Reviews

The Slave Yards is a translated work of historical fiction. The title refers to an area on the nineteenth-century Benghazi coast where black Africans who were brought to Libya as slaves were traded. The area later became a makeshift settlement occupied by those, like former slaves and their descendants, on the margins of society. And it is where Atiqa lives. We meet her as an adult when she meets her cousin Ali and learns the truth about her family history. The story unspools first to her childhood, where she was raised by her aunt and never knew her parents, and then further back to the life of her mother. Tawida was an enslaved Black woman who caught the eye of her master’s son, a relationship that would irrevocably alter her life.

This is a tough read. The fact that it doesn’t unfold in a linear fashion can make it a bit tricky to settle into. And the subject matter is obviously tough - apart from the (sadly expected) horrific treatment of the enslaved, there are also forced abortions, forced prostitution and outright torture. It also speaks to the risks and perils of relationships between owned and owner, no matter how genuine the feelings of the two people concerned. But there is also a focus on the resilience of the enslaved and especially the bonds between the women. The book also includes a nuanced look at racial identity, something Atiqa always struggled with.

What make this book special though, and well-worth reading is that it is a Middle Eastern story. This is an aspect of slavery that western readers like myself, familiar with the “enslaved people on plantations in America and the Caribbean” narrative, are often largely unaware.

All in all an absorbing but heavy tale told well. And one with a unique (at least for most Western readers) perspective on slavery.

Content Warnings

ellethinks's review

Go to review page

challenging reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

Content Warnings

expendablemudge's review

Go to review page

4.0

But Atiqa, the self-made therefore self-possessed woman of the story, doesn't come to this knowledge simply or directly. The whole novel is, as the title suggests, the Slave Yards whole and entire, its incredibly rich culture, its appalling degrading poverty, its joys and hates and endings and beginnings. The stories Atiqa remembers, tells herself anew, feels and smells again in her hard-earned, richly merited new life, are the meat of this book. Maybe "meat" isn't the word...the asida in the bazeen of this book. The story is dispensed with for long stretches of tale-spinning, of life-living memories. And that is a good, good thing.

I felt as though I had gone completely away from 2020 Long Island and its existential anxieties, thence to gain perspective:

Without a word {the groom} handed the bride's uncle a blood-spattered white sheet. The uncle...took it out to a group of men gathered in front of the house. This done, he gleefully set about emptying the contents of his shotgun into the air. ... The uncle unfurled it like a victory banner, the battle of innocence now won...they could hold their heads high in the knowledge that their honor was intact.

The present-day abortion-rights battles are the not-distant descendents of this kind of complete and utter idiocy. The entirety of monotheistic religion's thrust (please pardon wordplay) has been to stand on the neck of Womankind's autonomy out of anxiety. What? Anxious manhood? Perish forbid, say the abortion-deniers, and throw a thousand words into the void between their fears and the actual world. (THEIR daughters, white as snow, will always be able to get abortions...multiple women I'm related to had them pre-Roe-v-Wade. We're white. Connect the dots.) The real issue is control. The real issue is covering up for the men's fear of being robbed of their control over women's bodies:

Nobody seemed to notice that there was something wrong with the custom of having the groom use his hand {to break the woman's hymen} on the wedding night to determine whether his bride was a virgin. On the contrary, even the women thought is was perfectly normal. It had never occurred to them that it was just a way of covering up for a man's possible impotence.

Huh. Imagine that, a custom arising (you should forgive) to protect a fragile boy-ego at the expense of a woman. My pearls, my pearls.

The entire review goes live tomorrow at 6:30 on my blog, Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud. CW: I'm really, really, really pissed off with the US and with 2020 right now.

More...