![]() ![]() Others force characters to remember longer-buried transgressions, recalling the tradition of Haiti’s post-revolution zombie folklore, which emerged from imagined horror stories about enslaved people trapped in their bodies after death. Some of Card’s ghosts, such as those that manifest in Jamaica as a result of Abel’s faked death, are born of recent familial wrongs. Rather, they drift in and out of the humans’ perception, shifting people’s relationship to the world around them by compelling overdue reckonings. The titular beings aren’t just malevolent boogeymen who show up to frighten the living, as in a Halloween tale. Like other works of Caribbean literature, These Ghosts Are Family takes a wide-ranging approach to its depiction of undead spirits. But while books such as Yaa Gyasi’s transatlantic opus, Homegoing, and Namwali Serpell’s Zambian epic, The Old Drift, home in on the experiences of their living characters, Card’s novel stretches beyond the earthly realm. Zeroing in on how Abel’s original sin affected each of the women, These Ghosts Are Family joins other recent novels that track troubled families over generations. Unaware of each other’s existence, the Paisley and Solomon daughters endured isolation and poverty across oceans, mountains, and New York City boroughs. By the time the elderly man gathers his daughters and granddaughter in his Harlem brownstone in a contemporary scene to tell them the truth, his family has long been fractured. “Circling the world, looking for a grave that does not yet exist?” These Ghosts Are Family doesn’t follow Stanford’s wandering soul, but it does trace the fallout of Abel’s decision over the next several decades. “Where is his soul now?” Card writes of Stanford. Leaving his old name and family behind, he claimed a life that was never his. At the beginning of her new novel, These Ghosts Are Family, Maisy Card sketches the swindler’s portrait: Decades prior, when his friend Stanford Solomon died on the job in England, Abel assumed the other Jamaican man’s identity. To whom does one life belong? As the man born Abel Paisley prepares to greet death, the question takes on a sudden urgency.
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