Bloodlines - Softcover

Fred D'Aguiar teaches at the University of Miami. He was raised in Guyana and southeast London before coming to the United States. He is the author of three novels and four books of poetry.

D'Aguiar (Feeding the Ghosts; The Longest Memory) uses the form of an epic poem to eloquently convey two generations of oppression and sacrifice. The 19th-century narrator, who remains nameless, employs modern language and metaphors to tell his story, beginning with his conception and continuing through the tragic separation of his parents: his mother, a slave, and his father, a plantation owner's son. But this is sophisticated material: what begins as a rape evolves into a romance ("This is the nature of sweet transgression:/ after the fact bodies become solicitous;/ black and white locked in illegal passion"), and the two flee the plantation together. They are captured and humiliated by white men she is raped repeatedly, sold and taken west; he is bound and defiled. Throughout the 10 sections of the poem, the narrator's voice intermingles with the mournful songs of his 17-year-old mother, Faith, who dies in childbirth, and his father, Christy, who becomes a traveling fighter after Faith's return to slavery. Traditional poetic structures frame the vibrant, contemporary language ("Her love did more damage to her body/ than all the lyrics in all the pop songs slammed/ together have done to a sentimental boy/ or girl in suburbia on a diet of MTV jams") and powerful images of loneliness ("I am stripped bare by the light, bare and/ lonely, my bones wrung clean, the clean/ bones ground to dust, scattered in the four winds"). This saga of a man shunned by society will long echo in readers' minds. Ages 14-up.

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