Uzodinma Iweala
Most writing about South Africa's disturbing racial history focuses on the relatively modern phenomenon of apartheid and the gross injustices inflicted on the black majority by the descendants of Dutch and British settlers. But precious little contemporary literature addresses the precursor to apartheid, the Dutch and British race-based system that relied on the forced labor of a steady supply of black Africans, both local and imported from other colonial possessions.
Yvette Christianse's first novel, Unconfessed, is an important book precisely because it helps fill this literary void. Addressing the circumstances surrounding one of the most disturbing crimes of the colonial period, it recreates the tormented world of a real historical figure…Christianse is able to create an enveloping air of mystery in her slow revelations of the specific nature of Sila's crime and punishment. This mastery of suspenseful plotting shows in both the present action and the flashbacks, even if the language that stitches them together can prove a bit weak.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Poet Christianse (Castaway), born in apartheid-era South Africa and now living in New York City, channels the torturous history of South African slavery in her debut novel. Sila van den Kaap, whom Christianse discovered in an early 19th century document, is a slave serving hard labor at the Robben Island prison colony after murdering her own son, Baro. As Sila breaks and hauls stones, evades the attentions of the prison guards and cares for her small children, she casts her mind back to the daily indignities, fleeting pleasures and larger injustices that have defined her life since, as a young girl, she was brought to South Africa from Mozambique. Addressed primarily to the spirit of her deceased son, Sila's absorbing, lyrical narrative is circular: she alternates between exhausted lament, seething rage and scripture-tinged poetic soliloquy ("their sins are like unto a plague of locusts that eat not fields but bodies and hearts"), and returns repeatedly to the broken promise of her freedom, granted in the will of one of her mistresses, Oumiesies ("old Missus"), and disregarded by Oumiesies's cruel son, Theron. After many passionate digressions, Sila alights, finally, on the death of Baro. In the final pages, she movingly addresses "the daughters and sons of my generations"-those now living with slavery's legacy. (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Sila van den Kaap doesn't recall much about her childhood, but one thing is clear: as a young girl, she was taken from her family in Mozambique and sold to Dutch settlers in the Cape Colony of South Africa. Her first owner, a minister named Neethling, eventually drank himself to death. Other masters and mistresses followed, including one, Oumiesies ("Old Missus"), who promised Sila that upon her death she and her children would be free. Sadly, Oumiesies's son destroyed his mother's will, compelling Sila to remain in bondage. When we meet her, she is on Robben Island, imprisoned for strangling one of her children. The story unfolds in fits and starts and reads like a confession to a soulmate. This stream-of-consciousness style gives readers an intimate if disturbing peek into the mind of a fierce 19th-century slave woman. Herself born in South African, Christians , author of the poetry collection Castaway, based her novel on archival records; that someone with the protagonist's name was actually tried for murdering her child gives the narrative added heft and poignancy. Impossible to put down, this work deserves a place beside such classics as Toni Morrison's Beloved and Edward P. Jones's The Known World. Highly recommended.-Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Based on actual court records, the story of a South African slave who was sentenced to death for murdering her son 50 years before the American Civil War. Sila was so young when she was kidnapped from her village and sold into slavery that she doesn't know what part of Africa she came from. Shipped to the Cape Colony, Sila was sold to Oumiesies (the Old Missus), who, after many years, granted Sila's freedom in her will. Oumiesies's son Theron defied his mother after her death, denying Sila her emancipation. Instead, she became the property of Van der Wat, a sadist whom Sila, now a grown woman with several children, calls the pig of Plettenberg Bay. Van der Wat beats his slaves, sells off their children and rapes others. Able to bear any cruelty except that done to her offspring, Sila stands up to him. Subsequently, she is charged with the murder of her son and sentenced to death. Only the discovery that Sila is pregnant saves her from hanging. The authorities transport her to Robben Island (where, 150 years later, Nelson Mandela would serve an 18-year sentence). Through days of hard labor-she and the other prisoners, mostly men, break rocks in a quarry-and nights of repeated rape by the guards, Sila remains defiant. She prays that her petition for freedom will reach the English King across the ocean and finds solace and communion in long conversations she conducts with her vision of Baro, the son she set free. South African-born Christianse captures not only the breadth and complexity of Sila, a heroine for the ages, but also the moral crisis and political turmoil of 19th-century South Africa. Her masters are not all evil. Nor is Sila, as she herself admits, all good. A gorgeous,devastating song of freedom that will inevitably be compared to Toni Morrison's Beloved. But it deserves to stand on its own.
