The Bread the Devil Knead was shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction along with five other titles. Ruth Ozeki took home the winner’s trophy for The Book of Form and Emptiness.
“When I wake up that morning, oh, God, my back and my belly was hurting.” There are some books that announce their arrival – they establish the tone right away, demand that the reader focus all their attention to the page, and declare that the author is here for business. The Bread the Devil Knead does just that.
You might be tempted to pull out a pencil and “correct” all the grammatical “errors” but I would suggest you stop right in your path. Allen-Agostini uses Trinidadian Creole that lends the book its personality. Once you trudge through the first few pages, the language grows on you and you realise that it just might be the book’s biggest winner. But more on that later.
The Bread the Devil Knead is Allie’s story. She could very well be one of the many women we find around ourselves – confident and ambitious at work while they get battered at home and lead a dangerous domestic life. More than Allie, the book reveals society’s relationship with domestic abuse and how women bear the responsibility for it.
“As if somehow is a normal thing for a man to beat a woman. Yet it not normal for a woman to stay with a man who is beating she? If is the woman fault for staying, not the man fault for lashing she, beating woman come normal, then.”
Allen-Agostini does not dawdle and launches into the monstrosity of Allie’s domestic life right away. There is no way to blunt the edges of domestic abuse and the author does not try to either. Allie’s boyfriend, Leo (a good-looking musician who can be quite charming), is her abuser. The silence in which she suffers the previous night’s blows is jarring to read.
However, Allie does not let it affect her and sets off for work as if nothing had transpired just a few hours before. Though she is aware that this is not, cannot, be love, she defends Leo when her coworkers suggest that she should seek legal counsel. This is frustrating for the reader but anyone who’s been a victim of domestic abuse or knows anyone who has, knows this to be all too true. The veneer of happiness and dignity becomes a defence mechanism.
“That man was doing you out there behind God back.”
“Carenage not behind God back, Bobby. There are roads, streetlights, running water and everything.”
Unsparing tale
There is a reason why Allie is the relatable, woman-next-door – she proves that an apparently normal relationship can be rotten on the inside and even the most confident woman could be stuck in a situation that is impossible to get out of. The book makes a case for how women accept love, especially those who have grown up in complicated families. Allen-Agostini’s voice is unsparing when she explores how we justify and enable abuse in our society. There are mental implications of it where victims, including Allie, think of themselves deserving of abuse.
“I never meet a man yet who wouldn’t horn you if you give he a chance, but maybe that was just me. I is a bad-man magnet, I does tell myself sometimes.”
The Bread the Devil Knead does not isolate domestic abuse. We read about Allie’s formative years and realise how childhood experiences become the template for adult relationships, especially romantic relationships. Allen-Agostini looks at generational trauma that perpetuates abusive situations: seventeen-year-old Allie runs away from home, thinking she has shut the door on a painful past, only to find herself in relationships where the past is reenacted. She leaves and the cycle repeats itself. The lack of friends does not help either.
“I doesn’t have woman friends. Woman deceitful, my mother used to say. You can’t trust them. And every man I ever had discourage me from making too much friend.”
Though the present is narrated in a first-person voice, it is interesting to note how the book adopts third-person flashbacks to recall Allie’s childhood – an active dissociation with circumstances and people that Allie is unable to make sense of. These subtleties bolster her character as we face ourselves with a person who has much to unpack, acknowledge, and reconcile with. Though Allie is childless at 40, she’s still actively responsible for one – in the sense that the young Allie, nicknamed “Girlie”, refuses to leave her side.
Domestic violence is universal – only the statistics vary from region to region. Yet, when one is at the receiving end of it, the numbers and statistics blur into each other. It does not matter that you are just one of the many – as is the case with any misfortune, the enormity of such a situation seems incomprehensible.
A triumph of language
By using Trinidadian Creole, Allen-Agostini makes Allie’s story a deeply personal one. For someone who has nothing to herself, her memories and stories become her sole belongings. Locating Allie in Port of Spain, the capital city of Trinidad and Tobago, we get a better understanding of how cultures affect one’s sense of self.
Allen-Agostini carefully chooses the names of the protagonist too. Allie detests her childhood nickname Girlie; Leo cannot bring himself to address her by her name and calls her Babes instead – even her name is infantilised in the two periods of her life when she’s most vulnerable. Alethea, short for Allie, means Truth and we understand the meaning of her name as the story progresses and Allie shakes off the shackles of her past (and present) to build a future on her own terms. Simply put, language is the star of The Bread the Devil Knead.
The scenes on the streets of Port of Spain come alive in the book. I have never been to the city, but I can imagine Allie taking maxi taxis, walking along the streets dressed in bright clothes. The coworkers who eventually become her friends are characters in their own right too. We witness her at work and in private moments with her friends – there’s a sense of being an audience to something very intimate as Allie goes about her day.
In a quick-paced dramatic conclusion that comes unannounced, The Bread the Devil Kneads leaves us with hope. The grimness of Allie’s life is somewhat negated as she redeems herself and gets ready for a new beginning.
Allen-Agostini does not allow you to look away. I had to close the book and come up for air more times than I can count – hers is a distinct voice and we desperately need to make space for writers who play and mould language the way she has. Here, I would also like to commend publishers Myriad Editions and Allen-Agostini’s proofreader (elisha efua bartels) and editor (Vicki Heath Silk) for taking a chance on such an unusual book.
The Bread the Devil Knead is a force and Lisa Allen-Agostini has set the standards very high for not just women’s writing, but global literary fiction. Bravo!
The Bread the Devil Kneads, Lisa Allen-Agostini, Myriad Editions.