In Addie E Citchens' formidable Women's prize-shortlisted debut novel, Dominion, the titular concept is explored through the lens of a prominent Black church family in Mississippi. The story delves into how male entitlement manifests not only through overt violence but also through charisma, piety, and everyday banality.
Setting and Characters
Set in the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi, at the turn of the millennium, the novel follows the Winfrey family. The Rev Sabre Winfrey Jr leads the largest congregation in the state from the pulpit of Seven Seals Baptist church. He dispenses wisdom through sermons and local radio broadcasts, exuding the confidence of a man who believes God speaks exclusively through him. His wife, Priscilla, writes those sermons, raises their five sons, and silently maintains his authority without receiving credit.
Their youngest son, Emanuel, known as Wonderboy, is beautiful, gifted, and terrifying. He is a prodigious athlete with the voice of an angel, moving through Dominion with the dangerous ease of a boy who has never faced consequences. However, beneath his sheen lies something warped, and violence trails him like heat.
Narrative Structure
The action unfolds through alternating perspectives: Priscilla and Diamond, Wonderboy's teenage girlfriend. Diamond is vulnerable and poor, carrying the psychic bruises of childhood abandonment. Loving Wonderboy offers her the illusion of belonging and access to another world. Both women become tragically bound to the same young man: Priscilla has helped create, excuse, and enable him, while Diamond experiences the sharp edge of his cruelties.
The central drama revolves around the gradual, then sudden, surfacing of Wonderboy's true nature. A transgressive sexual encounter leads to a fatal outburst of violence, taking the novel in a darker, more urgent direction.
Themes and Critique
While the drama unfolds suddenly, readers may long for deeper exploration of Wonderboy's interior life, particularly his sexual repression and brutality. His unravelling is both the engine of the narrative and oddly underexplored. Perhaps this absence is intentional: men like Wonderboy are often produced in plain sight, their damage normalised. Priscilla reflects that she had long known his cabbage was done, while his cornbread was soft in the middle. Still, the making of this beautiful monster would be more compelling than the hurried excesses of his downfall.
Citchens astutely interrogates how religious performance becomes a theatre for power. Sabre, a philandering patriarch whose very being was a lie, embodies the hypocrisy of public holiness masking private cruelty. He excuses his son's predation as boys being boys and insists scripture smooth over disaster. When confronted with evidence of Wonderboy's violence, he demands his wife find him a scripture.
Priscilla is the emotional centre: witty, exhausted, kept from the brink by pills and liquor. She becomes a case study in the false seductions of female martyrdom, where women are taught to confuse endurance with love. In a moving moment, she tells Diamond never to lose or find herself in somebody else, or she will be lost in the desert.
Humor and Style
Despite its macabre subject matter, Dominion is gloriously funny. Citchens' prose crackles with southern Black humour and idiom. A poorly dressed woman is described as looking like the last slave freed; oppressive heat becomes boil-a-nigga hot. When Priscilla decides she has had enough of her husband, she laments that a Black woman could normally depend on diabetes or cancer to put rest to a problem husband. The textures and tones of semi-rural Mississippi life are rendered in Technicolor: the food, gossip, church politics, and family histories.
By the end, Dominion reveals itself as a tale about inheritance: inherited scripts of masculinity, inherited submission of women, and inherited sadness built atop generations of grief. Citchens has written a bruising, funny, and deeply intelligent novel about how women's lives are warped by the whims and cruelty of men, and about what becomes possible when they begin to imagine lives larger than those who diminish them.
Dominion by Addie E Citchens is published by Europa (£12.99).
