Current storytellers like Colson Whitehead o Brit Bennett they are very proud of the racial connotations as an argument. It is about abounding in that awareness of difference as something natural. Even more so from the stridency of considering the opposite. Michael Jackson did not want to be black, we are all clear on that. The question is to discover what moves a person to try to tear off their skin, to want to yearn for the fading of identity as a dark past to forget.
Self-inflicted guilt is the worst of convictions because it is oneself who is sentenced to wander with that weight of existence capable of sinking his feet into the ground until immobilization or entombment. A novel like this makes allegory of this tragedy of the assumption of belonging to an inferior race and pretending to escape from it by forgetting oneself. The consequences are as unpredictable as they are polarized. That is the reason why the story of these two girls shakes us inside like a new replica on the still latent racism on both sides of the same condition of being ...
Generation after generation, the black community in the town of Mallard, Louisiana, has tried to lighten their skin tone by favoring mixed marriages. The inseparable twins Desirée and Stella Vignes, with their snowy color, brown eyes and wavy hair, are a good example of this.
So different and so alike, they decided to flee the tiny town together, believing that they could also escape his blood. Years later and before the astonished gaze of all, Desireé returns accompanied by a girl black as coal. He has not heard from Stella for a long time, after she decided to disappear and definitively renounce her origins to live another life as a white woman.
Hailed as the worthy heir to Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, Brit Bennett is one of the great revelations of African American literature of late.
You can now buy the novel "The Vanishing Half", by Brit Bennett, here:
