THE SLAVE YARDS, nightmarish Benghazi reality translated from Arabic

THE SLAVE YARDS
NAJWA BIN SHATWAN (tr. Nancy Roberts)
Syracuse University Press
$24.95 trade paper, $14.95 Kindle, available now

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Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Set in late nineteenth-century Benghazi, Najwa Bin Shatwan's powerful novel tells the story of Atiqa, the daughter of a slave woman and her white master. We meet Atiqa as a grown woman, happily married with two children and working. When her cousin Ali unexpectedly enters her life, Atiqa learns the true identity of her parents, both long deceased, and slowly builds a friendship with Ali as they share stories of their past.

We learn of Atiqa's childhood, growing up in the "slave yards," a makeshift encampment on the outskirts of Benghazi for Black Africans who were brought to Libya as slaves. Ali narrates the tragic life of Atiqa's mother, Tawida, a black woman enslaved to a wealthy merchant family who finds herself the object of her master's desires. Though such unions were common in slave-holding societies, their relationship intensifies as both come to care deeply for each other and share a bond that endures throughout their lives.

Shortlisted for the 2017 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Bin Shatwan's unforgettable novel offers a window into a dark chapter of Libyan history and illuminates the lives of women with great pathos and humanity.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS BOOK FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What a horrible life slaves have always led.

There's an earth-shattering insight for you. I can't believe anyone didn't say it before me, can you? Well, this book's like that. It's not telling you anything that you didn't know before. It's making you feel, see, smell it instead of intellectually knowing. Slavery, at its heart, is about bodies. The thing we take for granted, the autonomy of the corpus delicti of our lives as sinners on this, gawd's private torture grounds, is abrogated; no man controls his labor, no woman her womb, no child its curiosity. A slave exists, doesn't live. A slave possesses nothing, not even a soul, or else no religion would allow the practice. No religion has ever, to the best of my knowledge, forbidden slavery. At best a few wild-eyed bizarro outlier sects like the Quakers, or the Northern Baptists in the US, could even be bothered to protest its wrongness.

Many were the slaves who had forgotten the story of their enslavement and had integrated gladly into the life of those owned by Muslim masters. As for those who married other members of their own race and, in some cases, won emancipation, they were delivered from hunger to hunger, and from poverty to poverty.

That is a sad and eternal truth: Poverty closely resembles slavery, and as poverty is entirely curable, that cannot be an accident. It suits the people at the top to keep the system just unfair and evil enough that they can keep the best for themselves and run the lowest risk of the huge majority figuring out that they can't kill *all* of us and rebelling.

I hope to High Hallack that the US is at such an inflection point right now. But I digress.

At any rate. The Slave Yards tells a story, fairly simple in its outlines, about Atiqa growing herself up in Benghazi's Slave Yards, suffering multiple orphanings, and growing into a woman with a loving family, both made and born. Into that world comes a man with secrets to tell her about her past, secrets she buried during the worst night of her entire existence, and proofs that she was not just a slave girl and never had to be one. Too late, of course, to prevent the slave girl from suffering the degradation of not even owning the lungs she breathed with.

But Atiqa, the self-made therefore self-possessed woman of the story, doesn't come to this knowledge simply or directly. The whole novel is, as the title suggests, the Slave Yards whole and entire, its incredibly rich culture, its appalling degrading poverty, its joys and hates and endings and beginnings. The stories Atiqa remembers, tells herself anew, feels and smells again in her hard-earned, richly merited new life, are the meat of this book. Maybe "meat" isn't the word...the asida in the bazeen of this book. The story is dispensed with for long stretches of tale-spinning, of life-living memories. And that is a good, good thing.

I felt as though I had gone completely away from 2020 Long Island and its existential anxieties, thence to gain perspective:

Without a word {the groom} handed the bride's uncle a blood-spattered white sheet. The uncle...took it out to a group of men gathered in front of the house. This done, he gleefully set about emptying the contents of his shotgun into the air. ... The uncle unfurled it like a victory banner, the battle of innocence now won...they could hold their heads high in the knowledge that their honor was intact.

The present-day abortion-rights battles are the not-distant descendents of this kind of complete and utter idiocy. The entirety of monotheistic religion's thrust (please pardon wordplay) has been to stand on the neck of Womankind's autonomy out of anxiety. What? Anxious manhood? Perish forbid, say the abortion-deniers, and throw a thousand words into the void between their fears and the actual world. (THEIR daughters, white as snow, will always be able to get abortions...multiple women I'm related to had them pre-Roe-v-Wade. We're white. Connect the dots.) The real issue is control. The real issue is covering up for the men's fear of being robbed of their control over women's bodies:

Nobody seemed to notice that there was something wrong with the custom of having the groom use his hand {to break the woman's hymen} on the wedding night to determine whether his bride was a virgin. On the contrary, even the women thought is was perfectly normal. It had never occurred to them that it was just a way of covering up for a man's possible impotence.

Huh. Imagine that, a custom arising (you should forgive) to protect a fragile boy-ego at the expense of a woman. My pearls, my pearls.

So for a moment, I was swept into a world where the power imbalances made no smallest effort to hide themselves. It was a relief, in a way, to be in a place where the crushing and cruelty were open and acknowledged; were simply the way things are. Because to fight the way things are is to crusade, to smash and shatter and slaughter the old, the bad, but the *known* and the *open* awfulnesses. Today it is harder by far to protect gains not evenly spread, to defend boundaries set to deliberately disadvantage some, and then work to spread and reset them. The world of Benghazi in the 1890s, the 1900s was bitter to be Black in, and the wrongness of it was everywhere. To root out racism in the richest country on Earth? The battle never ends, the rebellion is bought and undermined and softened and, in the end, prevented from making changes that discomfit the wealthy.

Better to be somewhere else, then, even for four hours. To be, however temporarily:

...the legacy of those who didn't look at their dead, who closed their eyes so that they wouldn't see death's cruelty, leaving them open just enough to let their tears escape. I'm the plant that was watered by those tears.

Instead I look with horrified eyes at the photos of Emmett Till https://tinyurl.com/y53q9w9s or videos of fucking racist pigs https://tinyurl.com/y272hvz3
and think, "slavery? what the hell's the difference between that and this?"
and I have no answer for myself.