Question 1

What is the significance of the title The Book of Night Women?

Accepted Answer

The title refers to the six older slave women — all named after mythological figures, all associated with the power of the night — who recruit and mentor Lilith in the novel's plot. The 'night women' meet secretly, plan the uprising, and possess a history of resistance and violence that the plantation's masters do not know about: they are the hidden knowledge that runs beneath the visible surface of plantation life. The title also signals the novel's relationship to literary tradition: James is writing a book — adding to the archive of stories that have been told about Caribbean slavery — and specifically writing women into that archive; the women of Caribbean slavery have been less fully represented in fiction than the men, and The Book of Night Women is an attempt to remedy that. The title also has a mythological resonance: night in many African and Caribbean traditions is associated with a different kind of knowledge and power than the daytime world of the plantation allows, and the women's meeting in the night is an assertion of an alternative order to the one imposed by slavery.

Question 2

Why is The Book of Night Women written in Creole?

Accepted Answer

James writes Lilith's narration and the dialogue of the enslaved characters in a modified Jamaican Creole English — a decision that is both politically and aesthetically motivated. Politically, it insists on the legitimacy and expressiveness of Caribbean vernacular language: the narration refuses to translate the enslaved characters' speech into Standard English, which would be a literary version of the colonial imposition that the novel is resisting. Aesthetically, the Creole gives the narration a rhythm, an intimacy, and a specificity that Standard English cannot reproduce: it makes the reader work slightly harder to follow the language, which is an analogue for the work that any understanding of Caribbean slavery requires. James has spoken about the influence of Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners on his decision to use vernacular narration — Selvon's modified Trinidadian English showed that a full narrative voice could be built from a dialect, and James extends this discovery to the Jamaican plantation setting.

Question 3

How does The Book of Night Women compare to other Caribbean slavery novels?

Accepted Answer

The Book of Night Women sits in a tradition of Caribbean slavery fiction that includes Andrea Levy's The Long Song (2010) — Levy's novel appeared after James's and was written without knowledge of it — and Fred D'Aguiar's Feeding the Ghosts (1997). What distinguishes James's novel is its violence: The Book of Night Women is more graphically brutal than most literary fiction about slavery, and James has defended this decision as an ethical one — the fiction that softens the violence of slavery is, he argues, a form of dishonesty about what slavery was. The novel's portrait of the plantation is systematically unsentimental about every character in it, including Lilith herself, whose capacity for violence and betrayal is treated as inseparable from her capacity for love and resistance. James's novel is also distinguished by its narrative voice: the second-person passages addressed to Lilith, mixed with the third-person narration of her story, create an intimacy that is unique to this book.

The Book of Night Women Reading Order

Complete The Book of Night Women Book List