A review by ralowe
Jubilee by Margaret Walker

5.0

i must have suppressed the knowledge that this was an oral history, since i became unsure by any type of guiding symbolist structure to the proceedings, and it made me very nervous. i wondered what the moral or message was intended to be, but of course fact, and maybe even fictive fact, offer no closure. one of my historic triggers is the time of reconstruction, this reading confirms it, the time where the horrors of the present-day took shape, indentured servitude perpetuated through debt bondage and cropping for shares, all that bureaucratic ugliness that reveals the amount of irrationality required for securing the institutions of the rational. the beauty of walker's writing made itself clearer to me near the end with the vast passages of dialogue, the sheer beauty of black english put to the project of 'working through' the many horrors of american life. at one point there is an intramural confrontation between the camps of what would be later refined as pacifist liberation theology in one corner and across from it the counter-colonial ancestral longing for black freedom that would perhaps inspire afropessimism. i don't know where the the author's loyalties lie, and it is quietly remarkable that is a testament to the work that for some reason it doesn't seem to matter.