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  • “My Preoccupations are in My DNA”An interview with Bernardine Evaristo
  • Michael Collins (bio)

This interview was conducted by email in August 2008.

COLLINS: Your new novel, Blonde Roots, is the first you have written in prose. Previous works of yours such as Lara and The Emperor’s Babe, were in verse. The former was written in “page length poems” with, you once told me, an unplanned syllabic regularity; the latter is in the form of couplets, in a mostly iambic rhythm. Is prose just a new form for you, or is it a major break with your previous approach to storytelling? The Emperor’s Babe is set in the Roman Empire

EVARISTO: It’s a long story. I’ve wanted to write a prose novel for many years but never quite managed it. My novel-in-verse Lara (1997) was originally a prose novel that I began in 1991, and worked on for three years producing two hundred pages of fiction, about two-thirds of a novel. I had never written prose before so I was grappling with the form and found the end result very dissatisfying. My background was originally in writing for theatre, except my plays were written in verse. Then I left theatre behind and became a poet. I felt that what I loved about writing was embedded in poetry such as linguistic inventiveness, imagistic freedom and the craft of concision and capturing the essence of something as well as paying attention to rhythm and sound. My prose, however, was plain, flat, almost devoid of imagery and rambling. It had no life. I then threw the manuscript (literally) into a bin and started re-working Lara as poetry. Once I did this I found that I was able to tell the story using language that brought it alive. It became, in the end, a novel-in-verse of 150 pages which spanned 150 years, three continents, and seven generations of my family history.

My next book, The Emperor’s Babe (2001), was a novel-in-verse too which began life as a few poems that grew. On the other hand Soul Tourists (2005) began life as a prose novel just like Lara, and just like Lara it didn’t work as such. I then transformed the novel into what I call a novel-with-verse, which is a novel that juxtaposes prose, poetry, script-like forms and, as it happens, other non-literary forms such as relationship described through a budget. It was originally 90,000 words that was reduced to 50,000 words.

Finally, in 2006, I began writing my next book Blonde Roots and, as it happens, what I often forget is that in its infancy, the first few pages of the novel were written in very long-lined couplets as a way into the book, which I then quickly re-shaped as prose. So, after some 14 years of trying to write a prose novel, I finally did it, and felt that I didn’t [End Page 1199] compromise my natural poetic voice in the process. As much as I love writing poetry, I am a storyteller at heart, and nearly all my poetic endeavours since the early Nineties have been narrative. Poetry reaches such a tiny audience and with Blonde Roots I am so happy that the form of the novel will not be a barrier to readers.

COLLINS: The Emperor’s Babe is set in the Roman Empire and told from the point of view of Zuleika, a child of immigrants from the Sudan who give her hand in marriage to a much older man who presents her with two servants. These servants are described as “Two ginger girls . . . captured/ up north, the freckled sort . . . Felix [Zuleika’s husband] ordered them/ before he left for Rome . . . Pets./ I ordered Tranio to chain them . . . ”

This reminds us that the Romans took slaves from both the north and the south of Rome and points to something that you explore more fully in your new book—namely that the condition of being a slave or of having a slave has no necessary relationship to race. At one point, Zuleika herself asks in a poem...

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