hree first-person narratives intertwine in this impressionistic novel, the life stories of a trio of women scattered across history. And actually a fourth voice serves to bind them all, that link being an observant goddess.
We encounter first a middle-aged slave named Mer. Mer lives in colonial-era Haiti—or Hayti, as Hopkinson prefers—where she functions as a healer (when she's not doing the same back-breaking labor in the cane fields as the other slaves). Mer takes some solace from her female lover Tipingee, and from her ability to aid her fellows, including a naive young woman named Georgine who is about to give birth for the first time. But Mer also receives spiritual sustenance from her visions of African goddesses such as Lasirèn. Several events are about to upset Mer's life. Makandal, a shape-changing sorcerer who plots revolt against the white slave owners, is ready to step up his rebellion to dangerous new levels. Tipingee's husband, Patrice, a runaway slave, returns to the plantation, coming between Mer and her lover. And Lasirèn herself manifests to Mer with an injunction to heal the salt roads that bind the Ginen—the stolen blacks—to their past.
A century later in France, Jeanne Duval, dancer and good-time girl, has taken on a new lover named Charles Baudelaire. The famous poet, shackled to the financial and emotional apron strings of his mother, is besotted by this mulatto beauty, but their relationship is a tumultuous one. Jeanne is intent on securing some measure of wordly well-being for herself and her own mother, while Charles is too busy with aesthetic matters, including the wonders of a brash new American writer named Poe. Jeanne's narrative spans several years, years in which many troubles beset her, leaving her a crippled, lonely woman seemingly on the verge of homelessness and starvation—until a brighter fate intervenes.
Meanwhile—if such a phrase can be used to express events so scattered in time—a young Alexandrian whore named Meri or Thais or Meritet, who lives in the early decades of Christianity, becomes infatuated with a Greek sailor named Antoniou. Hearing tales of the wonders of Jerusalem from him, she vows to visit, taking with her as company a fellow male prostitute named Judah. But Meri's larkish voyage to Jerusalem proves to be a life-shattering experience, as the ancient Egyptian gods she worships come face to face with upstart Christianity.
Boldfaced passages interspersed throughout these revolving sections recount the confused birth and swift maturation of an extranatural force that comes to be known as the goddess Ezili. Birthed out of the pent-up demands of her worshippers, Ezili finds herself a numinous spirit trapped in the flesh of Jeanne Duvall. But in moments when the unaware Jeanne is inattentive, Ezili finds she can escape across space and time to inhabit Mer and Thais and others as well, furthering her education. Eventually, Ezili will confront her fellow deities and be forced to make some judgments about humans in general.
A fantastic fable of liberation
Readers who know Nalo Hopkinson only through her debut SF novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, will have to make an adjustment in their expectations for this new book. Whereas that earlier novel was a near-future, strongly plotted tale rich with patois, a book that seemed to place Hopkinson somewhat in the camp of Maureen McHugh and Kathleen Goonan, although with more emphasis on fantasy and interracial realities, this new novel—being marketed as mainstream, by the way—would seem aimed at a readership more familiar with Toni Morrison or Alice Walker. But in the end, I think that this hypothetical new audience will be a trifle disconcerted by The Salt Roads and her older audience more accepting, since this book—with its experimental structure, transgressive sex and occult underpinnings—really reads like a blend of Kathy Acker and Samuel Delany.
Like Acker, Hopkinson enjoys playing with older fictive models and historical figures, in this case Baudelaire and his poetry, some of which is featured as a kind of commentary. Hopkinson's bad-girl protagonists Thais and Jeanne are the kind of street-smart women Acker liked to focus on, damaged but resilient. The Delany influence comes in with the more ancient scenario, which resembles—in its focus on the gritty economics of archaic survival—Delany's Neveryon books. Additionally, I seem to sense a small homage to James Tiptree (can the name Tipingee be totally coincidental?) in the Ezili sections. This depiction of an alien intelligence that scans all human suffering and joy reminds me of much of Tiptree's work, including such stories as "And Her Smoke Rose Up Forever."
But whatever her guiding lights, Hopkinson transcends them to craft a unique experience. Her prose is beautifully wrought, with the subtle salt symbolism found throughout. Salt is the sea, tears, blood, sexual exudations and a handful of other references. All the things that bind our spirits to the mortal world. Additionally, Hopkinson creates three distinct voices for her three heroines, grounding them firmly in their eras. (Although some of Thais's initial dialogue—"Yeah, yeah. You and your ancient Egyptians"—seems too 21st-century to be credible, her speech soon settles into patterns believable for her station and era.) Structurally, the book is cleverly assembled as well: One particularly strong conjunction occurs when Mer witnesses the immolation of a human and we immediately cut to the ashes in Jeanne's fireplace.
With its wide, loving embrace of all human defeat and triumph, vanity and humility, foolishness and wisdom, The Salt Roads functions as a panoramic depiction of life, both observed from on high and experienced from the muck of the ground.
