Brave Music of a Distant Drum by M. Herbstein
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.20361/G2WW2FAbstract
Herbstein, Manu. Brave Music of a Distant Drum. Markham, ON: Red Deer Press, 2011. Print.
This is a powerful and thought-provoking novel, which offers remarkable insights into one of the darkest chapters in human history. South African author Manu Herbstein was awarded the 2002 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and in Brave Music of a Distant Drum, Herbstein re-imagines Ama’s story for a younger, North American audience.
The novel chronicles the meeting between an elderly woman at the end of her life and the son who does not remember or understand her. It soon becomes clear that the divide which separates mother and son cannot be overcome until he listens to her story. Kidnapped as a teenager by Bedagbam slave raiders, young Ama was traded several times by powerful slave owners in Africa before she found herself on a slave ship bound for South America. Now elderly and blind, Ama needs her son to write her history down so that it will not be drowned “in the swamp of lost memories.” It is a heart-breaking story, but one that is filled with courageous acts of resistance and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of hope. Following in the tradition of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) and Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negros (2007), it is apparent that Ama’s son needs to understand his parents’ history before he can make sense of his own life in the present.
This novel is recommended for young adults (16+), and this is an important guideline for two reasons. First, readers who lack sufficient literary and historical knowledge will have trouble interpreting the clues that reveal that the novel is set in eighteenth-century Brazil. More importantly, although the novel’s realistic depictions of horrific violence serve an important purpose, this violence is challenging for even a mature reader.
Recommended: Four stars out of four
Reviewer: Linda Quirk
Linda is Assistant Special Collections Librarian at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta.
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).