The Griot's Tale Book

The Griot’s Tale tells the story of Adamah, the Griot (African story teller) who, as a child, is filled with wonder and curiosity by his mother’s magical stories. Later, he also hears disturbing things about her African roots and of life on the slave plantations. He learns to read and with his Master, he travels to England where he gains his freedom. The novel is set in England during the late 18th century and the Regency period, a time of great change (including the struggle to abolish the African slave trade) and evolves from Africa to the island, then via America across the Atlantic to England. The Griot’s life takes many twists and turns, which brings him into contact with people from many lands as he moves back and forth from London to the Provinces. After meeting Rachele and falling in love with her, they were married and he lived in London where from his Newgate prison cell the Griot tells his ‘tale’ as he awaits ‘trial’. In this story of love and loss, of betrayal, bondage and freedom, the Griot emerges as that rare character in British literature, a ‘Black’ hero in Regency England, who is motivated by a deep need to understand and interpret his life experience. He strives to become an ‘ethical being’ (his life enfolded as a story within a story in a non-linear style where unpredictably prevails), which does through the seemingly unrealisable ambition of telling his own story in writing. Thus he achieves this not with anger, but with ‘meditative thoughts, reflection and compassion,’ as one Reviewer put it. The Griot’s Tale is absorbing from beginning to end. As the tension grows, Ron Ramdin‘s wonderful, inventive, fluent writing gets more adventurous from one episode to another. It is a rare literary work ‘where the plot and style are a message in themselves,’ a process through which the Griot replaces the ‘oral by the written word, where words say more than it speaks and means more than it utters.’ This timely and timeless novel will not fail to move those who read it. The Griots Tale is Ron Ron Ramdin’s second novel.Read More