Monday, January 7, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The River Where Blood is Born by Sandra Jackson-Opoku




The River Where Blood is Born is a book whose claim to being fantasy is largely based upon its framing device - the story is told from the perspectives of two divinities and occasionally commentated on by the dead spirits of some of the characters as a kind of greek chorus.  Other than that, it's a story mainly of Nine Black Women, all the descendants (over several generations and of various branches) of a single African Woman, as they live out their very different lives far away from the land they were originally from.  So if you're looking for a fantasy story, you're not really gonna find it here.

What you will find here however is a really fascinating book well worth your time.  It's certainly not a light book - as you might imagine when the first woman in the family is taken from Africa on a slave ship and has her tongue cut out - but it is absolutely compelling as it jumps from one character's story to another.  The book is not told chronologically - we jump back and forth between generations, but there is a method to the madness and the connections between characters become revealed as we go on and as the women come closer and closer to fulfilling their destiny of returning to the place they came from.  This is going to be a hard book for me to review coherently, but it is well worth your time.


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------------
The Spider Kwaku Ananse makes a deal with the Queen Mother of The River Where Blood is Born, to weave a story, a tapestry, from the lives of generations of daughters from the River.  But the Spider has his own agenda for what he wants with their lives, and one of the Queen Mother's divine daughters, the Gatekeeper intends to try her own hand at telling their stories.

And the result of their storytelling is this book, the book telling the story of the Nine Daughters of the First Wife, with their Nine Destinies, which will take them far across the sea away from the River, away from Africa.  They will be a slave girl, the adopted daughter of a Caribbean plantation owner, a Christian American woman who is the mother to a big family, a singer whose father was killed by racists, a rebellious girl fleeing her homeland, a wandering woman who decides to take charge, a young woman seeking to figure out love and sex and friendship, and a young woman searching for her her soul as she finds herself trapped between a man and an obscure calling.

Will the Spider and Gatekeeper's tale result in the Ninth Daughter finding her way back to the River?  Or will the Queen Mother be denied through the Spider's trickery, and the women be lost to the land from which they came?
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The River Where Blood is Born is a fascinating look at the lives of the women whose ancestors were forced away from their homeland of Africa (although the first woman, Ama, hardly has a cherished life in Africa, as the book doesn't idealize how things were in the homeland either).  Each chapter, in between asides told by the Gatekeeper, the Spider, or the dead Ancestral Spirits of the women (who grow in number as the book goes on), tells the stories of what happened to each woman, whether they be in America or in the Caribbean.  The book does not go strictly chronologically and not every woman gets a story strictly from their own point of view (Big Momma, third chronologically speaking although overlapping with women 4 through 8, has her story told only through another and comes after several of her descendant's stories).  But they're all rather different in how they were affected by their circumstances, and how they feel the pull of distant Africa and to what extent they feel it as they try to figure out their lives.

It helps that all of the women are very different, despite their shared heritages.  It should be noted that the book is absolutely NOT about the women discovering their common ancestor - (Darlene adopts Sara for example and never discovers their common relation - and Alma meets both and never finds out the same either).  Rather it's about each of the women discovering themselves and figuring out their own identities and purposes, without trying to be led astray into misery.  And it's a rough journey for all of them, with the journeys being affected by many different factors both personal and environmental (naturally racism and sexism play major roles), and not every woman comes out triumphantly in the end.  But the stories are always compelling and make this a fascinating book to read.  As I'm not a literary book critic, I know I'm reusing the same words here to describe this book, but it's not really in me to go through each of the 8 major stories and analyze them, so just take my word about their strength.

Honestly, my biggest complaint about this book is not spending enough time with several of the characters.  Two of the middle generation (in terms of where they show up in the book, not in terms of actual generations) women - Darlene and Sara - are the centers of particularly well done segments, with both undergoing development during these stories and then the stories simply end as they've made their own key developments.  Both women pop up in the last generation's stories - Alma interacts with both of them - but we never see more than small glimpses of them, and it's a bit of a tease that I wish was expanded to a bit more.

Of course when the biggest complaint is that we don't see enough of two characters, that's a pretty damn good sign about the strength of a book.  The ending is rather well done, in a way that befits the tellers of the story, so again I'd definitely recommend this book if you're looking for something different than the typical story written by a white author about the lives of white characters, even if this isn't really something that maybe qualifies as "genre."
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