Readers will easily transfer Conjure Women‘s focus on the commodification of birth into the present and see how the trajectory disproportionately affects women of color. Instead, Conjure Women is more deliberate in its statement that the economics of women’s reproduction effectively re-creates racism. Here Atakora extends Marx’s theory suggesting the reproduction of goods enabled society to re-create itself. Slave owners enforced reproduction as an economy, and in doing so severed families while positioning a person as nothing more than capital. Marse Charles deliberately purchased slaves whose reproductive capacity would increase his finances. More frequently, the commodification of women’s reproduction, specifically the belief that slaves were akin to livestock, prevailed. Yet the ability to take control of their bodies was furtive. But they also create the tinctures that act as birth control, allowing women to decide when and if they become pregnant. Miss May Belle and Rue are constantly curing women of venereal disease or supporting them as they recover from rape - both instances delivered by their white master. More so, Atakora intentionally emphasizes the daily acts of violence to reveal the fullest extent of the abuse.įor Atakora, there are two primary branches of corporeal violence: the first is sexual. Conjure Women’s depiction of slavery’s atrocities is painfully authentic. Conjure Women demonstrates the prevalence of these services and the resulting urgency for women’s corporeal control across time and space.Īs the Black Lives Matter movement and subsequent uprisings have exposed the ubiquity of police brutality, it is impossible to ignore the lastingness of using violence to control black bodies. Without question, abortion has always existed despite its deregulation and illegality. Their ability to heal and control is not magic, it is agency.Īs women’s bodies are held in dominion by white ownership, Miss May Belle and Rue are conductors of power. The mother and daughter provide medical treatments to enable women to take control of their reproductive systems, especially after surviving sexual violence. As healers, Miss May Belle and Rue both assist women, black and white, in conception, abortion, and sexual health. Similarly, the discourses constructing women’s control of their bodies and sexualities are another accurate reflection of modern discourses. Through Atakora’s lens, said division remains and is as evident as ever. Certainly, the Civil War era saw the United States as a divided nation. The threat of cultural loss is akin to the present-day refusal to abandon symbols of racism such as the confederate flag, statues of slave owners, and military generals. Rather, Atakora uses the Civil War to exhibit time’s fluidity between a historical and contemporary moment.įor example, when characters consider the encroaching Civil War, they frame the northerners as motivated by blood, focused on dissolving southern culture in order to enforce desolation rather than emancipation. The Civil War does not represent a singular stage for pre- and post-war society. This is explicitly communicated as the narrative shifts between “Slavery time”, capturing the antebellum era, and “Freedom time”, centralizing the interbellum. To draw parallels between the past and present, Conjure Women rejects time as linear.
#The conjure woman license
Smoke by werner22brigitte ( Pixabay License / Pixabay) Yet it is Atakora’s reiteration of the current calls for racial justice that positions Conjure Women as an unadulterated masterpiece.
The accusations are both exasperated and alleviated by the arrival of Bruh Abel, an itinerant preacher.įrom the start, Conjure Women adroitly unpacks the nuances of interbellum society, the influence of spirituality, and the power of superstition.
When a baby is born in a caul and with black eyes, the townspeople accuse Rue of witchcraft. Rue’s talents, in contrast, result from an affinity with naturalism and herbalism. Indeed, Miss May Belle shows a proclivity for the supernatural and crafting curses. Their ability to heal is so powerful that their skills are often misidentified as magic. The narrative focuses on Rue, a midwife and healer, who learned her skills from her mother, Miss May Belle. They struggle to survive, especially as an incurable disease ravages the town’s children.
Since the culmination of the Civil War they live in freedom, rarely interacting with white society. Building a town on the ruined plantation of Marse Charles, the black inhabitants are his former slaves. A work of historical fiction, the novel is set in the interbellum rural South. Afia Atakora‘s debut, Conjure Women, is a vivid exploration of the bondage and power of women.
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