Word: bayangumay
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...SLAVE-GIRL Rosalie is the daughter of the Diola Bayangumay, a self-willed tribeswoman. Through the mother's eyes we glimpse both the glory of the culture bound by ties of survival and love and its swift, callous destruction by agents who are only understood by the tribe as evil spirits of the night. Bayangumay, who even on the slave-ship wants to swallow her tongue and sings "tomorrow I will cease to be an animal," is the prime source of her daughter's intransigence. The product of a drunken orgy of sailors and their black cargo, Rosalie, born with...
...Bayangumay cannot cope with her slavery. Although she stubbornly retains the dignity of her native culture, she responds to the tortures of the French masters of Guadeloupe with mere surliness and escape. She realizes, as only a few of her fellow sufferers initially do, that there is no cause for her plight beyond the power of the slave-drivers. But Schwarz-Bart leaves to her daughter the ability to retaliate significantly...
...eyes which seemed to hurl accusations at the world, and she remembers that her mother and her mother's peg-legged friend also watched the execution with a darting glare. The girl realizes that seemingly placid slaves have made the bearing of their lives into an outcry. When Bayangumay flees the plantation, Rosalie lapses into madness--an epileptic state in which the slave-child first takes for herself the name of Solitude. She survives a pair of doting masters, the initial freedoms gained by the French Revolution, the forced-labor corvees which are then resumed, and a subsequent revolt...
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