Dominion, a fictional city within the Mississippi Delta, is shot by way of with Black church tradition and an outsize reverence for high-school soccer. On the flip of the millennium, it’s a neighborhood wherein sexuality thrives regardless of, or maybe due to, efforts to suppress it. Addie E. Citchens’s debut novel, which takes its setting as its title, follows two girls yoked collectively by their love for a teen named Emanuel, who extra generally goes by “Wonderboy” or “Surprise”: Diamond, his girlfriend, and Priscilla, his mom and the “first woman” of the native church. Each girls, over the course of the novel, desperately attempt to dislodge themselves from their troublesome pasts whereas confronting a swelling sense of wickedness in Surprise.
Diamond has to develop up rapidly when, at 8 years previous, she is deserted, together with three siblings, by her mom. As she enters her senior 12 months with Surprise’s child on the best way, she struggles to determine her id exterior of her relationship with this mysterious boy, who makes more and more reckless selections. Priscilla, in the meantime, manages 5 sons, a philandering know-it-all husband, and a nasty hip with the assistance of brown liquor and what she calls her “fulfillments” (learn: capsules).
The characters in Dominion are bombarded with non secular scripts about what a correct erotic life ought to seem like. But when we all know something about intimacy and want, we all know that they typically maintain dominion over us fairly than the opposite manner round. Many official and casual directives come from Reverend Sabre Winfrey Jr., Priscilla’s husband and Surprise’s father. The longtime chief of Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church, he insists on seeing a malignant sexual deviance in all places. In one in every of his sermons, he posits that the Bible’s “first seducer” altered “the course of human historical past,” urging his followers to contemplate what Jesus can inform them about “finest resist temptation.” Surprise, who sings and performs music at Seven Seals, masters the trumpet fairly than his most popular instrument, the saxophone, as a result of, as his father places it, “a person by no means oughta put nothing in his mouth however meals.” Surprise additionally confesses that he murdered the household’s dachshund as a result of it “saved making my daddy mad.” As Priscilla recollects, the reverend “wasn’t too eager on his boys taking part in with an animal formed like a ding-a-ling.”
These counterproductive makes an attempt to regulate sexuality have an effect on the ladies of Dominion as properly. In an early scene, Priscilla walks in on Diamond and her son in an intimate second. Considering the place the boy might have discovered such impropriety, she recollects the reverend telling her “that as a result of Eve ate the apple, I must ‘eat the snake.’” Later, as Diamond registers her embarrassment, she recollects assembly Priscilla years earlier at an occasion for Finer Womanhood Week that taught younger women “about pads and cramps, sit with our ankles crossed, what to put on to maintain our our bodies from transferring underneath our garments.”
The guide primarily unfolds by way of first-person observations, toggling between Priscilla and Diamond, each of whom reside in awe of Surprise. Diamond sees her relationship with him as “creating one thing all our personal, one thing I inherently belonged to”—a uncommon feeling after her household was ripped aside. Priscilla, in the meantime, is disturbed by her son and the “vitality that radiated off of him,” which “felt nuclear, harmful, like somebody I didn’t and couldn’t ever know.” The guide additionally contains church bulletins, church histories, obituaries, and information of Surprise’s different dalliances marked by case numbers. These temporary accounts of his escapades present unvarnished views of his typically hazy motivations—his seek for the “plumpest, most unruly breasts he’d ever come throughout”; his delight at discovering that one other lady’s “panties had been scratchy and fancy. Harlot pink.”
Surprise may need continued to reside a kind of nondescript lifetime of church, soccer, and teenage intercourse if not for a sudden queer encounter with a person he meets at his faculty’s soccer stadium. When the stranger catches him off guard with a kiss, Surprise reacts with anger and revulsion. He then violently assaults a homeless man who occurred to witness the entire thing. Citchens frames this second, maybe the novel’s most pivotal, as a high-resolution broad shot from up within the nosebleeds. She tightly choreographs the possibility assembly: Surprise “noticed and felt lips on his, accepted the tongue crashing about in his mouth. Dude had one hand cradling Emanuel’s head; his palm resting on the stranger’s sturdy rippled stomach, struggled to determine whether or not to the touch or shove.” Citchens barely describes this different man, giving no sense of who he’s or the place he’s come from. He’s merely darkish and muscular.
Many readers will need extra particulars on the id of this shadowy determine who modifications the lives of Surprise and the ladies who love him. However these info are irrelevant; the person is portrayed as a manifestation of the aberrant sexuality that Dominion’s Christian tradition seeks to suppress. The kiss causes Surprise to spiral; he displays on each second of innocuous intimacy he has shared with a person, “the locker rooms and fanny slaps and chest bumps he’d participated in most of his life.” His vicious outburst warns that when erotic want is oppressively regulated, it may erupt into one thing damaging.
Not lengthy afterward, Surprise and Diamond run away from dwelling, drive six hours to the Mississippi coast, and gap up in a motel room. This interlude is reduce quick when Diamond finds Surprise sprawled on the bottom after having ingested too many capsules. She spends the following few days sitting by his hospital mattress, vowing to like the incapacitated younger man beside her endlessly.
What Diamond doesn’t know at that second is that the selection gained’t be hers to make. After his suicide try, Surprise begins to tug away from her. Panicking, she wonders how she may emulate what she calls “harmful girls”—those that “had the facility to make males threat all of it; they introduced males to their knees.” When she asks Mrs. Kathareen, a “brown and juicy” lady who’s having an affair with the reverend, channel the type of energy that may preserve a person, the girl ripostes, “Nooooo, child lady, my solely energy is that I gained’t give my energy away.”
Diamond isn’t instantly certain what Mrs. Kathareen means. However the dam that’s been holding again the passions of Dominion has already damaged past restore, and he or she’ll quickly discover out. Priscilla tastes liberation first when her husband steps down from the pulpit in a public admission of his extramarital affairs, liberating her to go away him and face her personal needs. She urges Diamond, too, to go away her son. “He’s no good for anybody, I promise you,” she tells her. “No good for you or a child.”
Quickly after Surprise wakes up from his overdose, Diamond observes: “Folks hardly ever simply snap and do loopy shit. What regarded like a snap to different folks was really an erosion of the surfaces that we constructed up for defense, and sadly folks would fairly dwell on the snap than the carrying.” As a result of Dominion takes place over the course of just some months, the reader witnesses the snaps, however yearns for extra of the carrying. Priscilla laments troublesome moments in her marriage, however we scarcely see her husband disclose greater than phallic anxieties and churchy platitudes. Her drastic choice to go away her previous life behind definitely feels warranted, however I’d have delighted in a extra elaborate depiction of the circumstances that led to her selection.
This quibble arises as a result of I merely needed extra of this guide. To paraphrase one in every of Priscilla’s extra vivid characterizations of her son, the novel’s cabbage feels accomplished, whereas its cornbread is delicate within the center. Though Dominion is definitely not a romp, it reads maybe too briskly: The novel’s message is evident, however its characters, at occasions, might use extra fleshing out. Then once more, that is what makes it a parable—albeit an advanced one, rooted not in dogma however in messy actuality.
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