Die the Long Day

Written by the New York Times, on publication of Die the Long Day:

Institutions, in West Indian society, were created by slavery and colonialism, for a small elite. When a new Elite, however, began to emerge, the peasant majority began to understand their former white rulers through the black imitators who succeeded them. The peasant at this stage also recognized that the institutions sustaining the black elite were even more vulnerable than the ones that had upheld the white one; that these borrowed institutions could be co?opted, transformed and finally destroyed if necessary. A mass demonstration, an election or a coup d’etat can topple one ruling element and bring another into being. It is not that the people are unstable so much as the institutions they inherited.

Orlando Patterson in Die the Long Day, a novel set on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the 18th century, throws new light on this unstable situation and on the subtleties of the master?slave relationship. In so doing, he gives a better understanding of contemporary West Indian society. For it is as if this society is bent on proving that those who ignore the past will be forced to relive it; as if the passing of two centuries has only deepened the conflicts, by presenting them over and over again in different guises.

The novel begins with a muted, sensuous description of the landscape around the plant?, tion, and then Quasheba, a slave appears. She is running for her life. She had tried to prevent her daughter Polly from being hired out to a plantation owner. Don’t make him touch you, she had warned, even if you have to kill im…. Make then do what they want after. You will be just as good as dead if im touch you anyway. The owner was known to have syphilis, and Quasheba dreaded the disease…. for her own mother had died of it and she had to look after her during her last days.