![]() ![]() First published in 1997 as L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, the novel, which tells the story of a slave’s flight from his plantation and the dog-led pursuit to recapture him, was translated from French into English by Linda Coverdale in 2018, and won the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. It is these silences and ‘blood-traces of the self’ that Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau sings of in the seven chapters, or cadences, of The Old Slave and the Mastiff. These traces of slavery haunt city streets and landscapes around the world, where ‘In the last flash of the sun, the city glints / white and hard as bone’. ![]() While above: starlings shadow each otherĪnd double back on their own flight paths, ![]() On the burial ground of the city’s slaves The deaths of earlier inhabitants-including those who first named Cape Town ‘Camissa’ (mentioned in Baderoon’s ‘Port Cities’)-remain unheralded and mostly forgotten. These silences are the quotidian ones that accompany the close of day, but also the silences of the city’s ghosts. In her poem ‘A Prospect of Beauty and Unjustness’, Gabeba Baderoon writes of a sunset walk in Cape Town, ‘through the old silences of the city’. Patrick Chamoiseau (translated by Linda Coverdale) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |