{"id":52,"date":"2022-01-03T23:44:51","date_gmt":"2022-01-03T11:44:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/?p=52"},"modified":"2024-03-22T15:22:55","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T03:22:55","slug":"book-review-the-underground-railroad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/?p=52","title":{"rendered":"Yo Vocal Magazine – Book Review: The Underground Railroad"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Written by Colson Whitehead – Published in 2016 – 320 pages<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At 15 years old, I sat in class and half paid attention to a module that taught me this: chattel slavery was practiced until the 19th century. It involved the mass importation of people from Africa to the Americas. Individuals were bought, sold, imprisoned, and worked to death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order for us to heal from the past, we must first understand it. Often, this understanding is not meaningfully achieved through the memorisation of dates and events, but through well-told fiction.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is a novel that sheds light on essential truths about human behaviour, past and present. It explores what drives cruelty, desperation, and the will to survive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel tells the story of Cora, an enslaved girl who escapes a plantation in pre-civil war America. On her tail is Ridgeway, a slave catcher whose determination comes less from hatred, but a deep commitment to a toxic worldview. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the first 70 pages are beautiful, visceral pieces of writing that explore the arbitrary horrors consistent with our understanding of plantation life, there\u2019s a sense we\u2019ve been here before. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a wily trick. By chapter 4 the narrative is yanking the protagonist and reader down a series of tunnels, both real and figurative. By chapter 6 we\u2019re immersed in a story steeped in allegory, blending fact with fiction to breathe fresh life into history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For instance, the titular Underground Railroad was a real historical metaphor used to describe a web of operatives that helped smuggle enslaved people to the free states and Canada. While this real-life network ran on safe houses, Whitehead\u2019s Railroad runs on rails – a literal steampunk subway that transports escaped slaves north. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cora travels via this network to several US states, each characterised by a unique set of symbolic tropes. For instance, in South Carolina, Cora finds gleaming skyscrapers and societal harmony. Here, she takes a job playing <\/em>a slave in the state museum. For wages, she acts out the menial work she tried so desperately to escape while white children gawp at her from behind a screen. In Tennessee, she finds biblical plagues, while in North Carolina she encounters an American rendition of Nazi Germany. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Cora\u2019s heels is Ridgeway, the novel\u2019s most potent intersection of fact and fiction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This lawman sees the capture of runaways as the fulfillment of a duty ordained to him by a higher power. If God had not meant for Africans to be slaves, reasons Ridgeway, then they<\/p>\n\n\n\n

would not be enslaved. This banal, fundamentally flawed logic echoes many real voices, past and present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From their place at the top of the social order, individuals like Ridgeway convinced themselves that the artificial hierarchy from which they benefited was the proper order of the world. This rationale represents the kind of ethos that regards cruelty as an unfortunate but necessary bi-product of maintaining \u2018natural\u2019 order. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lest we think our Aoetearoa\u2019s hands are clean. While the British Empire abolished chattel slavery in 1833, indentured servitude remained legal until 1916. This practice involves the contractual binding, through debt, of labourers to employers for set periods of time. The system, like slavery, was predicated on the same racist belief in a hierarchy that excuses dehumanisation and suffering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indentured servitude carries many practical hallmarks of slavery. For instance, employers could sell the labour of an indenturee to a third party, meaning that in 1915, a person from Mumbai could be sold to a Westport coal mine without their consent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many labourers were kidnapped and sold into the trade, many more were lured into contracts by false promises. Most were paid under 20 cents per day, with an amount subtracted each month to pay the cost of travel, food, and shelter. It was in the interest of employers to ensure indentured workers never left, and thus the institution is now outlawed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a form of slavery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between my flat and the local fish supply, there is an old house that today serves as a wedding venue. John Cracroft Wilson built it in 1870, to house his indentured servants. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The worldview at the core of systems like slavery and indentured servitude is the true antagonist of The Underground Railroad. It\u2019s an ethos that drives Cora\u2019s former owners to view her as inhuman, as livestock, as property. It\u2019s the spirit that consumes Ridgeway, who commits to his trade with the banal ambivalence of a parking warden, believing himself to be an essential cog in the world\u2019s upkeep. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Underground Railroad is a novel that sheds light on the engine that drove inhuman behaviour for centuries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By colourising our past and making that engine tangible, Colson Whitehead asks one, salient question: sure, it looks like an old locomotive, but does it still run? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Favourite lines <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFreedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see it’s true limits.\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe world may be mean, but people don\u2019t have to be, not if they refuse.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

4-minute read. In order for us to heal from the past, we must first understand it. Often, this understanding is not meaningfully achieved through the memorisation of dates and events, but through well-told fiction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":53,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-3","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":530,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/530"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/taliskersh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}