A Woman Named Solitude Analysis

Our history books don’t teach us much about the slave’s perspective on slavery, only the white man’s point of view. They don’t seem to go into detail about how their culture was broken when taken from their homeland, and forced to forget their sacred traditions that were passed on to them generation after generation. A Woman Named Solitude does just that. This inspiring story follows a young girl named Solitude as she tries her hardest to overcome the challenges slavery puts in front of her. André Schwarz-Bart’s A Woman Named Solitude is a striking tale about how slavery can affect the inner self.
To start off, one of the life lessons taught in this book is the idea that if one were to look at life as a dream, or take life lightly, there may be severe consequences. In the beginning of the book, Byangumay, Solitude’s mother, experiences a traumatic event. However, she couldn’t comprehend what was going on around her and perceived everything as a dream, which caused her to not act how she would if she knew it were a real-life situation. She even thought to herself how she had to gather all the details of her dream to explain the next day, “. . .For her dream had become so serious that she would be obliged to describe it in every detail in the morning” …show more content…
As mentioned earlier, the author does a very well job on describing the scenes of the story. Schwarz-Bart goes into complete detail to ensure that the reader fully understands the concepts of the story. In this scene, Byangumay is taken from her home as the narrator describes what she sees, “At that moment two spirits of the night rushed into the hut howling with their long metal sticks. They had beaks, clothes like plumage, and on their foreheads stars within silver crescent moons.” [Schwarz-Bart