While the canon of literature devoted to the African slave experience is filled with harrowing and emotional testaments, there aren’t many (at least that I know of) that are written by Canadian authors. Someone Knows My Name (published outside the United States as The Book of Negroes and winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) is by Lawrence Hill, a Canadian whose parents immigrated to Canada in the 1950s, one day after their inter-racial marriage took place.
When we first meet Aminata Diallo, it is 1802 and she is an old woman, living her last days in London, the ‘poster child’ for the abolitionists campaigning to stop the slave trade. She is writing her life’s story, and begins with her childhood in Africa, living with her mother and father in the village of Bayo. Rumors of toubabu, foreigners, who steal people from their villages and take them away, have infiltrated their village and keep the villagers wary. Despite the threat, Aminata’s is a happy childhood; her father is teaching her to write in Arabic and read from the Qur’an and her mother, a midwife, has begun having her daughter accompany her as an apprentice. Aminata’s cheeks bear the symbols of crescent moons, which signify her as a free-born Muslim, but this does not stop men from abducting her one night on the way home from ‘catching’ a baby, killing her parents and several other villagers, too. With others from Bayo, including a pregnant woman and one of their own slaves, Aminata is forced to make the long journey to the western coast of Africa, and from there, to South Carolina.
From the moment she is taken, the descriptions of what she and the others must suffer under captivity are excruciating to read. The scenes aboard the slave ship assault all senses and give the reader a glimpse into the brutality that is as much a part of the slave experience as the taking of their freedom. There were moments when I had to grit my teeth and force myself to read, riveting though the story was.
Aminata, or Meena as she is renamed, is sent to work on an indigo plantation. It is her parents gifts – literacy and midwifery – and her own will that allow her to survive the new horrors that await her. But amidst the degradation, there is friendship, love, and hope, even as all three are tested time and time again. Aminata never succumbs, no matter the cost, and her fight for survival will eventually lead her to the shores of Nova Scotia, where, as a Black Loyalist, the British Crown has deemed her a free Negro. But that freedom comes with a price, and her trials are not over. To again hope for true freedom, she and other Black Loyalists look to Africa, to start their own settlement free from the threat of slavery. But again, things are not as they seem and Aminata’s will to survive is tested once more.
What Hill has managed to convey so finely in this novel is how cruel people can be to one another, how easily we excuse or deny even the most deplorable actions, and how difficult – yet necessary – it is to stand up and be ethical in a world so pervasively unjust. In a story where humanity is shown at its most depraved, where true goodness is a rarity, it is not just the attention to historical detail that makes this such a compelling and emotional read, but Aminata herself, and the knowledge that she represents countless others throughout history.