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• Excerpt from Unconfessed
• About Unconfessed
• Dr. Christiansè's bio

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Tavis: Yvette Christiansë teaches African American literature and post-Colonial studies at Fordham University in New York City. The South African native is receiving universal praise for her first novel, "Unconfessed." Of the book, the "Library Journal" says "This work deserves a place beside such classics as Toni Morrison's "Beloved" and Edward P. Jones' "The Known World." Yvette, as my grandmother would say, that's some high cotton.

Yvette Christiansë: It is indeed. My grandmother must have been related to yours. (Laugh)

Tavis: Yeah. (Laugh) What do you make of that kind of accolade coming out the gate?

Christiansë: I think it is terrifying and it's humbling. Morrison's book is a remarkable book, it's a trendsetter. I think Morrison's book is as important as Frederick Douglass' book is. It changed the way people thought about slavery in America. "The Known World," I think, again, this is heavy stuff. I had not had any idea that those associations would be made, although of course writing a book about a woman, a slave woman who kills her child, you are writing in the penumbra of Morrison's "Beloved." But I had - I guess the thing is not in my wildest dreams (laugh) would I have (unintelligible) that.

Tavis: I wanna get to - in a moment, I'm gonna let you do most of the talking here, which is the way a talk show should work, I guess. That sounded stupid. (Laugh) Anyway, I wanna give you a chance to walk me through this in your own words, but I wanna start by asking why you chose to write this as a novel. Edward P. Jones and Toni Morrison notwithstanding, this is a fictionalized account of a real slave. You chose to write it as a novel. Why?

Christiansë: I felt that my academic project didn’t deal with something that was missing in South African history, and that is what it might have felt like, what it might have been in the everyday life of a slave. In South Africa, we don't have the slave narratives as you have in America. One of the reasons for that is that the colonial office so controlled the printing press, certainly till the late 1830, nineteenth century, that there was no chance for slaves to develop a literary voice, a written voice.

One of the ironies about the records that do exist of slaves is that they appear in court records. So slaves were just always already criminalized. And whatever was said by them was redacted by the transcribers of the court. I felt that this particular life, so fragmented in the record, deserved some attention. I thought she was a remarkable person who had been sentenced to death for the murder of her nine year old son.

And yet, just kept cheating death. She was alive three years after she was sentenced to death. Survived being in a prison where she clearly was being used as the prison prostitute, and had two children, one of whom died. Then ends up on Robben Island, and survives being one of three, sometimes four, sometimes six women on a prison island of a couple of hundred male slaves, and male garrisons.

I needed to know more about this woman. And fiction seemed to be the only way that I could deal with her, because it oriented me psychically in her direction. And, and I guess that was one of the things that I'd hoped the novel would achieve, was that it would try and turn people toward slavery in South Africa.

Tavis: How might I put this? Because the story is so powerful in and of itself, one could argue, and I want just to get your take on this, one could argue that telling it as a nonfiction text, writing it as a nonfiction text, because it's so powerful in and of itself, might have accomplished something that fictionalizing it does not. Because it allows - when you read this book, you know it's fictionalized character as opposed to just giving you the raw stuff in a nonfiction text that really drives home a very powerful story. You think anything was lost in the process?

Christiansë: Necessarily so.

Tavis: Yeah, that's what I thought.

Christiansë: What I wanted to do was to say that we can't know the lives of those slaves in South Africa. All that is left is the colonial record. And the colonial record has a particular way of speaking about them. Of telling us about them. One of the things I know of being a scholar is that the impulses to find all the stories, the impulse is to nail everything down, deliver the information.

I think what is difficult to do with the life of a slave in the Cape colony was to actually sew it up neatly. It was a gesture on my part of an act of faith. An act of respect, to say some things can be silent. What is in the silence, what I'd hoped to suggest, is the loss. And the loss is what one has to live with. That's the heartbreak of it.

I wanted so to make it a much more linear novel. To fill it. But writing in the first person narrative meant I had to give up one of those sort of lovely, filling strategies, which was description. And I had to give that up.

Tavis: Tell me about, to your point now, about the lack of what you found in the record. Tell me how you went about researching a book like this, because one of the things that we suffer from, whether you're South African or an American Black, one of the things you suffer from is that the records are so incomplete where our lives and our histories and our legacies and our lineage is concerned. How did you research this novel?

Christiansë: Just summers and summers in the colonial archive. I became the haunting. Sometimes I think it's not the dead who haunt the living. I think it's the living who haunt the dead.

Tavis: Living who haunt the dead (laugh).

Christiansë: Absolutely.

Tavis: Fair enough.

Christiansë: So there I was, rattling my chains in the corridors of the colonial archive, and I began to learn to look sideways. And part of that came from my training in African American literature. Blessingham, more recently Farah Griffin's book "Who Set You Flowing?" tells us to look not for those forms of writing that are authorized, the novel, the sermon, but to look for traces.

Other kinds of document. So I began to look for references in maybe minister's letters, and everywhere I went, I found silence. So I began to pay attention to the silence, because I thought that the silence in some ways stenciled out the conditions in which a slave woman like this lived. But in terms of actual, concrete records that name this woman, accident discovery for me.

I'm reading this letter from the colonial office in London. Yes, to the new superintendent of police, yes, you can have so man bushels of (unintelligible). Yes, you can have so much blotting paper. Yes, you can re-string the prison warder's chairs. No, you can't thatch the roofs. And why is this woman still alive after three years? She'd been sentenced to death. Peculiar.

I turn, I go somewhere else. Boom, this name comes up again. And the word that is in both of these communications that disturbs the bureaucratic language. And it's the word that's transliterated from the Dutch, (unintelligible), to the English (unintelligible). This was such an emotional word that didn’t seem to fit.

So I began tracking her, chasing her, which she just would appear in slavery as just a name. Then as a name, as a woman who had children. And then she turns up in the court record as having murdered her son.

Tavis: How much of the struggle that those of us of African descent deal with even today has to do with this notion of identity, or the lack thereof? When you look at these registries and you see a slave, a woman, a mother, but nameless, faceless, and in many ways, I think one could argue that Black folk are still wrestling with that whole identity question. Does that make sense?

Christiansë: Yes. And yes and no. I've just also been speaking with (unintelligible) Hartman, whose book I think just brings me down at the knees, it's the most extraordinary book of trying to pay attention to that sense of having to do a quest for identity. What does that mean? It's a comment about now, and how one feels in one's community.

Does the nation still see you as being somewhere else, and some kind of interloper? And do you finally belong? Belonging, I think, also has something to do with a sense of your lineage. Lineage is a place. A name is an address. And I think that for Americans looking at slave history, I think that the slave narratives, I think that the records that were kept, that were able to be turned into narratives, I think that they are a document.

That they are a body of work that does say something about identity. 'Cause identity's never a fixed thing. And it says, "Here are moments, here's a moment of absolute courage, here is a moment of disappearance. Here is a moment in which someone dies in order for someone else to live. Here is a moment where wow, a woman gets herself out of slavery, she turns around and goes back down, and you can call her Harriet."

And here's a woman who comes out of slavery and she says, "Ain't I a woman?" And okay for her, one of the key things is you have to see me as a woman. That's part of her identity. That’s part of humanity. In South Africa, it's very interesting. I used to go to the archives for years (unintelligible). And there were people in the archive looking for their European ancestors, and not wanting to know about their slave ancestors.

And I think one of the interesting things about Apartheid is that it did, of necessity, demand attention. One of the things about that attention is that it dealt, what Wolcott says about the middle passage, an amnesiac blow. I think that in the South African context, there was a blow and a kind of amnesia about slavery in that country.

Tavis: Let me ask you this, finally. This is, as you know, I was just days ago down in Jamestown, Virginia, moderating a big conversation on the four-hundredth anniversary of the Jamestown settlement. So this year, 400 years since the Jamestown settlement established, which is where the Africans first arrive. This is the two-hundredth year, as you know, of the end of the Atlantic slave trade.

And yet there are folk who think that these are conversations that are not worthy. That we need to get over it, stop having these conversations, much less writing books about this stuff. Right quick, what's the value in our still having these kinds of conversations?

Christiansë: I think that there's always something that the record needs to hear. In this case, it's the record of a woman who managed to survive a death sentence so many times, and whose act, this terrible act of killing her son, actually reminds us of that old violence in which laws are constructed. The violence that made slavery was the hijacking of law.

And this terrible, terrible act that she committed was a way of summoning the law and exposing its violence. (unintelligible) a very abstract answer, but I think that those lessons go - the same thing happens again and again and again. So in the case of South Africa, I think there's still a huge need for that country to deal with its slaving history.

I don't think that people who write canonical histories about - and I'm going to say this. I actually personally think that Shakespeare has a lot to say. I don't feel people who write canonical histories about Shakespeare, or who go back and write one more story about Churchill in England, I don't think anybody's ever going to say to them, "Enough already."

Tavis: Yeah. Fair enough. When your book has - your first novel, no less - been compared to the great work of Toni Morrison and the fine work of Edward Jones, it's worth reading. The new book, the first novel from Yvette Christiansë is called "Unconfessed." Yvette, nice to have you on the program.

Christiansë: Thank you very much, Tavis.