But it can result in frustration and grief when the search stops suddenly, as the record of lives dries up. Vacancies exist where generations should be; the only evidence of their existence is you.
This is the struggle of the descendants of enslaved people in America.
In the novel “Yonder,” Jabari Asim brilliantly takes horrific details of the Black American experience of slavery and breathes life into them. He adds depth to the nameless monochrome images, offering vivid strokes of color and encouraging readers to commit to a deeper understanding of the lasting impact of being a person held in captivity.
Set on a Southern plantation called Placid Hall in 1852, “Yonder” explores the intertwined lives of four enslaved people: William, Cato, Margaret and Pandora. Known as the Stolen, they measure time by harvests rather than ticks of a clock. The chapters alternate between the points of view of each character, allowing readers to hear their voices and understand their thoughts, hopes and fears. It renders them human as they navigate the abuse at the hand of their owner, Randolph “Cannonball” Greene, known as a Thief.
Asim, a poet, children’s book author and cultural critic, delves into the nuances and complexities of slavery. He explores the emotional and psychological acrobatics the Stolen must go through to transcend the many layers of their subjugation: first as human cargo, then as property – purchased, traded and discarded like spoiled goods, if they are lucky to survive.
Asim juxtaposes violent savagery with familiar nuisances — pestering insects, smothering heat, the putrid smell of death — emphasizing how the Stolen cope. “The flies landed on the backs of necks, alighted on knuckles, even crawled across eyelids — and still my people worked, either oblivious or amazingly disciplined,” Pandora says.
The characters often wrestle with loving deeply, struggling to fight the feelings of attachment, fearing that if those emotions are revealed, they will be exploited and then forcibly extinguished. Some come to believe that human connection is futile because at any moment those alliances can be severed, leaving a profound emptiness that makes them question their very existence: “As soon as we learned to toddle on our own two feet and feel the heaviness of the world, we began to ask ourselves why. Not why we were born but why we were born there,” Cato says.
Amid the bleakness, though, there is resilience, tenderness and community among the Stolen, a thread of spirituality and an upholding of traditions.
Freedom — life in the yonder — is something the Stolen can barely imagine.
“I saw such flights of fancy as a form of weakness,” William says.
But eventually William, Cato, Margaret, Pandora and a young boy named Zander decide to make a break for it. Their destination: Canada, a place that one character imagines as within reach, with Africa just beyond its borders. The final section of the book follows their exodus, a bold and dangerous journey whose outcome remains uncertain until the very last page.
The history of the American enslaved person is customarily presented with little depth, reducing their presence to one of kidnapping, auction, toil and death but rarely touching on the life-shaping moments in between. “Yonder” is a great departure from the typical story of the captured who solely pick cotton while dodging the master’s whip. Asim articulates the full humanity