Here am I, a middle aged, Australian woman who, although I have faced gender discrimination in my life, have never remotely dealt with anything like the challenges faced by our heroine, Animata Diallo.
Yet, I felt strongly connected to her. Her love of language, her dignity, her spirit, and love of family - all these things I can relate to. To me, she was a strangely modern character, well ahead of her time, strong, outspoken, reflective but not once during the book did, I feel that Lawrence Hill portrayed her unrealistically. On a side note, I find that the fact that Hill penned his protagonist as female is interesting in itself - he certainly “captures” the female psyche well!
Lawrence Hill has done his homework and, in doing so, has educated, and enlightened me. I had little knowledge of the African Slave trade. Sure, I knew that people were captured from different language groups, bound together, and shipped to wherever they would fetch the highest price whilst facing unspeakable cruelties and indignities, but that was about it. I didn’t know anything about daily life on the plantations, the Book of Negroes, the shipment of Loyalists to Nova Scotia and other destinations, the establishment of Sierra Leone. I had seen Slaves as wretched people and, undoubtedly, they were but I hadn’t realised the extent to which they were able to form communities, comfort and nurture each other and tenuously keep in touch with others through the underground “fishnet” system. To say that they often triumphed over adversity would be an understatement.
Yet, their losses and the humiliations inflicted on them were mind numbing. On considering what Animata lost, gained back, lost again, all the while enduring unimaginable hardship, it was difficult to see her surviving and yet she did - magnificently so. At the risk of spoiling other readers’ enjoyment of her story, I will only say that her survival is only one of the uplifting events in this book of sorrows.
The writing is spectacular but never inaccessible. Lawrence Hill tells this epic tale simply. Written in the first person and in a narrative style (both styles I usually steer clear of), it is never dry or dull and doesn’t intimidate the reader. And his writing is poetic. How could you not cry when you read something like “Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons”?
I did have a couple of minor issues with the ending of the story - it was a bit “neat” for me and felt a bit rushed (as if Hill had a publishing deadline to meet or something) but those issues didn’t diminish my overall reading experience one little bit!
In summary, to those readers who long to read something of substance, READ THIS BOOK. You will learn so much about the lives of the slaves ripped from their homelands and those born into slavery. You will also be uplifted by the resilience of the human spirit and what it’s capable of accomplishing. But you won’t just learn - you will also get to read a well-researched, well written, rollicking good book! And those are few and far between!
The Book of Negroes is Available From Timbooktoo Tel: 5033448, 4494645
