THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9503300608
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY GAIL GRIFFIN
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
THE LONGEST MEMORY
FRED D'AGUIAR
Pantheon. 138 pp. $20.
After tasting the forbidden fruit of the written word, a young slave escapes from a Virginia plantation.
His father sends authorities to capture him and return him to safety, hoping to prevent his death en route north. But because of a misunderstanding, his son is killed more cruelly: before his eyes, under the whip, at the hands of an overseer. Unbeknownst to victim or killer, they are half brothers.
Guyanese writer Fred D'Aguiar begins with this tragedy and adds layer after layer, voice after voice, to craft his compelling first novel, The Longest Memory.
Set in 1810, the novel traces the tangled bonds of blood, race and love that tie three families - slave, master and overseer - to one another, irrevocably. ``What began as a single thread has, over the generations, woven itself into a prodigious carpet that cannot be unwoven,'' the master tells the overseer.
D'Aguiar creates a chorus of voices, allowing a different character to speak in each chapter. Among the most affecting are Chapel, the rebellious slave who is the offspring of a rape by the overseer; Whitechapel, his stoic, passive father; Mr. Whitechapel, the plantation master who struggles to reconcile his Christian beliefs and his ownership of slaves; and Lydia, the master's daughter who teaches Chapel, her illicit lover, to read and write.
The chapters are cast in different styles - from verse to diary entries - but share a tightly written eloquence. D'Aguiar missteps only in a chapter of newspaper editorials glorifying slavery, which seem forced and false.
The Longest Memory raises many of the same philosophical issues as other novels that have dealt with slavery, such as the narrow divide between the keepers and the kept. The insights aren't particularly new, but D'Aguiar, who has written three books of poetry, expresses them well, bringing a poet's cadence and grace to his work.
The language helps convey a bitter irony, one of many in this brief book. Learning to read and write propels Chapel, a slave turned poet, toward the reality of the lash - but also toward beauty and freedom. Of his lover, Lydia, Chapel says: ``(S)he opened the rose
She called a book and moved my finger over
The words as she sang them
I heard a choir.''
His story reminds readers, powerfully, why words matter. MEMO: Gail Griffin is a staff editor. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by KATHLEEN DIGRADO
Jacket painting by BILL TRAYLOR
by CNB