The photo is of the book cover of the novel "Washington Black" by Esi Edugyan. It is this month’s choice of the Addison Book Club. I would describe it as sometimes a painful read, but a necessary one. According to Ryan B. Patrick’s Aug. 27, 2018 article “How Esi Edugyan Wrote Her Novel Washington Black — and won her Second Scotiabank Giller Prize” at cbc.ca, it tells the story of 11-year-old Washington "Wash" Black, a slave on a Barbados sugar plantation in the 19th century. His master is Englishman Christopher Wilde, who is obsessed with developing a machine that can fly. When a man is killed, Wilde must choose between his family and saving Black's life — and the choice results in an epic adventure around the world for Wash. The extraordinarily brutal cruelty of slavery never ceases to make my stomach turn. But it is something we should never forget and help us understand why the life experiences of Black Americans that have shaped their history and influence today’s attitudes are so exceedingly different than those of the white race. Kirkus Reviews calls the book “a thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel. High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative which leaps, sails and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.” Let’s learn more about it.
According to Wikipedia, “Washington Black” is the third novel by Canadian author Esi Edugyan. The novel was published in 2018 by HarperCollins in Canada and by Knopf Publishers internationally. A bildungsroman, the story follows the early life of George Washington "Wash" Black, chronicling his escape from slavery and his subsequent adventures. The novel won the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
Summary
George Washington "Wash" Black is born into slavery on Barbados. He is raised by Big Kit, another slave. When Wash was eleven, the owner of the plantation dies, and the plantation is turned over to his nephew, the extraordinarily cruel Erasmus Wilde. Wash's life continues on much as it did before, until he and Big Kit are called to serve in the big house. There he meets Wilde's younger brother, Christopher "Titch" Wilde, a scientist, who enlists Wash as his manservant. Titch teaches Wash to read and cook and, after noticing he is a prodigious artist, allows him to focus on drawing. Titch and Erasmus are later joined by their cousin Philip. Philip eventually reveals to Erasmus and Titch that their father has died, leading Erasmus to hatch a plan to move back to return home for a few years, leaving Titch in charge. He furthermore refuses to sell Wash to Titch, having become aware both of how close they are and of Wash's artistic talents. While arrangements are still being made, Philip commits suicide in front of Wash. When Wash informs Titch of the death of his cousin, he realizes that Erasmus will murder Wash in retaliation for Philip's death. To save Wash, the two escape. Due to a sudden storm, Titch directs them to crash into a merchantman and jump ship. There they meet the captain Bendikt Kinast and his brother, the ship’s doctor Theo Kinast. Though the brothers guess that Wash is a runaway slave, they nevertheless decide to take the pair to Virginia.
In Virginia, Titch learns that his brother has hired a bounty hunter to capture Wash, a Mr. Willard. While there they also meet up with a penpal of Titch's named Edward Farrow, who is an abolitionist. While at Farrow's, Titch also learns that his father may still be alive, prompting him to decide to go to the Arctic to see him. Farrow and Titch offer Wash the opportunity to escape to Upper Canada where former slaves are able to live in freedom but Wash declines. In the Arctic, Titch learns that his father is in fact alive, but Wash is surprised that their reunion is so cold, and Titch's father is indifferent to his sons and their disputes. Devastated by his father, Titch decides to leave the Arctic and Wash behind. Though Wash tries to follow him, he is unsuccessful, and Titch disappears during a snowstorm. Mr. Wilde tries to find him, but after searching for several days he comes back empty-handed and dies of a fever. No longer under the protection of either Wilde, Wash decides to take Titch's advice and resettles in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. From the ages of 13 to 16, Wash lives a life of fear, afraid that the bounty on his head will be collected. After spying some jellyfish on the docks, he remembers his interest in illustration and turns to that passion anew.
He meets Tanna, a fellow aspiring illustrator and the daughter of renowned marine biologist G.M. Goff. Wash works with Goff and Tanna to collect and illustrate marine specimens and has the novel idea of creating an aquarium. Tanna and Wash eventually fall in love and have sex after Wash is attacked by Mr. Willard. Wash had fought off Willard's attack, knifing him through the eye, but had been injured himself. Getting word that Titch may be alive, Wash follows Tanna and Goff to London, where the three begin work on their aquarium. Wash and Tanna look for information into Wash's past life and discover that Big Kit is Wash's mother. Wash attends Willard's public hanging for murder at Newgate Prison. Wash and Tanna eventually track down Titch in Marrakesh, Morocco. In the deserts outside of Marrakesh, Wash finds Titch living alone with a young Moroccan boy. Wash confronts Titch about their time together and his abandonment of Wash. A desert storm comes down upon the camp and, having received no satisfactory answer from Titch, the book ends with Wash beginning to walk off into the swirling sand.
Television adaptation
In October 2021, it was announced that Hulu had given the production a series order to a limited television adaptation of the novel consisting of nine episodes. The project will produced by 20th Century Television with Sterling K. Brown and Selwyn Seyfu as executive producers.
Reception
“Washington Black” received positive early reviews. Trade journals Kirkus Reviews, Booklist and Library Journal all gave the book starred reviews. The New York Times Book Review praised the novel for "complicat[ing] the historical narrative by focusing on one unique and self-led figure." The New Yorker praises both the novel's success as historical fiction and at taking on grand themes such as love and freedom, writing "That striving—the delicate, indomitable, and often doomed power of human love—haunts ‘Washington Black.’ It burns in the black sea of history like the jellyfish in the Nova Scotia bay, no more than a collection of wisps in the darkness, but a glory all the same, however much it stings."
The novel was also shortlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Esi Edugyan
Born in 1978, Esi Edugyan is a Canadian novelist. She has twice won the Giller Prize for her novels “Half-Blood Blues” and “Washington Black.” Edugyan was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta; her parents were immigrants from Ghana. She studied creative writing at the University of Victoria, where she was mentored by Jack Hodgins. She also earned a master's degree from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
Her debut novel, “The Second Life of Samuel Tyne,” written at the age of 24, was published in 2004 and was shortlisted for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in 2005.
Despite favorable reviews for her first novel, Edugyan had difficulty securing a publisher for her second fiction manuscript. She spent some time as a writer-in-residence in Stuttgart, Germany. This period inspired her to drop her unsold manuscript and write another novel, “Half-Blood Blues,” about a young mixed-race jazz musician, Hieronymus Falk, who is part of a group in Berlin between the wars, made up of African Americans, a German Jew and wealthy Germans. The Afro-German Hiero is abducted by the Nazis as a "Rhineland Bastard." Several of his fellow musicians flee Germany for Paris with the outbreak of World War II. The Americans return to the United States, but they meet again in Europe years later.
Published in 2011, “Half-Blood Blues” was announced as a shortlisted nominee for that year's Man Booker Prize, Scotiabank Giller Prize, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and Governor General's Award for English-language fiction. Edugyan was one of two Canadian writers — alongside Patrick deWitt — to make all four award lists in 2011.
On November 8, 2011, she won the Giller Prize for “Half-Blood Blues.” Again alongside deWitt's work, “Half-Blood Blues” was shortlisted for the 2012 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. In September 2012, in a ceremony in Cleveland, Ohio, Edugyan received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction for “Half-Blood Blues,” chosen by a jury consisting of Rita Dove, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Joyce Carol Oates, Steven Pinker and Simon Schama.
In March 2014 Edugyan's first work of nonfiction, “Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home,” was published by the University of Alberta Press in the Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture Series. In 2016 she was writer-in-residence at Athabasca University in Edmonton, Alberta.
Her third novel, “Washington Black,” was published in September 2018. It won the Giller Prize in November 2018, making Edugyan only the third writer, after M. G. Vassanji and Alice Munro, ever to win the award twice. “Washington Black” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award.
She features in Margaret Busby's 2019 anthology “New Daughters of Africa” with the contribution "The Wrong Door: Some Meditations on Solitude and Writing."
Edugyan lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and is married to novelist and poet Steven Price, whom she met when they were both students at the University of Victoria. Their first child was born in August 2011, their second at the end of 2014.
Writing “Washington Black”
According to Ryan B. Patrick’s Aug. 27, 2018, article “How Esi Edugyan Wrote Her Novel Washington Black — and won her Second Scotiabank Giller Prize” at cbc.ca, Esi Edugyan said, “I didn't initially set out to write a slave narrative. Several years ago I came across a real-life story about the famous Tichborne case that happened during the Victorian era in England. I started digging into it and found this completely absurd story where Sir Roger Tichborne, a young aristocratic man from a wealthy household, was shipwrecked and missing at sea off the coast of South America. His mother refused to believe he was dead and put notices in newspapers all around the world. A man in Australia claimed to be the missing man, and she sends a man named Andrew Bogle — a former slave from a Jamaican plantation and now a member of the Tichborne household — down to Australia to identify him.
"I started thinking about what Andrew's life might have been like to have been born a slave and raised in such brutality — with a sense of this is your destiny — to be suddenly wrenched out of that life to live in a completely different way and to grapple with a completely different society and set of rules. That's where the interest came from."
Research
"I'm constantly researching and trying new things when writing. I do read and research widely before I start writing to figure about what's going on in the first quarter of the novel. My husband is also a writer; he might read half a draft and make a suggestion and that sends me off in a different direction. Because this book began on the plantation, there was a lot of reading about plantations and conditions in the Caribbean. I found a few detailed and interesting books that focused on Barbados.
"I'm someone who writes in many drafts. There are wildly differing scenes in each draft, where the first draft of the novel looks nothing like the last draft. In an early draft, Wash wasn't an artist and when I determined that he was, it set me off reading books about science, and about marine life and marine watercolors. It was a real pleasure to read historical accounts of science discoveries and inventions — things like airships — and I was reading this fascinating research while I was writing the book."
A good writing day
"My writing process used to look like getting started at 10 at night, writing until five in the morning and then sleeping during the day. It was great. But then I had kids! These days, I drop them off to school in the morning and then head to my desk around 9:30 a.m. I read for about an hour, to quiet my mind, and then I write. A good day is when you can get two pages — single spaced, 12-point font, on my computer. That's a solid day of writing."
“Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling”
According to lyceumagency.com, in 2020, Edugyan was invited to deliver the prestigious CBC Massey Lectures, exploring the relationship between art and race. This incisive analysis was collected into her nonfiction work “Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling.” Through the lens of visual art, literature, film and the author’s lived experience, “Out of the Sun” examines the depiction of Black histories in art, offering new perspectives to challenge the accepted narrative. History is a construction; what happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? “An essential reckoning with how history is made” —Publishers Weekly, starred review — “Out of the Sun” illuminates myriad varieties of Black experience in global culture and history. Edugyan is also the author of “Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home,” a nonfiction work published in 2014. She is at work on a new novel and a children’s book.
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