Stigmata

Another contribution to the growing body of Afro-American fictions on women's experience of slavery as a site of traumatic, intergenerational memory, Phyllis Berry's debut novel, Stigmata is an extended meditation on how the pain and horrors of that past continue to surround and consume the lives we inhabit. That tale of possession is told through the uncanny memories and physical traumas or stigmata of 14-year-old Lizzie, who is literally, bizarrely, transformed by the voices and lives of her great grandmother Ayo and her grandmother, Grace, whom she mimics so exactly she becomes them both at the story's end. Told in a series of flashbacks, Berry skilfully weaves stories of Lizzie's present and her various pasts, switching seamlessly from her extended incarceration in a mental institution, to the shadowy, often strangely enigmatic, unfocused scenes of Ayo's life in slavery and back again to the present as Lizzie finally comes to terms with her memories. Like the metaphor of memory at the heart of these stories, narrative form is reflected in the commemorative and memorial quilt Lizzie and her mother are making of Grace's life--a process which allows both of them to begin imagining, recollecting and re-experiencing their now reverse roles of mother and daughter, as well as re-imagining the secret, inner intimacies of memory itself. Quilts, like memory, are the main records here of a history of unspeakable, unimaginable loss. --David Marriott


Genre: General Fiction