Dominion by Addie E Citchens review – Mother’s Prize-short film about parenting horror | Fiction

‘Twoman gave the womb, and to the man he gave dominion, and that’s what I teach my children,” Rev Saber Winfrey Jr tells his wife Priscilla, among Addie E Citchens’s formidable Women’s-prize-shortlisted book, Dominion. freedom.

Set in the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi, at the turn of the millennium, the novel follows the Winfreys, a prominent Black church family whose established grandeur hides a deep decay and legacy. Saber leads the largest congregation in the state from the pulpit of Seven Seals Baptist church, imparting wisdom through sermons and local radio stations, exuding the oily confidence of a man convinced that God speaks in his own voice. The long-suffering Priscilla writes those sermons, raises their five sons and quietly maintains the order of her rule without receiving honor.

Their youngest son, Emanuel – known to the world as Wonderboy – is handsome, talented and terrifying: a renowned athlete with the voice of an angel. They pass through the Dominion with alarming ease for pretty boys who have never faced any obvious consequences. “When they passed, the teachers were afraid; the girls sighed.” Yet from the beginning there is something twisted beneath the sheen. Violence, we find, follows him like heat.

The events are moving in different directions for Priscilla and Diamond, Wonderboy’s teenage friend. Diamond is vulnerable and “poor”, carrying the psychic scars of childhood abandonment. Falling in love with Wonderboy gives him the illusion of being his own, and the chance to travel to another world. Both women have reached a point of tragic attachment to the same boy: Priscilla has helped to create him, forgive him and enable him; Diamond is beginning to experience the brutality that thrives under such tolerance.

The central plot of the book is slowly changing, then suddenly, the real appearance of Wonderboy. Excessive sex with another man causes Wonderboy to have violent outbursts, and the novel takes a long, fast-paced turn.

The drama takes place suddenly and, at times, one longs to uncover more about Wonderboy’s inner life, especially the consequences of his oppression and brutality. The opening is the engine of the story and the mystery. Perhaps that absence is part of the point: men like Wonderboy are often created in the spotlight, their damage permanent. His violence is presented as inevitable: he is “one special boy”, Priscilla points out, “but I already knew that his cabbage was gone, when his cornbread was soft in the middle”. However, the creation of Wonderboy, the “beautiful monster”, may be more compelling than his rapid downfall.

Citchens is subtle in his inquiry into how religious practices can be sites of power. Sabre, the sarcastic patriarch whose “person was a lie”, represents the worst illusion of public purity to hide private cruelty. He admits that his son has said that “boys will be boys”, and insists that the text should solve the problem. After encountering a lot of evidence of Wonderboy’s violence, he asked his wife: “Get me a letter, Cilla!

Priscilla is at the center of the novel’s plot: intelligent, tired, kept on the edge of addiction to “fulfillment” (pills) and alcohol, she becomes a case study in the false illusion of female mortality, in which women are taught to confuse endurance with love. In one of the most dramatic moments, he tells Diamond: “You should never try to lose or find another person because you will get lost in the desert if you do.”

Although it has a big story, Dominion is glorious, deliciously funny. Citchens’ writing is punctuated by Southern humor and metaphor: A scantily clad woman is described as “looking like the last freed slave”; the suppressive heat is “hot-hot”. When Priscilla thinks her husband has had enough, she laments that “too often, a Black woman can rely on something like diabetes or colon or prostate cancer to comfort her husband”. The sights and sounds of rural Mississippi life are rendered in Technicolor – food, gossip, church politics and family histories.

Ultimately, Dominion reveals itself to be a myth about legacy: the innate masculinity of masculinity, the innate subordination of women, the innate sadness of cities built upon generations of sadness. Citchens has written a poignant, funny and brilliant book about how women’s lives are disrupted by the demands and abuses of men, and what is possible when they begin to think of life as bigger than those who limit them.