He lifted up the infant and, as all watched, whispered three times into his son’s ear the name he had chosen for him. It was the first time the name had ever been spoken as this child’s name, for Omoro’s people felt that each human being should be the first to know who he was.
Roots tells the story of Kunta Kinte, the great-great-great-great-grandfather of author Alex Haley. There is a huge burden on Roots: over 12 million slaves were captured and shipped across the Atlantic, and Roots endures in the public conscience as the story of those untold millions.
Roots starts with Kunta Kinte’s birth in the village of Juffure. Fleshing out Kunta’s life in Juffure becomes especially painful to the reader because we know what will eventually befall our protagonist. A rocky relationship with Kunta’s mother, burgeoning pride for his young siblings and the lessons from his painstaking manhood training are soon to be violently stripped away. I had to put down the book several times during the chapters that describe Kunta’s brutal capture and three month horror-show on a slave ship.
The Africa section of the book echoes throughout the rest of Roots as the book transitions from the horrors of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to Kunta’s attempts to retain his African heritage in Virginia. Kunta fights tooth and nail to retain his name after unceremoniously being named Toby by his owner. The second half of Roots follows the lineage of Kunta, and eventually all that remains of Kunta are the memories of his name and strange words like ‘ko’ and ‘Kamby-Bolongo’.
The struggle to retain his heritage strikes a particular chord with me. Obviously the wholesale erasure of African culture during American slavery is extreme, but even a second-generation American can empathize with Kunta. If you grow up as the child of Vietnamese refugees in the Midwest, you’re forced to assimilate in ways that you’re not even conscious of: making your last name easier to pronounce or becoming willfully ignorant of your native tongue. Part of me wonders what it would be like if I were more like Kunta Kinte when I was younger, but another part of me is inspired to have as much pride as Kunta. Roots resonated with me not just as a struggle for mortal life, but also as a more universal story for the survival of culture.