Fourteen years ago, Jinx's mother was murdered by her abusive boyfriend and this tragedy was the trigger that began her alienation. A figure from a time and a catastrophic event that Jinx would rather forget, Lemon is intent on reliving it all. In fact, Jinx feels most at home amongst the dead people she works with as a funeral home cosmetologist.Īnd then, one day, Lemon comes to call. But her food offers sustenance, not comfort. She cooks beautifully balanced meals that look aesthetic on the plate. She cleans obsessively - a largely pointless task, since there is little mess to clean since her husband and young son, tired of her frigidity, moved out. He just knocked, that was all, knocked and the front door and waited, like the fourteen years since I'd killed my mother hadn't happened. Utterly compelling and deserving of its Booker longlisting. It's what has enabled us to survive."ĭonna Bailey Nurse's comments have been edited and condensed.Summary: A fierce book about love, regret, alienation and redemption. But, at the same time, both books are insisting, maintaining and confirming the great love that exists within the Black family. "I think what both books are actually getting at is that there's just been so much violence, racism and just general hostility aimed at the Black family, and the Black family has been devastated by it. It was so interesting that somebody who was writing a novel about the difficulty of recording Black history was having so much trouble recording his own personal Black history." A family built on hardship and love Every time he went to write that down he just felt like he couldn't do it! He felt resistance, even in writing down his own Black history because he was afraid he would sound like he was whining or he was complaining. "While David was writing this book he wanted to draw upon some of the racism he experienced as a child growing up. I believe that children do not tell their parents either. In any family, in my family for instance, your parents do not tell you those things that happened to them and their parents did not tell them. "There is so much Black history that we do not know partly because it's been ignored or erased or misrepresented, but partly because it's very painful for Black people to talk about what has happened.
The title fits with the novel because the Soucouyant folktale really represents a brutal, flaming history." Difficulty telling the story
Her two sons move away from home, overwhelmed by their mother's worsening condition and by the poverty, racism and the general lack of opportunity that defines their lives. Her husband dies in a labour accident and both of her sons leave home soon after. The novel is about a Black woman woman named Adele who is suffering from early onset dementia. "The title of the book, Soucouyant, refers to a Trinidadian folktale about an old woman who, by night, turns into a ball of fire that flies around the village and sucks blood.
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