AS DOMINION begins, there is a sense in which the two central female characters, Priscilla and Diamond, join the reader as passive observers of their own lives. Priscilla faithfully types the notes for her husband’s sermons, which are littered with rhythmic regularity throughout the book. As the story progresses, the notes become emblematic of Priscilla’s voicelessness and her disappearance behind her abusive, complicated husband.

Priscilla’s oppression has led to their sons’ being brought up to focus on the needs of men to the detriment and dehumanising of women. This is particularly true of their spoiled youngest son, Emmanuel. Emmanuel’s girlfriend, Diamond, herself brought up in poverty and neglect, receives from him betrayal in return for love, which she expects and accepts in the devastating pattern of many abusive relationships.

As the plot takes both father and son out of the picture, the narrative focuses on the relationship between the women. Priscilla’s gradual grasping of her own life enables her to support Diamond and her unborn child in a way that is ultimately healing and redemptive to them both.

As a white ordained woman, I found Dominion a confronting and challenging read. Priscilla and Diamond drew me into the sisterhood and simultaneously reminded me that, to them, I embody the cause of many of their hardships by my ethnicity and my priesthood; “if a Black woman was in the car with a white man, she was either tricking or cleaning.” The snake slithering out of the chalice on the book’s cover is an arresting representation of the fact that, for them, the Church is a vehicle of misogyny, sexual abuse, and shame.

But the ending, while not being a tidy resolution, brings hope. For the women, the destruction and damage are redeemed, and Priscilla is able to find her voice.

The Ven. Catherine Pickford is the Archdeacon of Northolt, in the diocese of London.

Dominion
Addie E. Citchens
Europa Editions £12.99
(978-1-78770-615-6)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69