Mumbo Gumbo

Donna Wright

Random House

Otago Daily Times, May 15th 2004

An assignment in New Orleans during Madi Gras might seem like a dream job, but New Zealand photographer Laura Delacrois barely has time to register the jet lag before things start going downhill.  She finds herself partnered with a reporter, aptly named “Mozzie”, with whom she has a relationship of mutual antipathy, she loses her camera in a local bar, has her drink spiked by a man in a Saddam Hussein mask ,who brands her with a fleur de lis then disappears. Caught in a drunken riot, her first 24 hours end with her humiliating arrest in front of local TV cameras.   After posting bail, she returns to her hotel-only to be abducted by a strange black woman who saw her on the previous night’s news and recognised the flower newly imprinted on her shoulder.  Fear not, gentle reader, there is an explanation.  It turns out that Laura and her abductor, Renee Poupet, share a common ancestry, the result of rape by a white slave trader of a young Guinean woman he is transporting to Haiti.  Renee has discovered a memoir by this woman describing a hidden fortune and prophesying that it will only be recovered when her descendants, both black and white, search together…

Thus begins Donna Wright’s  Mumbo Gumbo, a novel of “history, blood and Vodou”.  The hunt that Laura and Renee embark upon can best be described as a “rollicking adventure”, but it is the story of the slave, Tume, which forms the heart of the book.  Her narrative stretches from her early life in a Guinean village through the Haitian revolution to the final days of her life as a slave in the  American South.  Detailing the horrors of the 18th century slave trade, the violence of civil war and touching (lightly) on the fascinating tradition of Vodoun, I found this more captivating than the non-stop action of the surrounding narrative.   The New Zealand author’s extensive research into New Orleans and Haiti is obvious.  The voices of both Renee and Tume are believably and sympathetically realised, and it is Laura’s references to NZ, (“I hear the clatter of the Christine Rankin earrings as she shrugs”) which seemed out of place and likely to date.

 Although not to my own taste, the pace of the story drags the reader in, and for those who enjoy an adventure story will and provide a diverting enough read for a cold winter afternoon.