The Hundred Wells of Salaga: A Novel
By: Ayesha Harruna Attah / Narrated By: Janina Edwards
Length: 6 hs and 37 mins
I have a feeling I “SHOULD” have liked it more than I did?
The Hundred Wells of Salaga ostensibly has it all: the inhumanity of slavery, strong women protagonists, hard-hitting themes, and superior narration by Janina Edwards. The latter, especially, I believe is responsible for me liking the book at all. Edwards brings such amazing voicing, such amazing emotion, to the text that I felt something at least part of the time. (By the way, I had to speed my usual x1.25 listening time to x1.5 as, tho’ she’s spectacular, she’s also kind of slooooooow). Really, I bought into her characters one-hundred percent.
But the writing and plotting leave a lot to be desired: stilted writing with characters who think about what’s right first then think about sex then what’s right then more sex. Don’t get me wrong. This is not a sexually graphic book; it’s just that the characters, though strong and always voicing their opinions, lack real weight, real complexity. When you think you know what’s going on, the protagonists do something totally out of character, or totally stupid. Then by the end, we’re asked to buy into a person maybe doing an entire 180 and changing who they are, who they want to be, what they’re willing to do/sacrifice to get it. I didn’t buy into it, I’m afraid. I was worried for, say, Aminah at the end, even as I wondered what the hell Wurche was going to do.
Aminah is a beautiful young woman who’s caught and sold into slavery. She’s sexually misused, and tho’ she lucks out with “decent enough” owners, she’s still a slave, her family is still dead and gone, and she still yearns to be free. Wurche is a strong-willed young woman born into a ruling-class who owns slaves. She’s forced into a disgusting marriage but finds the courage to run away with her young son.
Naturally the two come together with Wurche owning Aminah, and though they form a bond as “sisters”, they’re still master and slave. Along with this are precarious times in villages throughout the nation, with warring factions struggling for supremacy, sometimes even leading them to form alliances with foreigners.
And ALWAYS, there’s longing for whatEVER being transmuted into sexual desire. There’s no intimacy; it’s a matter of men being toads (once again, I do apologize to toads the world over), and women somehow losing their backbones and desiring that sexual connection no matter what, even as they become putty.
Salaga has a hundred wells because they were created to marginally hydrate captives before being sold into slavery. They’re a symbol of hopelessness, of human depravity. And by the end we’re supposed to be feeling a sense of hope, a sense of beauty, of completeness, of the wheel turning round to where it started. But I didn’t feel any of that. I just saw two women hoping without any basis for hope, acting without any reasons to trust. So I was a bit dismayed, even as the final lines, I thought, were beautifully written and brought a lump in my throat. It made me think: THERE! Why wasn’t the whole book written like THAT?!?
You’ll probably love the audiobook because, as I said, it has it all. I just happen to think that ALL should’ve included a little warmth, and at least a tad complexity.
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