The master keeps the dog always hungry in a solitary pen and feeds him fresh, bloody meat. The old slave remembers the mastiff arriving on the island from a slave ship, as abused as any slave cargo. The mastiff is beyond ferocious he is scary as hell. The story consists of three main characters: the old slave, a giant mastiff dog trained to go after runaway slaves to either drag them back or kill them, and the Dark Wood, a mysteriously phantasmic place inhabited by zombies (so says the master) and living matter from which few escapees ever leave alive. Chamoiseau’s language never fails to shimmer. Slave Old Man is poetry, not in stanzas, but in breaths, even the Table of Contents is listed as Cadences, not chapters. Often, at night, this memory crushes him with insomnia.” He stocks his soul with scattered, reconstructed, lopsided things, which weave him a shimmering memory. “He does not dance, does not speak, does not react to the cattle-bell summons of the drums.” Yet, he attends the dancing: “He joins in the dancing while remaining stock-still. But inside his ancient body is a voice of the unknown or forgotten, calling, always calling to him. He does not recognize the music which moves others to dance and sing.

As the title suggests, he is a very old man.

He lives on a sugar plantation in which he is held in near reverence by the other slaves. It’s unlike any American slave narrative I’ve ever read, and that is not only because Chamoiseau’s slave is in the West Indies Caribbean island of Martinique, but from the very beginning, I believed the old slave was escaping to reach something more than escaping from something. Slave Old Man is marketed as a novel although its page count of 133 would suggest a novella, which eventually morphs into a fictional memoir in the old slave’s voice, then back to the original narrator as he describes the master when in pursuit of the old slave. This review took me at least three reads, and Slave Old Man will now remain on my nightstand for years to come. So, on Ron Shoop’s (retired RH rep) recommendation, I requested a copy of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man with the promise that I would, indeed, review it. The books I often find most difficult to review are those recommended by someone whose suggestions are not taken lightly.

Slave Old Man by Patrick Chamoiseau