All goes well. He has a job and a family. Both of his hands cut did not prevent him from plotting his course. But it still happens to Eddie to wake up with a start in the morning and think back on the farm in Louisiana. The fields of sight and the body full of bruises. An open-air prison. The novel Delicious Foods, inspired by a true story, speaks of slavery, racism, crack cocaine, and the struggle of a son to take his mother from the underworld of the drug. The crack is a full-fledged character in Delicious Foods. He flirts, he manipulates, he promises in the language shimmering from the street. Novelist James Hannaham, born in 1968 in the Bronx, shows remarkably well the gear of the drug. The lovely Darlene Hardison will pass from life to survival.
Two young students black americans. The future smiles at them. Darlene and Nat meet with the faculty Status of Gambling. Following an imbroglio in love, they are forced to flee the university in order to be able to live their love. They settled in Ovis, on the edge of the Mississippi, where half of the population lives below the poverty line. A small town where the Whites merge with the Black between them. Racism is never ordinary. The couple gave birth to a son, Eddie, and opened a grocery store. Nat is committed to the fight against racism. He feels alone in his fight for equal rights. The police are corrupt. “Go on, then you complain to the police with the police. “When the fire of the grocery store, Nat is murdered. The police remained conspicuously absent. Darlene and Eddie, the mother and the son, are now alone.
The descent to the underworld begins to Darlene Hardison. She lost her husband, returned to his grocery store. Its three pillars. Each day past is a walk down. In order : the pain, the drugs, the poverty, the tapin. Darlene found a job in an agricultural cooperative. A miracle. It disappears. Eddie his search. The boy found his mother in Louisiana, in a huge farm, a producer of fruit and vegetables, where it is being held in slavery for six years. Rats, cockroaches, buckets of dung from the morning to the evening, howling. A universe at the mercy of the chiefs and sub-chiefs. Darlene can not escape : the hits, the crack, the debts make her a slave to modern. “In Louisiana, a Black has more quickly meet with an igloo as the justice. “The employees do not even know where they are. Their bodies are made of cramps, sprains, bruising. Eddie joined Darlene in hell. In this universe, the son has only one singularity : it is drug not.
The misery behind the fun
The ironic title refers to the delicious foods, watermelons, tomatoes, or strawberries, consumed in all unconsciousness in the world. We forget the misery behind the pleasure. The agricultural cooperative of Delicious Foods is a cog of the us agribusiness. Everything seems to come from a distant time, but everything is well-anchored in the contemporary society. The author James Hannaham has inspired workers of Bulls-Hit, south of St. Augustine, Florida, held in bondage by crack and alcohol at the beginning of the 1990s. The employers sold them to the workers of the illicit substances in order that they find themselves bound to them by their debts. The novelist denounces the trafficking, modern slavery to debt. The three voices, the mother, the son and the drugs, we tell a story of bitter. Each style is different. The mother must survive at any price, the son must attempt to live, the drug needs to give you pleasure. The humor runs the length. We pass from the tragic to the comic. Delicious Food, crowned by many awards across the Atlantic, is a literary work. The author denounces without warning shot. Activism is not black and white.
The strongest pages are those that take place in the agricultural exploitation of Delicious Foods. And then the escape attempts and the successful escape itself. But James Hannaham also tells about the encounter between Darlene and Nat at the faculty of Gambling, the powerful relationship between a son and a mother, the few links of solidarity within the agricultural cooperative. For that there is human exploitation, it is necessary that he has human frailty. Darlene feels always overwhelmed by his emotions. “Are you gonna take me for a crazy, Eddie, but whether it’s a pistol whip in the head, or a sunset, I feel overwhelmed by what is happening to me. I don’t want to lose anyone, I don’t want to lose anything. Why is it that in order to live he must always lose, always lose everything all the time ? “Darlene comes to build, but not to rebuild. Drug addiction provides an escape in his head, when the harshness of everyday life nailed to the ground. In the operation, the employees enslaved imagine lives and tell stories. In the end, the reality is rung three shots.
Delicious Foods , James Hannaham, trad. Cecile Deniard, Editions Globe, 400 pages, 22 euros (in bookstores August 26).
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