Present at the Slaughter
Douglas Glover(Author)
Biblioasis (Publisher)
Will be published approx. on 25. March 2027
Book
Paperback/Softback
353 pages
978-1-77196-722-8 (ISBN)
Description
A deeply rooted familial story excavating colonial slavery and exposing the layers of oppression and exploitation then and now.
When Douglas Glover's mother told him their Scottish ancestor was the "youngest planter in the British Empire indemnified for freeing his slaves," he felt uneasy pride-and a child's confusion. Present at the Slaughter is the story of what happened when he decided to find out what those words really meant.
Moving between colonial archives, slave registries, family lore, and fieldwork in Grenada and Carriacou, Glover reconstructs the lives of his Scottish ancestors and dozens of enslaved people they owned. These slave biographies-spare, factual, often heartbreaking-form the deep structure of the book. "The counter story," he writes, "is the weight of blackness." What emerges is not a story of guilt or denial, but something stranger and more revealing: how the memory of slavery can be preserved without remorse, passed down not as shame but as family legend. Glover examines this moral indifference not to condemn his ancestors (though their actions certainly deserve condemnation), but to understand how ordinary people accommodate themselves to atrocity-by adjusting tone, suppressing judgment, or aestheticizing the past. In so doing, he also reflects on the evasions of our own time, and on the seductive ease with which oppression and exploitation are made acceptable. The result is a work of layered witness and unsettling intimacy-rooted in research, animated by self-doubt, and driven by a restless moral intelligence.
When Douglas Glover's mother told him their Scottish ancestor was the "youngest planter in the British Empire indemnified for freeing his slaves," he felt uneasy pride-and a child's confusion. Present at the Slaughter is the story of what happened when he decided to find out what those words really meant.
Moving between colonial archives, slave registries, family lore, and fieldwork in Grenada and Carriacou, Glover reconstructs the lives of his Scottish ancestors and dozens of enslaved people they owned. These slave biographies-spare, factual, often heartbreaking-form the deep structure of the book. "The counter story," he writes, "is the weight of blackness." What emerges is not a story of guilt or denial, but something stranger and more revealing: how the memory of slavery can be preserved without remorse, passed down not as shame but as family legend. Glover examines this moral indifference not to condemn his ancestors (though their actions certainly deserve condemnation), but to understand how ordinary people accommodate themselves to atrocity-by adjusting tone, suppressing judgment, or aestheticizing the past. In so doing, he also reflects on the evasions of our own time, and on the seductive ease with which oppression and exploitation are made acceptable. The result is a work of layered witness and unsettling intimacy-rooted in research, animated by self-doubt, and driven by a restless moral intelligence.
Reviews / Votes
Praise for Attack of the Copula Spiders"Glover is a master of narrative structure."
-Wall Street Journal
"So sharp, so evocative, that the reader sees well beyond the tissue of words into . . . the author's poetic grace."
-New Yorker
"Passionately intricate."
-Chicago Tribune
"Every literate person in the country should be reading Glover's essays."
-Globe and Mail
"Darkly humorous, simultaneously restless and relentless."
-Kirkus Reviews
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Emeryville
Canada
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 209 mm
Width: 133 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-77196-722-8 (9781771967228)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Douglas Glover has been called "a master of narrative structure" (Wall Street Journal) and "the mad genius of Can Lit" (Globe and Mail) whose stories are "as radiant and stirring as anything available in contemporary literature" (Los Angeles Review of Books). He is the author of two historical novels Elle and The Life and Times of Captain N. Elle won the Governor-General's Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He grew up on a farm in southwestern Ontario.