Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Nov 2006, 360 pages
Paperback:
Sep 2007, 360 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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Imprisoned for life in the
Robben Island prison colony, Sila talks in her mind with her dead son, Baro,
and later with a whole host of spirits from her past. She remembers her
love and desperate grief for Baro, and for her other children mostly lost to
her: Carolina, Camies, Pieter, another boy "who came and went too quietly for a
name", Meisie, Catherina and Debora - all the result of rape either by her
former owner or by prison guards, but intensely loved nonetheless.
Through her lyrical, rambling voice that reveals her mental state to be closer
to madness than sanity we slowly learn of her life, from when she was stolen as
a small child by slavers in Mozambique, through her ownership by a variety of
masters, to the ultimate irony of her present life as a freed slave (slavery
having been abolished) condemned to life imprisonment.
As she breaks stones in the prison quarry and attempts to care for the small
children born to her in prison, she looks back on the daily humiliations and
larger injustices that have defined her life, but also on the few brief
pleasures she has been able to eke; and slowly we learn what the law considers
to be her crime - setting free the person she loved most in the only way available to her.
Unconfessed is rambling, circular and sometimes confusing; but
it's also a lyrical, powerful and important piece of writing. Depending on
your viewpoint you may side with the reviewer for Kirkus who describes it as "a
gorgeous, devastating song of freedom that will inevitably be compared to Toni
Morrison's
Beloved" or Entertainment Weekly who thinks it "plods along like
Gertrude Stein with a head cold."
This review was originally published in January 2007, and has been updated for the
September 2007 paperback release.
Click here to go to this issue.
According to the US State Department, slavery is now the third largest type of illegal trade in the world (after drugs and weapons); every year between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders with about 17,500 entering the USA. Many advocacy sources put the figures much higher, for example some say that about 1 million children in Asia alone are victims of the sex trade. In June 2006, British authorities announced that
slave auctions were being held at British airports with brothel keepers bidding on women arriving under duress from Eastern Europe.
Human trafficking appears to be flourishing because of the general move to globalization in a which the poor are increasingly willing to leave their homeland in search of work; another factor is the end of the Cold War which left millions of Eastern Europeans in poverty, causing a massive explosion in criminal rings.
Some of the worst offenders, such as Saudi Arabia, China, Laos and Mexico, say they are taking action, and in 2000 the USA Congress introduced stiffer penalties for human trafficking; however, in the past five years, the USA Justice Department has tried only 91 cases. The Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley estimates that almost half of enslaved people in the US are in some form of prostitution, a further quarter are in domestic service and the remainder are being used in agriculture, factories, hotels and restaurants.
This review was originally published in January 2007, and has been updated for the
September 2007 paperback release.
Click here to go to this issue.
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