A Woman of Endurance
A Novel
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4.4 • 18 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Combining the haunting power of Toni Morrison’s Beloved with the evocative atmosphere of Phillippa Gregory’s A Respectable Trade, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s groundbreaking novel illuminates a little discussed aspect of history—the Puerto Rican Atlantic Slave Trade—witnessed through the experiences of Pola, an African captive used as a breeder to bear more slaves.
A Woman of Endurance, set in nineteenth-century Puerto Rican plantation society, follows Pola, a deeply spiritual African woman who is captured and later sold for the purpose of breeding future slaves. The resulting babies are taken from her as soon as they are born. Pola loses the faith that has guided her and becomes embittered and defensive. The dehumanizing violence of her life almost destroys her. But this is not a novel of defeat but rather one of survival, regeneration, and reclamation of common humanity.
Readers are invited to join Pola in her journey to healing. From the sadistic barbarity of her first experiences, she moves on to receive compassion and support from a revitalizing new community. Along the way, she learns to recognize and embrace the many faces of love—a mother’s love, a daughter’s love, a sister’s love, a love of community, and the self-love that she must recover before she can offer herself to another. It is ultimately, a novel of the triumph of the human spirit even under the most brutal of conditions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Llanos-Figueroa's intense and bittersweet return (after Daughters of the Stone) traces the gut-wrenching life of a woman who struggles to survive slavery and find trust and love in her community. In 1836, Pola, 18, is captured in West Africa and enslaved on a sugarcane plantation in Puerto Rico. Pola is made a "breeding mare," in her words, forcibly impregnated many times, her children immediately seized and sold into slavery. In vivid and often graphic detail, Llanos-Figueroa depicts the sadness and inhumanity of Pola's life: her capture, the "man-beasts" who rape her, and her transfer to a second plantation to recover after having run away from the first and been caught, then beaten nearly to death. Rufina, an enslaved healer, mends Pola's body, but Pola is combative with and untrusting of other enslaved people. As Pola becomes a maternal figure to Chachita, a starving, orphaned girl roaming outside the plantation, she begins to soften. Others help protect the girl, assistance for which Pola is grateful, but tragedy strikes again. The action builds toward a memorable end as Pola regains her belief in Mother Yemayá, her faith spirit. The restoration of her Yoruba spirituality and her deepened friendships are both touching and emotionally palpable. This harrowing story is hard to put down.
