The Book of Negroes
| The Book of Negroes | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Lawrence Hill |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Historical novel |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
| Publication date | January 18, 2007 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 504 pp |
| ISBN | 978-0-00-225507-3 |
| OCLC Number | 70507153 |
The Book of Negroes is a 2007 award-winning novel from Canadian writer Lawrence Hill. In the United States, Australia and New Zealand, the novel was published under the title Someone Knows My Name.
Contents |
[edit] Title
The author has written about the title:
"I used The Book of Negroes as the title for my novel, in Canada, because it derives from a historical document of the same name kept by British naval officers at the tail end of the American Revolutionary War. It documents the 3,000 blacks who had served the King in the war and were fleeing Manhattan for Canada in 1783. Unless you were in The Book of Negroes, you couldn't escape to Canada. My character, an African woman named Aminata Diallo whose story is based on this history, has to get into the book before she gets out. In my country, few people have complained to me about the title, and nobody continues to do so after I explain its historical origins. I think it's partly because the word 'Negro' resonates differently in Canada. If you use it in Toronto or Montreal, you are probably just indicating publicly that you are out of touch with how people speak these days. But if you use it in Brooklyn or Boston, you are asking to have your nose broken. When I began touring with the novel in some of the major US cities, literary African-Americans kept approaching me and telling me it was a good thing indeed that the title had changed, because they would never have touched the book with its Canadian title."[1]
[edit] Plot introduction
Aminata Diallo, an 11-year-old child, is taken from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle — a string of slaves. Eventually, she arrives in South Carolina where she begins a new life as a slave. Due to circumstantial events in her life, Aminata develops certain advantages other slaves do not: she possesses the skills of a midwife and learns how to read and write.
Years later, she finds freedom, serving the British in the American Revolutionary War and having her name entered in the historic "Book of Negroes." This book, an actual historical document, is an archive of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the United States in order to resettle in Nova Scotia, only to discover that this new place becomes one that is also oppressive and unyielding. Aminata eventually returns to Sierra Leone, passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America, but eventually finds herself crossing the ocean one more time to England to present the account of her life so that it may abolish the slave trade.
[edit] Awards and recognition
The Book of Negroes won the 2007 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It was the winning selection for CBC Radio's Canada Reads 2009, in which journalist Avi Lewis championed the novel.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- CBC The Hour Interview, June 10, 2009.
- Quill & Quire Lawrence Hill Profile.
