Overview

"Slavery as it existed in Africa has seldom been portrayed-and never with such texture, detail, and authentic emotion. Inspired by actual 19th-century court records, Unconfessed is a breathtaking literary tour de force. They called her Sila van den Kaap, slave woman of Jacobus Stephanus Van der Wat of Plettenberg Bay, South Africa. A woman moved from master to master, farm to farm, and-driven by the horrors of slavery to commit an unspeakable crime-from prison to prison. A woman fit for hanging...condemned to death on April 30, 1823, but whose sentence the English, having recently wrested authority from the Dutch settlers, saw fit to commute to a lengthy term on the notorious Robben Island. Sila spends her days in the prison quarry, breaking stones for Cape Town's streets and walls. She remembers the day her childhood ended, when slave catchers came-whipping the air and the ground and we were like deer whipped into the smaller and smaller circle of our fear. Sila remembers her masters, especially Oumiesies (""old Missus""), who in her will granted Sila her freedom, but Theron, Oumiesies' vicious and mercenary son, destroys the will and with it Sila's life. Sila remembers her children, with joy and with pain, and imagines herself a great bird that could sweep them up in her wings and set them safely on a branch above all harm. Unconfessed is an epic novel that connects the reader to the unimaginable through the force of poetry and a far-reaching imagination. PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FINALIST A fiercely poetic literary debut re-creating the life of an 19th-century slave woman in South Africa. Slavery as it existed in Africa has seldom been portrayed-and never with such texture, detail, and authentic emotion. Inspired by actual 19th-century court records, Unconfessed is a breathtaking literary tour de force. They called her Sila van den Kaap, slave woman of Jacobus Stephanus Van der Wat of Plettenberg Bay, South Africa. A woman moved from master to master, farm to farm, and-driven by the horrors of slavery to commit an unspeakable crime-from prison to prison. A woman fit for hanging . . . condemned to death on April 30, 1823, but whose sentence the English, having recently wrested authority from the Dutch settlers, saw fit to commute to a lengthy term on the notorious Robben Island. Sila spends her days in the prison quarry, breaking stones for Cape Town's streets and walls. She remembers the day her childhood ended, when slave catchers came - whipping the air and the ground and we were like deer whipped into the smaller and smaller circle of our fear. Sila remembers her masters, especially Oumiesies (""old Missus""), who in her will granted Sila her freedom, but Theron, Oumiesies' vicious and mercenary son, destroys the will and with it Sila's life. Sila remembers her children, with joy and with pain, and imagines herself a great bird that could sweep them up in her wings and set them safely on a branch above all harm. Unconfessed is an epic novel that connects the reader to the unimaginable through the force of poetry and a far-reaching imagination."

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9781635424270

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Reviews

“Christiansë is able to create an enveloping air of mystery in her slow revelations of the specific nature of Sila’s crime and punishment. This mastery of suspenseful plotting shows in both the present action and the flashbacks...The pages of Unconfessed are full of powerful images of an institution capable of engendering horrendous evil; yet it is one that cannot entirely defeat hope and love.” —Uzodinma Iweala, New York Times Book Review “Christiansë’s novel isn’t just a stunningly intimate, heart-wrenching history of slave life in Africa. Her protagonist’s furious yearning for freedom (‘Wishes are sometimes just stories that have nowhere to go’) becomes a haunting meditation on love, loss and the stories we choose to tell in order to survive. Gorgeous and tragic, Unconfessed ultimately reveals a confession almost too terrible to bear and impossible to forget.” —People “[A] beautifully written historical novel.” —Ms. Magazine “A gorgeous, devastating song of freedom that will inevitably be compared to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. But it deserves to stand on its own.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Poet Christiansë (Castaway), born in apartheid-era South Africa and now living in New York City, channels the torturous history of South African slavery in her debut novel.” —Publishers Weekly “Impossible to put down, this work deserves a place beside such classics as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review) “Little has been written about what it was like to be a slave in South Africa under the early white settlers. This debut novel tells it through the first-person, present-tense narrative of Sila, once a slave, now a prisoner on Robben Island off Cape Town in the 1820s...the history is authentic, and Sila’s brave, desperate voice reveals the vicious brutality as well as surprising discoveries of love and friendship. Readers of Toni Morrison’s classic Beloved will recognize the story of a mother driven to save her children at any cost.” —Booklist “[Unconfessed] is a compelling story and a remarkable book.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “[An] evocative novel is spun from the protagonist’s memory, which reveals the sad and powerful story of the life of a slave woman in the South African outback in the early 1800s.” —Ebony Magazine

“Christiansë is able to create an enveloping air of mystery in her slow revelations of the specific nature of Sila’s crime and punishment. This mastery of suspenseful plotting shows in both the present action and the flashbacks...The pages of Unconfessed are full of powerful images of an institution capable of engendering horrendous evil; yet it is one that cannot entirely defeat hope and love.” —Uzodinma Iweala, New York Times Book Review “Christiansë’s novel isn’t just a stunningly intimate, heart-wrenching history of slave life in Africa. Her protagonist’s furious yearning for freedom (‘Wishes are sometimes just stories that have nowhere to go’) becomes a haunting meditation on love, loss and the stories we choose to tell in order to survive. Gorgeous and tragic, Unconfessed ultimately reveals a confession almost too terrible to bear and impossible to forget.” —People “[A] beautifully written historical novel.” —Ms. Magazine “A gorgeous, devastating song of freedom that will inevitably be compared to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. But it deserves to stand on its own.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Impossible to put down, this work deserves a place beside such classics as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review) “Poet Christiansë (Castaway), born in apartheid-era South Africa and now living in New York City, channels the torturous history of South African slavery in her debut novel.” —Publishers Weekly “Little has been written about what it was like to be a slave in South Africa under the early white settlers. This debut novel tells it through the first-person, present-tense narrative of Sila, once a slave, now a prisoner on Robben Island off Cape Town in the 1820s...the history is authentic, and Sila’s brave, desperate voice reveals the vicious brutality as well as surprising discoveries of love and friendship. Readers of Toni Morrison’s classic Beloved will recognize the story of a mother driven to save her children at any cost.” —Booklist “[Unconfessed] is a compelling story and a remarkable book.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “[An] evocative novel is spun from the protagonist’s memory, which reveals the sad and powerful story of the life of a slave woman in the South African outback in the early 1800s.” —Ebony Magazine “From the first ominous sentence to the last, echoing line, Yvette Christiansë has brought into being a compulsively readable novel, the gripping tale of a nineteenth-century slave woman imprisoned on Robben Island in South Africa. Richly layered and uncompromising, this mesmerizing tale of a woman’s life from her childhood abduction in Mozambique to her travails in the South African outback in the early 1800s is hypnotically and convincingly told. The main character, Sila van den Kaap, is inspired by actual court records, and Christiansë has given her both the strength and a unique voice to tell her own story. “The true power of a book is whether it lingers in the mind after a reader goes on to other things, and Sila’s story will stay with me for a very long time.” —Lalita Tademy, author of Cane River and Red River “Unconfessed is the story of Sila, a slavewoman who cannot be owned, who finds and loses her freedom but saves herself through the telling of her fearsome tale. With the shards of Sila’s broken life, Yvette Christiansë powerfully evokes a for-gotten world unsurpassed in its savagery and stark beauty.” —Anne Landsman, author of The Devil’s Chimney “I am overwhelmed—Sila van den Kaap will forever haunt the southern African landscape (in a powerful countervoice to mythical Adamastor). Yvette Christiansë made a new language: a slave woman is no longer the Imagined Other, but simply herself, and through her, from now on, other women.” —Antjie Krog, author of Country of My Skull

Author Information

Yvette Christianse Yvette Christianse was born in South Africa under apartheid and emigrated with her family via Swaziland to Australia at the age of eighteen. She is the author of the 1999 poetry collection Castaway. She teaches English and postcolonial studies at Fordham University and lives in New York City. Unconfessed, her first novel, was honored as a 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award finalist.

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