The Water Dancer

That this took me such a long time to read is not a reflection on this book's quality. Why it took so long is a boring story so I'm going to put it under a spoiler tag because I feel like explaining but I don't think anyone should actually read my boring explanation. I got this audiobook from the library and it's been so popular that the queue has been consistently very long. I got one of those skip-the-line loans where the library lets you jump to the front of the queue but you only get the book for a short period. When I did that with this book my library had just introduced the skip-the-line thing and would cancel your hold when you borrowed the book. Now they let you keep your hold when they offer you a skip-the-line which makes a lot of sense to me. I had 7 days to read it and got about a third of the way through before the loan expired. Then I had to go to the back of the queue which was like 17 weeks long. By the time I got to borrow the book again I had forgotten what I had already read and so had a hard time getting back into it. I had to start over from the beginning and my brain rebels when I tell it to do something over again. So it took a while of me borrowing it, realising I wasn't in the right brainspace, returning it, and joining the back of the queue and waiting to borrow it again. Not the book's fault at all. Told you the explanation would be boring.

Once I got back into this book I couldn't put it down. It's a slow book plotwise but the writing really draws you in. Since it's about slavery it's going to be difficult to read but I felt that the writing style made it very accessible and there was interesting philosophy that I haven't seen in other media about slavery. When we talk about slavery we tend to focus on either the corporal punishment or on the lofty philosophical ramifications of lost personal freedom. Both are important but this book highlights an aspect that I feel we don't see represented enough: that slavery tore families apart. This book is all about the fallout of people having their parents, children, brothers, sisters, spouses forcibly removed from them with no way of reasonably finding them again and what that does to their psyches and their communities. There are so many different perspectives on this presented throughout the book. The main character is a slave whose father is the master and whose mother was sold while he was very young. He has perfect recall of everything that has ever happened in his life except he cannot remember anything about his mother. He lives in a kind of limbo because his father acknowledges him as his child so he has certain privileges but he's still a slave. The entire story, while going to different places and involving a lot of interesting characters -- including Harriet Tubman -- really revolves around him trying to understand what happened to his mother and why he doesn't remember. That this relationship between mother and son is the core of this book made it feel very real to me. This book is all about relationships and about the difference between bonds that you freely enter into and those that are forced upon you. The magical realism feels grounded because it's based in the stories that are shared among family and community. The book really highlights how important shared stories are in fostering a sense of self and community. Also there's a heterosexual relationship that is actually really good - it passes through several phases from typically patriarchal to truly equal and respectful and even as a non-hetero it made me happy.

What I took from this book was that stories are such an important part of a person's history and understanding of oneself. They tell us about where we came from and connect us to each other through a shared history. They are a kind of power. Slavers stole those stories from the people they enslaved by tearing families apart and destroying those links between generations. It's an overlooked trauma from slavery that continues to affect current generations who don't have those connections to their ancestors.

Also, I don't know how to phrase this because as a white person I know I have not experienced the tiniest fraction of this but I did relate on a level as an adopted person as I don't have any stories that connect me to my birth family. Not saying it's the same thing AT ALL but I did feel a connection while reading this between Hiram trying to regain his memory of his mother and my own search to try to find my birth mother. Again, I know it's not at all the same as my birth mother didn't have me taken from her forcibly, she was just pressured by her religion, but whenever Hiram talked about wishing he didn't have that blank space in place of his mother I felt it pretty viscerally.