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hannahlee 's review for:
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
by Alex Haley
I was really torn as to how to "rate" Roots. On the one hand, it is a masterpiece of storytelling, a groundbreaking epic work that had a huge impact culturally and broke ground for many authors writing about black life in America to follow. On the other hand, I felt like it wasn't that well written?
To be sure, I was emotionally affected by the story, and I thought that the construction of the book, stepping from generation to generation, provided a real emotional insight into one of the cruelest parts of our country's history of slavery - the separation of families. Throughout the book, each time a character that had had hundreds of pages devoted to their life was left behind, and the story moved on to the next generation, I had this desperate desire for narrative closure - that at some point the new protagonist would see their parent again, or return home, or meet their grandparent, or something to close the loop. But of course that didn't happen, because that's not how slavery worked. I thought it was deft of Haley to use our deeply internalized conventions of how a story should resolve itself to throw the reality of the slave experience into stark relief.
However, there were other times that the writing was kind of corny or labored - for example, many times that "current events" felt shoe-horned into the text in order to give the contemporary reader more historical context. Like, was anyone really talking about John Hancock's big signature at the time? The surety and clarity of the Revolutionary and Civil War events happening contemporaneously with the characters felt way overblown in a reality when news would be slow to travel and contradictory and confusing. Similarly, the first chapters of the novel, detailing Kunta Kinte's childhood in Africa, felt weird to me. I kept wondering how much research Haley actually did into the social and cultural life of The Gambia in the late 1700s. While I don't claim to be a scholar of African history by any means, the descriptions there felt too simple and almost dumbed down to ring true. In general, many of the characters and social lives and interactions depicted throughout seemed like they lacked a necessary complexity.
Finally, of course, there are the questions of Haley's methodology and plagiarism. I find it less important whether or not the genealogy represented in the book is "true." I like Haley's celebration of his family's oral history traditions, and I think his attempt to force them to be "proven" by standard white imperialist methods of record-keeping is unnecessary. What's more concerning is his evidently conscious plagiarizing and manipulation of others to try to improve his own story. From my understanding of his work on The Autobiography of Malcolm X (which I haven't yet read), the blurring of the lines of truth and fiction without regard for transparency and honesty is something of a trend for Haley, which is too bad.
Overall, I think Roots is definitely worth a read as a novel. The bits where the writing is strained are more than made up for by the emotional impact of the story overall, which surprised and engrossed me in ways I hadn't expected.
To be sure, I was emotionally affected by the story, and I thought that the construction of the book, stepping from generation to generation, provided a real emotional insight into one of the cruelest parts of our country's history of slavery - the separation of families. Throughout the book, each time a character that had had hundreds of pages devoted to their life was left behind, and the story moved on to the next generation, I had this desperate desire for narrative closure - that at some point the new protagonist would see their parent again, or return home, or meet their grandparent, or something to close the loop. But of course that didn't happen, because that's not how slavery worked. I thought it was deft of Haley to use our deeply internalized conventions of how a story should resolve itself to throw the reality of the slave experience into stark relief.
However, there were other times that the writing was kind of corny or labored - for example, many times that "current events" felt shoe-horned into the text in order to give the contemporary reader more historical context. Like, was anyone really talking about John Hancock's big signature at the time? The surety and clarity of the Revolutionary and Civil War events happening contemporaneously with the characters felt way overblown in a reality when news would be slow to travel and contradictory and confusing. Similarly, the first chapters of the novel, detailing Kunta Kinte's childhood in Africa, felt weird to me. I kept wondering how much research Haley actually did into the social and cultural life of The Gambia in the late 1700s. While I don't claim to be a scholar of African history by any means, the descriptions there felt too simple and almost dumbed down to ring true. In general, many of the characters and social lives and interactions depicted throughout seemed like they lacked a necessary complexity.
Finally, of course, there are the questions of Haley's methodology and plagiarism. I find it less important whether or not the genealogy represented in the book is "true." I like Haley's celebration of his family's oral history traditions, and I think his attempt to force them to be "proven" by standard white imperialist methods of record-keeping is unnecessary. What's more concerning is his evidently conscious plagiarizing and manipulation of others to try to improve his own story. From my understanding of his work on The Autobiography of Malcolm X (which I haven't yet read), the blurring of the lines of truth and fiction without regard for transparency and honesty is something of a trend for Haley, which is too bad.
Overall, I think Roots is definitely worth a read as a novel. The bits where the writing is strained are more than made up for by the emotional impact of the story overall, which surprised and engrossed me in ways I hadn't expected.