Toward the end of Chapter One, narrator Aminata Diallo warns her reader:
Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary.
"By any means necessary." The famous words of Black Power activist and Black American hero Malcolm X. Thus truly begins Lawrence Hill's magnificent historical novel The Book of Negroes. A seasoned Afro-Canadian writer, Hill applies his astounding storytelling talents to the story of Aminata Diallo, kidnapped from Africa's Gold Coast as a child to become a survivor of the Middle Passage, American cash crop slavery, the American Revolution (as an assistant to the English), the Black Patriot migration to Nova Scotia (Canada) and the first race riots in North America, and finally, the settlement of Sierra Leone.
I first came upon this book at the Chapters Book Store in Waterloo, sometime this past February. It was on display right in front of the entrance and given the variety of nasty comments I had gotten about my Blackness and Black people in general since I had moved to Canada, I basically said to myself, "What the FUCK? NEGRO WHAT?!?" and practically ran to the book when I first spied it.
Just minutes later, I was fighting, unsuccessfully, to hold back tears. In the first lines, Aminata muses, "There must be a reason why I have lived in all these lands, survived all those water crossings, while others fell from bullets or shut their eyes and simply willed their lives to end." As I read the words and the pages that followed, I came to understand that no matter how strong my sensibility about the horrors of slavery, it was about to be reconfigured and deepened, painfully but crucially.
However, it wasn't just a lesson about slavery. It was my introduction to the part of Canadian history that isn't taught in schools. Although Hill's book was largely inspired by University of Waterloo History Professor James W. St. G. Walker's The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870, one is hard-pressed to find an educated Canadian who knows much of this side of Canada's history with slavery and racism. Almost anyone can tell you that Canada was the end of the famous Underground Railroad. Few know that on the ships delivering Black and white loyalists who fought for the English in the American Revolution sailed the still chattled (owned) slaves of the white loyalists. Few know of the real book, The Book of Negroes, that listed the names of all of the Blacks who would be given passage to Canada, ensuring that there would be no stow aways who hadn't "earned" their freedom through service to the British Empire.
Growing up, many of us Black youth hear talk from the elders in our communities about the tradition of oral storytelling and history keeping of the first Africans who landed in the so-called New World. Lawrence Hill is clearly one of the inheritors of this tradition for his generation. Hill works with words in ways that the rest of us only dream of. The words rarely lack power, from beginning to end. The opening line of The Book, "I seem to have trouble dying. By all rights, I should not have lived this long," immediately drag the reader right into the page, whether or not we know the reasons why Aminata should not have survived. The language continues to move with this force, right until the end on page 474. Over and over again, it brought to mind my two favourite writers: William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Both of them rarely wrote what did not have many meanings.
It's a travesty that Hill's book didn't garner the award recognition this year that it should have. It was longlisted for the Giller Prize, and that was it. Canada's other prestigious literary award, the Governor General's Award for Fiction, appears to have completely missed this wonderful work. I believe both awards were given to writers who had already received them once previously. But as Canada's usually conservative newspaper the Toronto Star wrote, "I don't think there is any way of overstating Lawrence Hill's contribution to contemporary Canadian fiction."
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I will stop my review here, not because there isn't more to say but because there is so much to say. Over the next month, in honour of Martin Luther King Jr's upcoming birthday as well as Black History Month's imminent arrival, I will be blogging responses to chapters of The Book of Negroes as I re-read the book. This is part of a larger project to bring Black literature, fiction and non-, to the fore as a celebration of Black history, Black resistance, Black pride, and Black survival and achievement despite efforts to stand in our way.
This is as much for the reader as it is for myself. As one of very few Black researchers, internationally, in theoretical physics and the only one in Canada (that I know of), I am pretty isolated professionally from my community. This is really hard sometimes, from not being able to tell my colleagues what I am reading without getting stuck in a debate about race to having to maintain self-control as co-workers inform me that Black people need to quit their whining. Staying close to Black history, my history, helps me keep my Eyes on the Prize.
A few notes:
For my American readers, I should note that the title The Book of Negroes did not survive the passage from Canada to the USA. Ironically, Americans regularly attack Canada's hate speech laws as oppressive to Freedom of Speech, yet it was determined that Americans couldn't handle Hill's usage of the word "Negro." As you can read about here, the title of the book is the colourless Someone Knows My Name. That's one that won't be standing out to potential book purchasers and saying, "I am crucial."
There was another book that deserves recognition for 2007. That is Thomas King's green grass, running water. Better recognized by the Canadian mainstream than Hill's book as a finalist for the Governor General's Award and named as one of the forty great works of Canadian fiction by the industry mag Quill & Quire, King's book is a story that sprawls from the white-washed halls of the University of Toronto to a Blackfoot reservation in Alberta.
A California native of Cherokee and Greek descent, King has long been at the fore of Canadian media as the writer and actor on CBC Radio's controversial show "Dead Dog Cafe" and the writer of several award-winning/bestselling novels and short story collections.
Published in 1993, grass continues to be relevant, funny, and devastating today. Though it speaks most directly to a realized experience for members of aboriginal groups (in North America primarily but elsewhere too, I am guessing), it speaks to all racialized minorities who are trying to sort out their place in a majority white world. Indeed, back in June, King's book caused my world to stop for a couple of days. In the middle of the book I found the expression of my reality and my fears as I watched University of Toronto Professor Eli, now home on the res fighting the appropriation of his childhood home for a dam project:
Eli sat down and waited for the coffee to brew and looked about the house at what he had become. Ph.D. in literature. Professor emeritus from the University of Toronto. Teacher of the Year. Twice.
Indian.
In the end, he had become what he had always been. An Indian. Not a particularly successful one at that. The cabin was hardly bigger than his office at the university. No electricity. No running water.
I'll end here and think about the many ways in which I can tell assimilation to go fuck itself. You can purchase The Book of Negroes in the US here and in Canada here (although preferably in your local independent book shop, which is sure to have a copy). You can purchase green grass, running water here.
Soundtrack for this entry: The Best of Sam Cooke and The Rise and Fall of Niggy Tardust by Saul Williams
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