In my opinion, Black Shack Alley was a great choice to read after Agostino. Both follow the story of a young boy, but the characters are opposites in many regards. Agostino came from a privileged upper-class community and never worked, whereas José was born into a marginalized, working class group. Agostino’s troubles were much more personal (although Freud would say they were universal), and José’s story captures the experiences many people of African descent went through for centuries, and continue to go through today. I’ll admit this story was a bit challenging for me, but the last part (pg. 125 onwards) was very interesting and I want to highlight a few things that stuck out.
The tradition of storytelling felt very nostalgic, and while I know this is a tradition in Indigenous communities in North America, I hadn’t realized it is also true of some African communities (I hope it’s true otherwise my very brief google search has let me down). While Mr. Médouze’s stories were sometimes lighthearted, he and others have a habit of sharing more serious ideas with just a sentence or two. For instance, Mr. Médouze tells José that the békés get their money from the devil (pg. 37), and Tortilla says the children cannot roam around naked because their “Good Angel will fall off” (pg. 20). These little phrases were likely shaping José’s mindset before he started school. After being in school for over a decade and taking up reading as a hobby, José believes that it is unrealistic for him to write a novel like the ones he reads because he doesn’t have much experience with the kinds of people in books (white and blonde-haired). He “was only familiar with Black Shack Alley…men…all or more less black… that was not the stuff novels were made of, since [he] had never read any of that color”, which essentially confirmed the belief he had that Black people, at least the ones he knew, did not belong in literature. This was quite sad to read because I can imagine a young person of colour not being represented in the books they read, but also makes me feel bittersweet because Zobel went and wrote this very book about a young Black child, something that is still not written enough.
Despite the fact that this book was published decades ago, there are still some messages that are true today. Carmen told the story of a béké who refused to accept his mixed children because his “name never belonged to anyone but white people” (pg. 162). While people today may not be as brazen as this man in sharing their opinions on biracial children, a lot of people still hold the belief that white people who marry outside of their race are ‘ruining their bloodline’ or some other racist remark similar to that. I think we can all acknowledge that racism is still very much an issue in the world, but do you think that racism is a bigger issue today than it was, let’s say, 20 years ago? Are we going back in time?
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Add Yours →We can also see in the novel how José learns different ways of telling stories, the complexity of encountering literature and being critical about what is not told and about how what does appear is told, the limitations of a Eurocentric perspective.