BEGIN THE WORLD OVER, what happens if other hands hold the keys

BEGIN THE WORLD OVER
KUNG LI SUN
AK Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A revolutionary tale of Black and Indigenous insurrection. History as it should have been.

Begin the World Over is a counterfactual novel about the Founders’ greatest fear—that Black and Indigenous people might join forces to undo the newly formed United States of America—coming true.

In 1793, as revolutionaries in the West Indies take up arms, James Hemings has little interest in joining the fight for liberté—talented and favored, he is careful to protect his relative comforts as Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef. But when he meets Denmark Vesey, James is immediately smitten. The formidable first mate persuades James to board his ship, on its way to the revolt in Saint-Domingue. There and on the mainland they join forces with a diverse cast of characters, including a gender nonconforming prophetess, a formerly enslaved jockey, and a Muskogee horse trader. The resulting adventure masterfully mixes real historical figures and events with a riotous retelling of a possible history in which James must decide whether to return to his constrained but composed former life, or join the coalition of Black revolutionaries and Muskogee resistance to fight the American slavers and settlers.

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

My Review: Counterfactual histories like this are my meat and drink in reading life. I love to see well-informed authors play with little things that, had they not happened in *exactly* the way they did, would have resulted in a completely different world than the one we live in. There is, of course, an element of wish fulfillment in this for me. And not just in modern times.

The ways and means of colonial oppression are alive and well in Anglophone literature, French literature...all the colonists' languages...as we can see by the marginalization of works by and about nonwhite peoples around the globe.
Literally everything that went wrong in the wars of Haitian, and Jamaican, liberation went right in this book; and that was sooo satisfying to this reader who find the smugness of US exceptionalism grating. On and on, the litany of "they won" rings its victory bells in my ears and my smiles of pleasure keep getting wider as, on reflection, I contemplate an alternative universe where this is history, not alternative history.

For reasons I'll never really understand, magical realism must be in any alternative history novel. I don't like it but it's going to be there, so be ready for that.

The part of the story where we see same-sex couples and coupling being accepted and acceptable is, for me, the best bit of the book. James Hemings, Jefferson's factual Paris-trained enslaved chef, is here a queer gentleman who provides an important central PoV, and that inclusion means that a LOT of attention is paid to food, and the eating of same, in groups and alone. Our trans and genderqueer siblings are well-represented in indigenous and enslaved quarters. This is something I truly can't praise the author for highly enough, the simple, matter-of-fact inclusion of people that the QUILTBAG community of today does far too little to include and celebrate. What's a harder sell, I think, to most people is that the revolution isn't bloodless and that's very much center stage for good swaths of the story. I am routinely appalled by the violence that many slaveowners enacted on their slaves' bodies. It isn't *better* when they, in their turn, enact that violence on their enslavers...it just reminds me that there are no truly good humans.

Starting our journey with James's PoV and then broadening the scope to include many others' PoVs was, I can see, a necessary way to get this story told. I will note that it felt frustrating because James won me over so completely that I wanted to return to him like a homing pigeon. That broadening does allow for more representation at the expense of depth of characterization. Part of the point of this particular story, as I see it, is to take the reader outside the usual and customary colonial hegemonic individualistic mode of storytelling. We're presented with an organic polyphony of PoVs. It pays to have that need in the reader's mind to get them into the spirit of the rebellion and its aims.

A read I strongly urge on you to understand and perhaps even align with the revolution so eagerly sought by young people and its aims. Younger readers, take heart! You're seen. Your concerns for liberation and justice aren't invisible.