Poetic vignettes on inter-generational trauma

Red At The Bone by Jacqueline Woodson weaves together the themes of race, class, sexuality and personal history, and collective memory.
Red At The Bone by Jacqueline Woodson weaves together the themes of race, class, sexuality and personal history, and collective memory. PHOTO: TIFFANY A. BLOOMFIELD

FICTION

RED AT THE BONE

By Jacqueline Woodson

Riverhead Books/ Paperback/ 196 pages/ $26.38/ Books Kinokuniya/4 stars

In 2001, 16-year-old Melody descends down the stairs of her grandparents' stately brownstone in Brooklyn, New York, for her coming-of-age ceremony.

Decked in an ornate white dress originally intended for her mother Iris, Melody makes her entrance to the tune of Prince's hit song Darling Nikki, the vulgar lyrics erased from an instrumental rendition that has been used for her ceremony.

The opening scene of American author Jacqueline Woodson's latest novel sets the premise for an exquisitely layered tale that weaves together the themes of race, class, sexuality and personal history, and collective memory.

Toggling between the perspectives of various family members as they witness Melody at her ceremony, the novel slips back and forth in time in a series of poetic vignettes.

The brownstone, the centrepiece of the novel, houses Melody's parents Iris and Aubrey - two African-Americans from very different class backgrounds who are brought together after a dalliance in high school.

Iris' parents - owners of the brownstone - are middle-class college graduates. Meanwhile, Aubrey's working-class mother, CathyMarie, spent all her life wrangling with "the system": one that reeks of prejudice and stigmatisation, and which imposes strict rules on eligibility for social welfare.

Both families grapple with traumas that risk seeping into the lives of the next generation.

CathyMarie struggles to shield Aubrey from "the system itself (which) was coming back to haunt her dreams". And Iris' mother Sabe recalls the 1921 race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when white mobs attacked black residents and businesses in the wealthy Greenwood district, including those of her ancestors.

"History tries to call it a riot, but it was a massacre," she said.

The same "goneness" lives on in her children and her children's children, she predicts - one has to hold on tight to your money, possessions and your sense of self, because you never know when that can be taken away from you. The sense of social marginalisation haunts even the privileged if you are in the black minority, Woodson suggests.

Against this backdrop, the younger ones strain at the seams, striving to live up to and yet defy the elders' expectations in the same heady mix of rebellion and tradition that has defined Melody's ceremony.

Iris, for instance, leaves for a top-ranking liberal arts college and becomes embroiled in an affair with a woman, refusing to accept the Tulsa massacre as part of her identity: "That's your history, not mine," she lashes out at her mother.

But when the Sept 11 terror attack strikes in 2001, it is also through these very narratives that the characters draw a sense of strength and solace.

History, Woodson suggests, can both cage and liberate us, and she artfully throws into relief the bittersweet experience of remembering and relieving loss. We are all, in the end, still raw and cooking - red at the bone.

If you like this, read: The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (Random House, 2008, $17.12, Books Kinokuniya). Set in Kerala, India, against a backdrop of social discrimination and communism, it examines inter-generational trauma through the tale of a pair of fraternal twins and their divorced mother.

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on November 19, 2019, with the headline Poetic vignettes on inter-generational trauma. Subscribe