Late in Ariel Dorfman’s philosophical novel Darwin’s Ghosts, a professor asks the protagonist, “who is not the product of some crime committed in the past?” This question summarizes all that Fitzroy Foster and his wife, Camilla Wood, discover about his ancestry after Foster’s fourteenth birthday when all photographs of him bizarrely show the face of a long-dead indigenous man from Tierra del Fuego. The quest to figure out how to “cure” Foster leads the pair to uncover the tragic, horrific history of the men and women who were kidnapped and displayed in human zoos in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
On the morning of his fourteenth birthday, Foster’s dad takes a picture of the boy that will change Foster’s life for the next eleven years. Instead of seeing his happy, teenaged face, they see the face of a sad, dark-skinned face of a mysterious man. The strange photo is not a fluke. Repeated experiments keep showing the same unknown face. The photos send Foster’s mother on a quixotic (and fatal) quest to advocate for displaced Amazonian peoples while leading Foster to become a recluse. On his own, Foster is fairly ineffective at figuring out who the man in the photos is and why he seems to be haunting the teen.
Fortunately for Foster, his girlfriend (later wife) Cam is fascinated with the whole thing. Also fortunately for Foster, Cam is a multilingual genius. Most of Darwin’s Ghost will be catnip for history and library buffs because Cam dives deeply into the quest to figure out who the man is, what happened to him, and how to get rid of him. The man is revealed to be a kidnapped Tierra del Fuego native, dubbed Henri (later Heinrich) by his captors, who was displayed in human zoos after 1881. Cam does PhD level digging through the archives and libraries in France and Germany about the heartbreaking stories of people who were kidnapped from around the world to be displayed in zoos, only to die of disease and deprivation after been exploited. She also learns about Foster’s tangled descent from the exploiters who photographed and studied (abused) these indigenous people.
Foster spent most of his teenaged years thinking that Henri wants revenge on the descendants of the people who captured and killed him. After all, the photographic haunting led to his mother’s death in Brazil. What Cam uncovers slowly teaches Foster to be more empathetic to Henri’s ghost. He grows up at last, after spending years as a sulking recluse, and finally looks for a way to put Henri to rest.
Darwin’s Ghost takes a bizarre premise and uses it to shed light on a chapter in history that should not have been forgotten, when paternalistic anthropology crossed with unscrupulous commercialism to create an appalling crime. There are definitely parts of this book that are hard to read. There are also parts of this book that get very preachy. That said, this novel asks a very important question that needed to be asked: how do we put things right for crimes our ancestors committed when those crimes are still impacting the descendants of the victims? Foster asks himself this question more than once. After all, he didn’t kidnap Henri. He wasn’t even alive. Still, the haunting wakes him up and makes him wonder seriously about his historical debts. I found the entire book fascinating.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration. It will be released 1 May 2018.