Inspiration is difficult to come by these days. The idea itself has been all but lost to social media, scrawled over a million million Instagram posts. You know the look — chalkboard shots backdropped by some magisterial nature scene, across each wood-framed board a neat truism or easy proverb. There is a virtually endless scroll of these for interested seekers of bite-size bromides. (Guilty.)
Actual inspiration is a good deal harder to come by. Our over-informed 21st century selves are well-trained in the cynical arts. We celebrate our lack of trust in politicians, institutions, organized religions, as such attitudes are seen as a signpost of intelligence. We are quick to question anyone who rises to prominence. What is their “real” motivation? What are they selling? Social-media influencers are pretty transparent, wittingly or not. But those with traditional forms of power are up for nonstop interrogation.
This relentless search for a hidden agenda can become its own kind of blinding ignorance. Sure, it’s fun to hone our skeptical side, but every once in a while a person comes along who deserves not just our credulity, but our full respect. The best of these are sometimes informally referred to as saints. In the case of the titular Bakhita, Pope John Paul II bestowed official sainthood in 2000.
Recently translated by Adriana Hunter from the original French novel by Veronique Olmi, Bakhita tracks the life story of Sudan’s patron saint. Stolen at the age of seven by slave traders from the Darfur region, for six subsequent years Bakhita would be bought and sold by a series of brutes and lunatics. She cannot remember her own name, the name her parents gave her. Her kidnappers call her Bakhita — an Arabic word meaning “lucky one.”
Particularly in the way Olmi never loses the thread of Bakhita’s connection with her mother, the author refuses to let Bakhita’s humanity be subsumed in comforting illusions of some distancing sainthood.
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There is no obvious luck here. Bakhita’s life in slavery involves regular and vicious beatings, abuse at whim. She will be separated from everyone she knows and comes to love, from her cherished mother and sister to young Binah, a fellow child suffering the misery of slavery who becomes Bakhita’s best friend.
When she is 13 years old, Bakhita is sold to the Italian consul, a man who is relatively decent, a man who takes Bakhita with him back to Italy. Technically, she is no longer a slave. (The practice was outlawed in Italy by the time Bakhita arrived there in the late 19th century.)
But in her work as a servant and nanny for Maria Michieli, the wife of a friend of the consul, Bakhita discovers that neither is she free. The Italian people generally keep their distance from Bakhita, out of racism, fear, and ignorance. In charge of Michieli’s young daughter Mimmina, it is arranged for Bakhita and the little girl to stay at a convent in Venice while Maria Michieli travels abroad.
There, amongst the Canossian sisters, Bakhita learns about the Catholic God. She feels overwhelmingly drawn to him, to the story of his love – for the world, for her. “Planted deep inside her like a stake is her need for something different. A different light… a love that was so unlike her childhood but had the same music to it,” Olmi writes.
In Venice, Bakhita discovers that loving God can make her truly free, though that freedom costs her dearly. Once more, she loses the one she loves most in the world. But in the ensuing decades of her life in Italy, Bakhita accomplishes an extraordinary legacy.
For one, she is enthralled with the children of the orphanages and schools where she goes on to work. Admittedly, this is the kind of “sweet” service we in the West often view patronizingly as most suited to women. But Olmi does yeoman’s work in illuminating Christ’s own words, no doubt known to Bakhita: “Let the little children come to me, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Bakhita sees in each child the divine imprint of God and she is, like her chosen padrone, quite concerned with their daily wellbeing. She works for years in the kitchen — her preferred station — in large part because it allows her to ensure the students have enough to eat.
That very practical of tasks — to feed a hungry child — is a source of joy for Bakhita. Her uniqueness amongst adults is not lost on the young folk. “The children love her the way you love someone who will never betray you,” as Olmi puts it. These Italian boys and girls have been let down by their parents, their communities, their country. Bakhita is there when World War I breaks out and she will live through World War II as well. The “civilized” adults of the world leave in their wake millions brutalized through slavery, millions dead on battlefields and camps.
Bakhita’s strength through these horrors is her love. She is not innocent of human cruelty, having been the victim of its most intimate and sadistic expressions. But despite her past, Bakhita loves with a largeness of heart that will move even the most jaded of 21st-century readers.
Much credit goes to Olmi for the powerful blend of preternaturally beautiful prose and unflinching truth with which she tells Bakhita’s story. Particularly in the way Olmi never loses the thread of Bakhita’s connection with her mother, the author refuses to let Bakhita’s humanity be subsumed in comforting illusions of some distancing sainthood. “She will become God’s daughter, and she wonders whether within Him, He who encompasses everything, there will be a tiny fragment of her mother,” Olmi writes.
If there is a weakness in this translation, it is the uneven weight allotted to Bakhita’s self-directed life in Italy. The first third of the book is full of heart-wrenching, detailed depictions of the abuse Bakhita suffered in Africa. Once she makes it to Europe, a substantial chunk of pages are devoted to her time with the Michieli family. Bakhita’s journey as a woman with agency is assigned 123 fewer pages than those describing the 20-odd years of her youth and (very) young adulthood. I was left wanting for a more robust, vivid depiction of Bakhita as a mature individual making her way through God’s calling.
But this is a small quibble. May I strongly recommend you kick off 2020 with inspiration from this superb historic novel about a woman who “refused to surrender one inch to the darkness.”