Lawrence Hill – The Book of Negroes
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 towards water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary…there, right underneath, lies a bottomless pit of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have a sense of gliding over the unburied.
It is rare to see an author attack a subject with the same scope and breadth that Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes does. Hill creates a web of interlocking histories, a series of overlappings through personal narrative that span from Africa to Nova Scotia and back. Set in the 18th century, the work follows the slave trade, focusing on Hill’s intensely strong protagonist, Aminata Diallo. Anchored by quick dialogue and abrupt story telling, the work compels the reader towards the margins of his/her own histories, to find the small and mistreated bodies, far from any home, that lay there unburied or forgotten.
As large as the novel is, it is always firmly rooted in the personal. Hill creates Aminata as a resilient woman, a self-taught literate, who uses her intelligence and perseverance to create a path of bare survival for herself. As the novel ducks back and forth between the end of Aminiata’s life, where she resides in England helping the abolitionist cause, and the beginning, first in Africa then across the ocean as she’s sold to an owner in North Carolina, the reader is constantly reminded of the vastness of each slave’s travels, the extreme distances put upon each and every one.
The novel becomes an endless search for home. Aminata is in a constant state of diaspora: she is stolen from her place of birth, Bayo in Western Africa, when she was eleven; she spends the rest of the novel trying to return there, all the while uncomfortable and unwilling to settle anywhere else. Eventually the ideal of Bayo becomes wildly romanticized and ultimately irresistible, leading her to Sierra Leone as one of the original settlers. But even this trip back to her home continent is unsatisfactory – Aminata is kept always at a wide distance from her original village; she is constantly held back from defining a personal space for herself and there is always an ocean in between herself and any notion of home.
Her physical space is always cast by the hegemonic other and in turn she is always having her borders defined. This dictation of “home” leads her to find solace only with other similarly treated blacks: in New York she is forced to live segregated in CanvasTown; in Nova Scotia she is stricken to the outskirts in Birchtown. Even after the pilgrimage back to Africa, she is held in Sierra Leone, crippled by dependence on the British for supplies and food and lacking the knowledge to make her trek back to Bayo.
This separation from a physical home is magnified by the constant emotional displacement of stability that overtakes Aminata. Her abduction from Bayo leaves her without her parents; she is constantly separated from her husband; eventually both of her children are taken from her as well. Aminata comes to be stripped of any sort of recognizable place of comfort, any place to come back to and feel safe within: everywhere becomes a place of peril, a place of stolen children and possible re-slavery and she is cast into a space of emotional scattering, never settled.
Hill carefully keeps this constant balance between the specific life of Aminata and the larger scope of Slaves as a community throughout the work. Aminata comes to inhabit all the different histories and experiences of the different slaves. While the story is immensely personal, following and speaking only through Aminata, her forced travels take her to the realms of a variety of slave and black histories. Her personal story becomes the echo for so many others, and her voice becomes both representative and particular. She is both the witness and the keeper of the varying stories. Eventually, she is given the task of filling out The Book of Negroes, a giant list of every single black patriot being shipped to Nova Scotia. Slowly this book evolves from a short and clipped record into a record of the dissipating lifestyle and home that Negroes were forced into.
While the story focuses mostly on this vast telling, this witnessing, the prose surfaces often into beautiful descriptions and inner reflections. While parts of the novel seemed rushed in order to have Aminata be involved in so many different landscapes, it is the reflective voice of the older Aminata writing that adds the splashes of beauty to the story, layering the language of English with her own birth language and amalgamating each together. The sections outside this older, reflective voice tend to lean towards the filmic, the juxtaposition of quick scenes skipping gaps in time mirroring the crumbling and tortured memories of an old woman and her many pasts.
The Book of Negroes is not a quiet book: it is large and ambitious and intimidating, but the payoff is just as much so; there is an loud and important echo of history here, larger than any open water wave. Here is a telling of countless repeated human tragedies that must not be forgotten or pushed to the same edges of towns and minds and oceans so many like Aminata were forced to occupy.
The Book of Negroes is available through HarperCollins for $34.95 Canadian.
