Novel
The Hills of Hebron
Sylvia Wynter · 1962
Synopsis
On the hills of Hebron, the New Believers live in the community to which their first prophet, Moses, had led them in exile. When Sister Rose, the young and beautiful wife of their leader Obadiah, finds herself pregnant and he claims to have had no part in it, the community is swept up in suspicion and doubt. Miss Gatha, Rose's adoptive mother and Obadiah's rival, sees in this an opportunity to install her own son, Isaac, the club-footed man, at the head of the Church.
Context
The novel is drawn from a play that its author had completed in 1958 and that the Royal Court Theatre in London had bought; it appeared in 1962, the year of Jamaican independence, from Jonathan Cape in London and Simon and Schuster in New York. It takes Bedwardism, a revivalist movement of the beginning of the century, as its subject, and shows descendants of slaves trying to build a free life in the face of colonial power. Ian Randle, in Kingston, reissued it in 2010.
Who it is for
In English mixed with Creole; some knowledge of Afro-Caribbean Christianity is needed to follow the quarrels of the congregation.
Prizes and reception
Its author's only novel, it is read today as an early form of her reflection on the Caribbean human.
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