Perspective and The Book of Night Women

There’s a word that I always come back to in my life that I think is invaluable. It’s one of those words that, in my humble opinion, defines life. It defines life, and a life well lived, because it leads to the other words that are crucial to human existence.

Perspective.

Perspective leads to understanding, leads to sympathy, leads to empathy, leads to kindness, leads to caring, leads to education. You can only understand someone else’s perspective if you’ve tried to see the human experience through their eyes. You can only gain sympathy, or empathy, or both, when you’ve understood the human experience. You then become kind and you then seek the education to understand more about that experience.

Reading The Book of Night Women was a departure for me, a step outside of my comfort zone, if you will, but not entirely. Most of my life I have been fascinated by the Civil Right’s movements, the concept of slavery, and the struggles of people different than myself. I’m a white woman. I have absolutely no idea what it is like to look at the color of my skin and wonder if I’ll be judged on sight for that. The only discrimination I have faced is that I’m a woman and therefore seen as the weaker sex. But that’s a topic for another time.

‘Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will.’

The Book of Night Women follows a girl named Lilith who was born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar cane plantation in the late 1700s. Lilith learns early that she’s different, chiefly because she has green eyes. That trait in a slave girl means that  her father was likely a white man. Lilith also learns that she’s different because she feels in her soul a sort of darkness that she can’t quite explain. She just knows she feels it. The other black women on the plantation feel it in her, too. Through a series of experiences, some horrifying, some not, Lilith and the other women on the plantation come to understand how real and deep that darkness goes and how much of Lilith’s own strength it takes to combat that.

A girl becomes a woman, a forbidden love blossoms, a war is waged, and through it all, a perspective is gained.

This book was published in 2009 so I’m a little behind the curve in picking this up, but I am glad I did. Marlon James is a brilliant writer. He’s Jamaican which I think makes him a natural storyteller in its own, but he tells such a beautiful story. You feel for her. You ache for her. You get mad at her, and mad for her, and at other times, you feel just as confused as she is. But you understand her. That’s the most important part. And James doesn’t mince words either. He presents this human experience with all the language and imagery necessary to drive home to points of the time. This is the way it was. Period. It’s brutal, it’s upsetting, it’s compelling.

I think what I feel is what anyone feels, you don’t want to believe these kinds of things happened to people. You don’t ever want to believe that people are responsible for these kinds of hellish acts against other humans. I also think that we’re so removed from the time of slavery that it’s easy to fool ourselves into thinking that issues like this no longer exist. The problem, is they do. When you read this book, it gives you some perspective on what it took to break down the spirit of a human and drive them to believe that they are lesser. Lilith comments to herself that she finds herself thinking so many thoughts and having so many feelings, but how can she have them when she’s as dumb as they say she is? That kind of feeling still exists today. So much time was spent breaking down the human spirit and drilling home feelings of superiority and inferiority that the ghosts of the past still haunt us. The easiest way to eradicate those ghosts is to admit they existed, learn from them, and do what we can to protect the people most affected by it going forward.

This story is a fantastic retelling of history from a different part of the world at that time and it is worth every minute you spend on it.

Let’s not walk in circles any longer.