Unheard Voices
by Malorie Blackman (ed)
March 2007 marks the bicentenary of the of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act and Malorie Blackman has put together a stirring collection of prose and poetry, reflecting on both past and present. These narratives are immensely powerful ? the extract by Harriet Jacobs based on her life as a slave girl, thwarted in love, will make readers both bristle with anger at the injustice of her treatment and want to find out what happened next. I was also deeply moved by the extract from 'Roots', based on Alex Haley's ancestor.
The poetry is more mixed affair: both Benjamin Zephaniah's and Daniel Francis's suffers from being more polemic than poetry but there are lyric pieces by John Agard and Langston Hughes as well as Grace Nichol's beautiful 'The people could fly'. Unheard voices is educational, thought-provoking and a saddening eye-opener. Human trafficking is still alive and well and this book shows that, in some ways, nothing has changed.
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