The invention of the wing
The invention of wings (original: The Invention of Wings ) is a novel by Sue Monk Kidd . The English-language original edition was published by Viking in 2014 . Astrid Mania's translation was published by btb in January 2015 .
prehistory
Sue Monk Kidd toured Judy Chicago 's The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2007 . This installation includes the names of many historical and mythological female figures, including those of the sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké from Charleston . Sue Monk Kidd, who was living in Charleston at the time, was astonished to have never heard of these two sisters who had campaigned for the abolition of slavery , racial segregation and women's rights at the beginning of the 19th century , and began to find out more about the Grimké sisters. In her historical novel, however, she did not stick to the traditional sources in every detail. She focused on Sarah Grimké as one of the two first-person narrators; the experiences of her opponent Hetty or Handful Grimké, a slave , are fictional. A slave named Hetty actually existed, but almost nothing is known about her other than the fact that she died young.
content
The Grimkés are one of the most influential families in Charleston; the father of a group of ten or eleven-strong siblings exercises the office of judge, but of course you also own plantations and the associated slaves. Numerous serfs also work in the family household. Sarah Grimké, a "middle child" with several older brothers, has a difficult life for various reasons. She is pale, red-haired and unattractive, suffers from her stuttering as well as from her tutor and from the fact that as a girl she does not receive a comprehensive education. The father, who initially allows her access to his library and includes her in the disputes in which he lets his older children practice their argumentation technique, has probably sharpened her view of this problem, but turns against his daughter when she is Efforts shows to leave the role assigned to her as a lady of society and marriage candidate for rich young men. Her brother Thomas, who initially taught her Latin and other lessons, also thinks it absurd that a woman can express the wish to become a lawyer, as Sarah does one day in the family circle.
For her eleventh birthday in November 1803, Sarah was not only given a room of her own after living in the overcrowded nursery, but she was also given Hetty, who was about a year younger as a personal maid. Hetty, called "Handful" by her mother, is a daughter of the slave Charlotte, who is entrusted with all the sewing work in the household and also makes masterful quilts in which she tells her story sometimes symbolically, but sometimes also in "plain text". Charlotte, in turn, is the daughter of a black slave who was brought to America from Africa as a child and separated from her parents, and a white woman . She was separated from her partner, a field slave who is Hetty's father, before she was born, when she was ordered to Charleston.
Sarah Grimké spontaneously refuses the gift, which causes a scandal at her birthday party, and is forced by her mother to write apology letters to all the women who were present at the incident. When she sneaks into her father's library and leaves a document there in which she gives Hetty freedom, she is also unsuccessful - the next day the paper is found in front of her room door, torn in two. Sarah initially believes that it fell into her mother's hands because she would have expected something different from her father, but later finds out that he himself tore up the license.
Hetty initially proves to be a rather unsuitable worker, but Sarah protects her from punishment as far as possible. Like her mother Charlotte, she is extremely resilient and tries to preserve her human dignity. Charlotte herself makes Sarah promise to help her daughter break free at the first opportunity that presents itself. After the failed attempt at release, Sarah initially sees no other chance than teaching Hetty, who always listens with interest when she reads something to her, to read and write. However, this is illegal and, when discovered - Hetty succumbs to the temptation one day to scratch a few words in the clay in the courtyard - leads to a scandal, as does the ABC song Sarah gave to the slave children in Sunday school tried to teach.
Over time, Sarah and Hetty, who initially had a close bond, develop apart. Sarah, who suffers severely from the fact that she cannot have a job, is given permission to become the godmother of her youngest sister Angelina, called Nina, and spends a lot of time shaping this child according to her own ideas and making him disgusted with Inoculate slavery. After her engagement to a marriage fraud is undone, she is forced to withdraw from society for some time. Later there is a scandal because Angelina refused to be confirmed, which is blamed on Sarah's influence. Eventually Sarah goes to the Northern States for an extended period of time, where she joins a Quaker community , meaning that she is no longer welcome in Charleston. Her sister later joins her, and the two eventually develop into well-known public speakers in the 1830s, advocating the abolition of slavery and racial segregation, and women's rights. Angelina marries Theodore Weld .
Meanwhile, Hetty has stayed behind in the Grimkés' household and has unfortunately also been given to Sarah's domineering mother. One day she learns that her mother Charlotte has a partner again, from whom she eventually becomes pregnant. Denmark Vesey bought his way out after winning the lottery. In addition to Charlotte, he has numerous other girlfriends, which complicates the relationship. But when Charlotte is arrested one day on the street and is to be subjected to a cruel punishment for not avoiding a white woman, she is able to escape and find shelter in Vesey's house for a short time, where she swaps her headscarf with another partner of Vesey's - her own is bright red and has been advertised as a wanted list before she tries to get out of the Charleston area. In the Grimké family you haven't heard from her for years and you have to assume that she is dead.
Hetty takes care of the individual parts of a quilt, in whose pictures Charlotte recorded her fate. The secretly saved money, with which Charlotte wanted to buy her daughter and herself one day, is no longer in his hiding place and must assume that Charlotte had it with her when she was arrested.
Meanwhile, pregnant Charlotte is captured by a white man who specializes in hunting escaped slaves and sold to a faraway plantation owner. She tries several times to flee with her child and is severely punished for this, including being branded and her owner knocking out her teeth with a hammer so that she can be more easily recognized if she should flee again. After he threatened to punish her daughter Skye for trying to escape her mother, she stopped doing anything for several years. But when the owner begins to approach the now thirteen-year-old Skye, Charlotte plans a new escape attempt - and it succeeds. One day she shows up with Skye at the house of the meanwhile widowed Mrs. Grimké, but dies a little later after telling Hetty that the money saved is hidden in a quilt.
Skye's father is no longer alive at this point: Denmark Vesey's plans for a slave rebellion have been betrayed and he was hanged in front of Hetty's eyes, who was involved in these plans. Among other things, she was the one who stole two molds for bullets from the armory for Vesey and his allies. Even now disfigured and disabled by an accident in a treadmill she was sent to as a punishment, Hetty wrote a letter to Sarah a few weeks before Charlotte's return, in which she said she wanted to try to escape, even if she was there should perish. Alerted by this letter, Sarah and her sister have returned to Charleston, ostensibly to visit their aging mother. She would like to make one more attempt to buy Hetty from her mother. She does not succeed in this; In addition, it quickly becomes clear that as an undesirable Quaker she is putting her family in Charleston in danger and should leave as soon as possible. In addition, the Grimké family has now caught sight of Charlotte's quilt sewn together by Hetty, and outraged by the charges contained in this piece of textile, Mrs. Grimké wants to act quickly against Hetty and Skye.
Sarah and Hetty then devise a plan: The mourning clothes of the Grimké women - in addition to the judge's widow, Mary, a sister of Sarah and Angelina, lives again in the house in Charleston - are stolen and reworked, and wrapped from head to toe as well as with White painted faces that can only be seen indistinctly through the veil, Hetty and Skye, supposedly visitors to the family, leave the house in a carriage driven by Goodis, another slave. Goodis, with whom Hetty had a relationship for years after she had initially strictly refused, sees through the camouflage, but does not reveal it, and so the two slaves can board a ship that is moored in Charleston harbor and with which Sarah is wants to leave again. The controls on board the ship can be fooled by Hetty, as a pretended widow, when asked where she is going, pretending to have lost her voice and as if she were crying, whereupon the controller only condolences and tactfully withdraws. The narrative ends with the ship's departure from Charleston.
reception
Julian Bergmann reviewed the audio book that was published on The Invention of the Wings . She found the world that Kidd describes presented in a very “tangible” way and the change of perspective between Sarah and Hetty was “elegant”. "This audiobook moves and even makes you angry at times," she said.
Anita Sethi said the book was "a resonant, illuminating novel" and "a story about searching for a voice to express inexpressible pain."
Suzanne Berne of the New York Times explained that Kidd is using the old trick of letting two outwardly very different characters find their similarities. The largely fictional Hetty seems far more alive than the historically documented Sarah Grimké, and it does not seem entirely credible how little the conflict that arises between Sarah and Hetty through their social roles is carried out personally between them.
Bobbi Dumas, on the other hand, was convinced that the novel was “a textured masterpiece”.
Oprah Winfrey , who, according to the blurb of the German edition, has secured the film rights to the novel, said in an interview with the author: “What gets me throughout the novel is that in such an imaginative and forceful way you enable us to see the state of women's rights — that not so long ago, women were just pieces of property ", and Monk Kidd confirmed her impression that the subject of the book is definitely topical:" We are not finished with the legacy of slavery or with the bias in our gender relations , and that's why the topics are still relevant. "
expenditure
- Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of the Wings . Translated from American English by Astrid Mania, btb 2015, ISBN 978-3-442-75485-4
Individual evidence
- ↑ The house of the Grimké family is registered on www.nationalregister.sc.gov.
- ↑ Juliane Bergmann, "The Invention of Wings" by Sue Monk Kidd , on: www.ndr.de ( Memento from February 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Anita Sethi, The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd - review , January 5, 2014 at www.theguardian.com
- ↑ Suzanne Berne, Taking Flight , in: The New York Times , January 24, 2014
- ↑ Bobbi Dumas, Finding Flight In 'The Invention Of Wings' , January 11, 2014 at www.npr.org
- ^ Oprah Talks with Sue Monk Kidd About The Invention of Wings , January 2014 at www.oprah.com