A Nightmarish Story About Sex, Race and Denial Issues

As recent events have shown, globalization has eroded the barriers that used to separate continents and states. Information flows, products flow and people move from place to place. Geography matters less, and we can be attacked from far away by people who perceive us to be quite close. But sub-Saharan Africa has remained distant. It may even be receding. In the 1960s and 1970s, Africa was chic, especially for black Americans. No longer. Few Americans go to Africa to find their roots anymore, and those who do often don’t find what they’re looking for.

Reginald McKnight’s new novel traces a search for roots that goes terribly awry. Bertrand Milworth, an anthropologist from Denver, goes to Senegal to do field research on folk tales. He is married to a white woman named Rose, but their five-year relationship is teetering. Bert is a tightly wound man who is unable to communicate his passions directly to anyone. During a tense moment at a village party, he becomes enraged but never lets on: ‘My anger is right here, right in my hands, my belly, my heart, but I can’t pull it up.’

Time and again, faced with an unsettling situation, Bert becomes passive and watches. That is a problem, because as the story progresses, his entire life devolves into an unsettling situation. A Senegalese couple moves into his apartment building, and he becomes sexually obsessed with the woman. “She’s gorgeous and tall, broad-shouldered, graceful, tooth-y, buxom, and an amazingly good cook.” Slowly, his life begins to fray. He is racked by vivid dreams of violence and sex, yet he has never dreamt before, or at least never remembered any dreams. Now, he finds that the boundary between his waking moments and his sleep starts to blur. The couple, Kene and Alain, alternate between passionate screaming and equally passionate lovemaking, and Bert can’t shake the sound of Kene’s voice as she moans. At the same time, he feels his wife slip ever farther away. He starts to question why he has never been with a black woman, or even attracted to a black woman. His fixation on Kene triggers the doubts and uncertainties that he has kept neatly packed away in his unconscious. Slowly, the story descends into the surreal.

McKnight does a masterful job evoking Bert’s gradual breakdown. Day by day, the line between conscious and unconscious disappears, until Bert literally falls asleep for the better part of 23 days, after having been poisoned by a talisman that one of his friends gives him to ward off the dreams. When he finally emerges from his stupor, he finds himself on trial by a village secret society in front of Alain, who has read Bert’s journals and believes that the American has been having an affair with Kene. By firelight, in front of an elder, Bert is humiliated. His diaries are read out loud, and out of context. He is placed in front of a hostile group and forced to justify his inner thoughts and feelings. And, having been stripped metaphorically, he is then stripped naked and tied down. He narrowly escapes with his life, but not after a gruesome punishment. McKnight doesn’t leave us with a pat ending, though he does have Bert reflect on the meaning of it all.

Writing to his estranged wife, he confesses the shame he had never confronted about race and sex and color. But while McKnight brilliantly evokes Bert’s ambiguous path to self-knowledge, the book doesn’t fully cohere. Weaving in and out of Bert’s dreams, the story is often difficult to grasp, and though that works atmospherically, it is narratively weak. Is Bert’s dream state literal? Does he really sleep on and off for three weeks? Is the trial real or partly imagined? McKnight keeps it all frustratingly vague. That is clearly the intent, but it often detracts from rather than adds to the power of the story. This is not a light read, and though it is relatively short, it feels far longer than it actually is. In this case, that is a strength, a testament to McKnight’s economy of prose. Not minimalist, but coiled and packed with meaning. Whether or not every device works, McKnight forces us to think, about race, sex, denial, but even more significantly, he forces us to feel, and to feel things that we may not want to but that lurk, somewhere, in all of us.