Scattered Seed
Three young women of Bambara nobility are sent to spend the summer of 1706 along the banks of the Niger river. When their camp is raided and the women are taken captive, the three sisters must endure the long march to the coast, where they are held on Gorée Island and eventually sent on a slave ship to the American colonies.
Folashade, Bibi, and Adaeze endure numerous atrocities and degradations along the way. They cling to each other throughout while deepening their bond of sisterhood and attempting to save each other from the worst of the violence and humiliation. Told in alternating points of view, each sister adapts to the grueling realities with a different coping mechanism. Throughout the story we learn more about the First and Middle Passage from the perspective of the women who were captured and sold.
The novel moves slowly, in part because the same dynamics recur repeatedly throughout the book in different settings. The characters tend to repeat mistakes or misunderstandings rather than growing and changing. A few errors or inconsistencies make parts of the story hard to believe. For example, the characters who could understand the various spoken languages seemed to shift and change, and the translator’s presence was often forgotten. Despite all this, I enjoyed the point of view of the young women characters and learning about Bambara culture in the early 1700s.
