Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Serving in its early history as the nexus between the commodity trade, slave trade and New World colonization, the Caribbean region is home to a complex set of cultures that are just now being brought to light in fiction by authors interested in reclaiming this history. Caribbean literature, with its characters’ and authors’ feet firmly planted in two camps--their home islands and the far-flung reaches of North America and beyond--reflects an uneasy duality, sometimes typical of European emigres. Occasionally borrowing elements of magical realism from some Latin American writers, the writing is a unique melange of social and spiritual concerns.

Joining such acclaimed Carribean writers as Paule Marshall, Rosa Guy, Jamaica Kincaid and Maryse Conde is a new group of outstanding talents like Edwidge Danticat and Patrick Chamoiseau. One must add to that list Dionne Brand, the Trinidad-born novelist, playwright and longtime Canadian resident. “At the Full and Change of the Moon,” her second novel, is a hypnotically compelling, magical set of tales that follow the fates of the various descendants of one slave and in the process personalize two centuries of history in several Caribbean islands, Venezuela and parts of Europe and North America.

The novel begins with Marie Ursule, who has been brutalized and crippled on the aptly named Mon Chagrin plantation. She and a group of her fellow slaves have decided on a vermilion-tinged morning to end their suffering and rob their master of their productivity through a defiant act of mass suicide. Spared from the tragedy is Marie Ursule’s only daughter, Bola, “her one curiosity and her vanity,” whom she has spirited away from the carnage under the protection of Kamena, a male friend. Bola, who is possessed of an uncanny clairvoyance, is Ursule’s hope for the future. The prospect that Bola will mother future generations is the one thing that seems to lighten the ominous burden her mother carries. But as Bola hides out in Culebra Bay, she meets two nuns, dead except in her imagination, who ominously tell her, “[T]ime is a collection of forfeits and damages.”

These are prophetic words, for in the chapters that follow, members of each succeeding generation lay bare their wounds, perhaps from the legacy of slavery and death they unwittingly shoulder, perhaps from their own misfortunes. Happiest is Bola herself, who lives a sensual surreal freedom and bears 13 children. Brand thoughtfully provides a genealogical chart for Bola and her offspring, which is essential when Bola christens them: Augusta, “the one for the blind man whose head she loved”; another is identified as “the one who stole her footsteps”; a third is simply called “the one who pointed to the sea.”

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The chart becomes crucial as the reader meets a succession of Bola’s haunted progeny and their stories double back on themselves in a fashion that is at times disorienting but compelling nonetheless. There’s Augusta’s son, Private Sones, who rushes to fight the Germans in World War I in hopes of discovering a destiny greater than his island home allows but is overwhelmed and broken by “the stench of other men sweating their fear.” Then there’s Dovett, the sea-child’s grandson, who attempts to organize oil workers in Trinidad and is murdered for his troubles. And Dear Mama, daughter of the footstep stealer, who has six children, including Carlyle, a boy preacher and “badjohn” drug dealer in America, and Eula, who immigrates to Canada to escape the claustrophobic expectations of her family.

The stories, fascinating, sad and sometimes horrific, are told in a densely rhythmic and haunting style that is also full of heartbreak and longing for things beyond the characters’ grasp. Eula best expresses that longing in a letter to her dead Dear Mama: “I would like one single line of ancestry, Mama. One line from you to me and farther back, but a line I can trace . . . [a] line I can reach for in my brain when I feel off kilter. Something to pull me back. I want a village and a seashore and a rock out in the ocean and the certainty that when the moon is in full the sea will rise and for that whole time I will be watching what all of my ancestry have watched for, for all ages.”

Like Eula, the reader hopes that certainty comes for these unfortunate characters, in spite of the fact they seem resolutely unable to make sense of their past or their present. By the book’s end, the reader is left to wonder: Is this failure theirs or their ancestors’? Were they robbed of their history or shackled by it? By the time Brand returns to the ancestral Bola at the end of the novel for a haunting coda, the reader is left with even more questions about the nature of self-determination and free will that have a resonance that extends beyond the pages of this unsettling and beautifully written novel.