Kate McCafferty was born in the United States and received her Ph.D. in English. Since then she has taught English in colleges all over the world. She has published essays, poems, and short fiction pieces in a number of publications. Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl is her first novel.
Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl
eBook
$11.99
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ISBN-13:
9781101176825
- Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
- Publication date: 01/28/2003
- Sold by: Penguin Group
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 240
- Sales rank: 90,968
- File size: 269 KB
- Age Range: 18 Years
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Kidnapped from Galway, Ireland, as a young girl, shipped to Barbados, and forced to work the land alongside African slaves, Cot Daley's life has been shaped by injustice. In this stunning debut novel, Kate McCafferty re-creates, through Cot's story, the history of the more than fifty thousand Irish who were sold as indentured servants to Caribbean plantation owners during the seventeenth century. As Cot tells her story-the brutal journey to Barbados, the harrowing years of fieldwork on the sugarcane plantations, her marriage to an African slave and rebel leader, and the fate of her children—her testimony reveals an exceptional woman's astonishing life.
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch
...enlightening not only from a historical standpoint, but also from its psychological insights on the relationship between slaves and their owners.
Los Angeles Times
...McCafferty's imagined oral record is convincing a harrowing tall tale about events too long ignored by textbooks.
Boston Globe
...McCafferty does a remarkably vivid and thorough job of portraying what life was like for the indentured Irish...
New Orleans Times-Picayune
Kidd has written a triumphant coming-of-age novel that speaks to the universal need for love.
Publishers Weekly
Between 1558 and 1603, the British government sought to meet the needs of a growing empire by sending tens of thousands of Irish men, women and children to the New World. They were technically indentured servants not slaves but this distinction was illusory: the initial term of indenture could be extended indefinitely. McCafferty explains this neglected piece of history in the preface to her debut novel. The brief recital of historical facts sets the tone for a story in which much is told and little is shown. This tendency is inherent in the novel's form: most of the tale is delivered as an oral narrative, told by Cot Daley, who was 10 years old when she was kidnapped from Galway and sent to Barbados. Now a young woman, she has been imprisoned for her role in an uprising in which Irish servants and African slaves rebelled against the plantation owners. Cot's largely unrelieved rendition of her life story paragraph after paragraph of her "testimony" never acquires the immediacy of a compelling voice, being more a litany of brutal experiences than an affecting insight into a woman's inner life. Interruptions by a secondary character the British officer interrogating Daley are jarring reminders of the awkward construction. Unfortunately, this form undermines the author's gifts as a stylist. And despite the legendary Celtic propensity for poetic speech, it is hard to believe that an unschooled Irish peasant would say anything even approximating "For once again I felt the manic demiurge called hope." (Feb. 18) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Surefire dramatic material and a hauntingly exotic setting are the most striking features of this debut historical about an Irish girl kidnapped, sold into slavery, and later involved in a failed rebellion against the "plantocracy" that exploits black and white victims alike. The time is the later 17th century, and she who "testifies" is middle-aged Cot Quashey (born Daley), under interrogation by Peter Coote, an "Apothecary-Doctor" also employed as an investigator by the governor of Barbados. As the priggish, thoughtlessly elitist and racist Coote prompts her impatiently, Cot relates the details of her abduction (when she was only ten years old), passage to the West Indies on an overcrowded, stinking "slaver," and twenty-plus years at two sugar plantations, where black African and "dispensable" white slaves labored together, cutting cane and enduring forced cohabitation ("The breeding was an extra duty after a full day in the fields"). Cot's piecemeal tale rises frequently to rhapsodic heights as she recalls the births and losses of her children, and particularly her unexpectedly happy marriage to "Quashey the Coromantee," a black African Muslim regarded as "a man of rank among the bondsfolk" whose elaborate plan to liberate the slaves is brutally put down-yet not before Cot is implicated in the "crime," for which she'll never stop paying. It's an engrossing story, bolstered by an impressive wealth of carefully researched period detail. But it all flashes by too quickly, and McCafferty's very pointed references to Cot's descent from a family of "seanachies" (i.e., bards) do little to dispel the reader's growing sense that the character's voice is an unconvincingly literate stand-in forthe author's, doling out exposition and compacted narrative as if conducting a history lesson. And, once Cot's story reaches the events of the revolt itself, they're presented in inexplicably abrupt summary form. As McCafferty's preface declares, "The Irish perspective is important to the history of resistance to colonialism." For that reason alone, Testimony is well worth reading-though it's not nearly as wonderful as it might have been.