Monday, May 18, 2015

My Reaction to Steven Barnes' Lion's Blood



While reading the first 30 chapters of Lion’s Blood I was filled with all types of different emotions. The first feeling I had was confusion when the protagonists Aidan, describes his experience of middle passage. It was hard to imagine that this story was being told about a little white boy and his people. My mind just could not comprehend that this was not happening to people of color. All I could picture in my mind when I read was the image of black men, women and children and this left me very disturbed. Why could I not imagine this story from a white perspective? As I continued to read about Kai and his great noble family, I tried to imagine black people holding superior positions and conquering new land. This was not so hard to imagine in my mind though it was at times challenging. For me the most eye opening part of the novel is when Kai and Aidan were being taught about the great pharaohs of Egypt by Babatunde. Babatunde pulls out a scroll with a drawing of and a Pharaoh who looks like a white man! I am not sure if it is Kai or Aidan who asks this question but the novel states “could the Great Pharaoh actually be closer in blood to Aidan than Kai”? I was just as shocked as Kai and Aidan when I read this part of the novel. It was then that I began to question how much of our history do we really know. I think about this not just as an African American but as a human being. How much of human history has been kept from all of the people of the world and or forgotten in order to keep us from knowing our true reality? 

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