A Woman Named Solitude

Book excerpt: This novel is about the slave trade in Guadeloupe. It opens by describing an indigenous African culture that comes under threat from a slave trade so brutal that there is a special door used to throw each day's dead into the sea. African women are routinely raped by the slave ship's sailors and thus Solitude is conceived. She is sold on the auction block and her story develops through the period of the French Revolution, the abolition of slavery in keeping with The Rights of Man, and the rescinding of that freedom, replaced by a plantation system where the whips were tipped with tricolor flags. Solitude joins a colony of escaped and released Africans in hopes to take ships back to their motherland.