Review By Harsimran Kaur

Slavery is subjugating!
Slavery is an abattoir of one’s impressionistic freedom!
Slavery is unruly and unruffled!
Slavery is about the slave burrowed in a dystopic empiricism!
What deserves more attention? The slave emasculated in the web of impropriety or the indomitable slavery that impugns the slave in the cesspit of scruples. Has humanity failed? Has it become indiscernible? What makes human a slave? Is it an imprecation living through cultural consanguinity or mankind in condescension is unable to distinguish the fundamentals of living?
The slave thus true to his calling lives through the cannonade piercing the parietal in contempt; the limbs strangle to stand erect and the skin lathered with ignominy blazes in comeuppance. In flinch & flutter, the ‘slave’ becomes the forbidden fellow. The slave-holder thus becomes the ‘holier-than-thou’.
Jim is a slave. He is about to be sold, and as hard-bitten as it seems, Jim plans to run away. He decides to hide near Jackson Island till he can strategize a plan to unite with his wife and daughter. A typical ‘slave’ he is, slipping often as a hangdog and the halitosis brewing from his ripped clothes, he actually knows how to read and write. The thought of being sold to someone in New Orleans makes him cut the already raddled flesh.
He runs away!
Jim has a companion. Huck is white, and is now considered to be dead atleast not by him, and Jim too knows about the entire masquerade. Their travel to the North along the Mississippi river is full of castellation, and to their utter chagrin the caterwaul of slavery turns out to be a fait accompli by the ‘wily whites’ in fief. But, Huck though ‘white’ is different and that’s why both of them are together on a run-mission.
Inspired by Mark Twain’s ‘The adventure of Huckleberry Finn’, the Booker Prize 2024 shortlisted, ‘James’ by Percival Everett is relentless and ruminative. It speaks the language of the ‘slave’; the lethargy in the words and the unsettled friction of the body. Jim’s beleaguered sense of upheaval & chaos often is parsimonious to the ‘priggish white fiendish’ but one fine day, it will be obvious that ‘freedom’ sees no whiff of discrimination.
The Mississippi river is their raft, for both Jim and Huck and for many whom they meet through a concatenation of thoughts. The discredible waves ripened by pullulative strikes of the rudder reveal the deepened secrets if Jim’s journey to the North. He loses Huck to two eccentric men in appellation of a ‘king’ and a ‘duke’. Jim meets Norman who sells him to a despicable white patron as a strategic parfait. He also becomes a part of the music troop where all perform in ‘black fashionable parade’ as if the slavery to one’s conscious is the last leaf to be plucked.
Jim’s language is of slavery. Is it by choice? NO! Do slaves have a choice? Yes! The tone is sepulchral, hiding the need to be free; ‘sir’ becomes ‘suh’; ‘like’ is worded as ‘lak’. It’s like sabotaging the ‘self’ to be a ‘detritus’, and annexing one’s core to become the ‘sclerosistic slave’. Jim, the slave, buried in the wretched slavery finds freedom cutting across barriers, routing his raft to Illinoi and Ohio, and back to where he belongs.
Will he be able to become ‘James’ or be the old rickety ‘Jim’ burrowed in the mucky soil?
TAKE AWAY
Brilliant and revivifying….
3 Responses
I wanted to thank you for this great read!! I definitely enjoying every little bit of it I have you bookmarked to check out new stuff you post…
Excellent observations. Thank you!
excellent book review thanks for sharing