In her 2008 interview with Lane Ashfeldt discussing her neo-slave narrative Blonde Roots, author Bernardine Evaristo makes her intentions clear. Readers are situated in what she describes as a "parallel universe" in which Africans, as the slavers, perform the atrocities of transatlantic slavery—from the horrors of capture and bondage, to the racist ideological underpinnings. In order to circumvent the usual "strong responses including anger, defensiveness, resentment, self-righteousness, guilt, sadness," Evaristo humorously reverses and inverts the signs of transatlantic slavery (Newman 285). Her claim that utilizing a parallel universe gives readers a context for revisiting the atrocities of both the modern and historical is simple enough. At its base level, shifting from white slaver/black slave to black slaver/white slave forces readers to occupy different bodies. More than passive receivers of this history, we become active participants. Occupying new bodies and their inherent subject-positions allows readers to see the world anew and observe it with critical acuity. In my critical study of Blonde Roots, I (1) identify the signification process that undergirds racialist thinking; (2) explore the crucial role that humor plays as an interpolator in the signification process; and (3) demarcate the space Blonde Roots occupies within a racialized channel of the field of cultural production. In doing so, I propose that Evaristo's deconstruction of racialized bodies creates a "remainder" or a gap and that this space presents some fascinating questions about the malleability of language and how race functions as an exchangeable commodity in Paul Gilroy's "black Atlantic."