“Sometimes, the stories we don’t tell people about ourselves,” Eleanor narrates midway through the book, “matter even more than the things we do say.” Divulging those secrets, however, does not bring about a simple happy ending her revelations only beckon further questions for her children: Heritage, especially for the migrant, is defined as much by loss as by preservation. It is also a story of traditions forged through difficulty, of exiles holding onto the past as it slips through their fingers, and of new generations misunderstanding their inheritance. Set between an unnamed Caribbean island (based on Jamaica), the United Kingdom, and the United States, the novel is a migration narrative about the ways civilian and state violence push Black people to leave behind their kin and their country in pursuit of safety.
In many ways, Black Cake tells the tale of what could drive a parent to risk so much for the sake of a dish eaten at celebrations and holidays. This juxtaposition of contrasting emotions-humor and devastation, glee and fear, and more-is characteristic of Wilkerson’s novelistic style, and one reason it is so affecting. Food is consumed and then gone the lessons a parent teaches through an upbringing last, if not forever, at least longer than a meal. It also reminds the reader how little she thinks she has given her son in the daily practice of raising him.
Such a belief not only foregrounds that Eleanor, as a migrant, has been alienated from the very place whose traditions and culture she hopes to pass on to Byron.
On the other hand, it’s devastating that a mother might think that all her child has to inherit from her is food. Even if it isn’t, what parent in their right mind would endanger their child for a not-yet-baked rum cake? Fruits can be replaced a son cannot. On the one hand, the jar may already be broken by the tremors. This is, at once, hilarious and poignant. It is all Eleanor feels she can bequeath her children. The container holds ingredients for the titular dessert. He thinks his mother could not possibly expect “her only son to risk his life by going back into their kitchen to pull a two-liter glass jar, sixty-eight ounces of ebony-colored slosh, out…while a seismic event was in process.” But she does. When they escape the building, his mother exclaims, “The fruits, Byron, the fruits!” Byron hesitates. Having long prepared for the big one, the type A marine scientist Byron grabs his emergency bag and the hand of his widowed mother, Eleanor. Late in Charmaine Wilkerson’s ravishing debut novel, Black Cake, an earthquake strikes California.
0 kommentar(er)
