The Emperor's Babe (review)

Once again the old has found a new, confident, rigorous voice in Bernadine Evaristo's verse novel, The Emperor's Babe. Set in Londinium, Britannia—an outpost of the Roman Empire—in A.D. 211, The Emperor's Babe chronicles the life of Zuleika, a young woman of Sudanese descent. She is, in her words, "A nobody wanting to be somebody. / I was born in this town, but I've never been outside." The novel—and it does on its cover identify itself as "a novel"—is written almost entirely in irregular unrhymed couplets. Zuleika is the oldest of two children and, in a tone that sounds a familiar blend of second-generation annoyance and pride, has memorized her African father's immigrant song of uplift:

they made it to Londinium on a donkey,
with only a thin purse and a fat dream.

Here in the drizzle of this wild west town
Dad wondered the streets looking for work,

but there was no room at the inn
so he set up shop in the kerb

and sold sweet cakes which mom made.
(He's told me this story a million times.)

Now he owns several shops, selling everything
from vino to shoes, veggies to tools,

and he employs all sorts to work in them,
a Syrian, Tunisian, Jew, Persian,

hopefuls just off the oil barge from Gaul,
in fact anyone who'll work for pebbles.

Within the above passage lies much of what makes The Emperor's Babe compelling. Evaristo crafts Zuleika's voice as a puckish rabble of high style and slang. Zuleika can be read as a profound mind that is either too stubborn or too slick to accept fully the trappings of her father's success.

Throughout the novel, identity and status are mediated through language that is flushed with striking imagistic detail and demanding extended metaphors. But it is primarily speech that fills in silhouettes of the social self. Hence, the language of Zuleika's father, Anlamani ("our man from Nubia") is always informed by a sense of social hierarchy, a clumsy diction, and a quickness symptomatic of unease: "Sì, Mr. Felix. Zuleika very obediens girl, sir. / No problemata, she make very optima wife, sir." Meanwhile, the Felix here addressed is the man to whom Zuleika is betrothed by her father at age eleven—" . . . even then Dad/ thought I was getting past it," Zuleika quips. Felix is a man from the center of the Empire: he is Roman, older, wealthy; a man of status who speaks with far more authority and far clearer motive than Anlamani. The preponderance of the first-person singular in his speech is a key to understanding Felix's sense of, and anxiety over, his own importance:

I intend to make this my far-western base
and I need to warm my home with a wife.

I am a man of multiple interests: a senator,
military man, businessman, I undertake

trading missions for the government,
and I'm a landowner.

Felix's presence in Londinium reinforces the reality that this city is far from the center: a rough peripheral space of Empire. Britannia marks the last expanse of the Roman Empire, and the novel relies upon this muted backdrop to highlight the tenuous and varying relationships between the haves and have-nots. Thus, the further within the life of the center that Zuleika finds herself the less we discover of Londinium.

Almost entirely narrated by Zuleika, the novel begins with her sense of Londinium as a place teeming with variance and thick with gossip. From the beginning, it is made clear that Zuleika's marriage to Felix is fraught with problems: he is rarely ever in Britannia, much less Londinium, and her sexual relationship with him is obligatory at best, his corpulence causing her disgust. Through the book's first half, Zuleika is pitted against the constant deferral of her desire. The end result of coitus with Felix is to experience, as she...