![]() ![]() The historic chapters are told in a knowing third person: opening with a teasing warning for the reader who might object to a self-claimed tale of women’s history beginning with the introduction of a small boy (‘Wait. Jeffers takes one family rooted in the fictional town of Chicasetta in Georgia, tracing lineage from the original Creek inhabitants, to theft by Europeans, enslavement and expulsion, Civil War, Jim Crow Laws, the civil rights movement, and up to the twenty-first century of reclaiming denied histories. Most importantly, there is great care here in these histories –- they are treated with love and recognition for the cumulative nature of harm. A multi-generational 800 page epic of strong singing prose, The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois is a story of women, family, memory, with an unflinching look at colonial, racial and sexual violence. The award-winning poet, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, has published her debut novel, and it is magnificent. Even were those to be disrupted, some argue the idea that one work could ever encapsulate the ‘character’ of the USA is false: the idea is more about inspiration – a constant striving of craft and voice.īut sometimes, when you see Greatness you know it. ![]() ![]() The concept and canon have faced critiques of its inherent whiteness and masculinity, how it positions marginalised peoples in a singular American story. The idea of the ‘great American Novel’ is a troubled one. ![]() ‘I thought of what Mama liked to say: to find this kind of love, you have to enter deep country’. ![]()
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