The book of Negroes

J’écris cette critique en anglais parce qu’elle est destinée à une femme en particulier, qui ne connait pas la langue de Molière, hélas. Indulge me.

A woman from the small African village of Baio slit her newborn’s throat and threw it off the slave ship. It was an act almost unnoticed in a moment of pure horror, when the captive men and women from Africa rose up from their dark prison on the boat and faced white men and rifles with desperate, hopeless rage. Eyes stabbed with nails, men impaled on swords, rifle shots through the head, people thrown overboard; it was absolute chaos. Aminata Diallo, a gifted young girl stolen from her village three months prior, witnessed the whole thing as it unfolded.

I do most of my reading in the subway, and I nearly missed my stop when reading this part. For a second I didn’t feel I was in Montréal at all; I felt like I was a silent observer on that slave-ship, the one that brought Aminata from freedom in Africa (a continent she was unaware of) to slavery in America.

Lawrence Hill’s novel, The Book of Negroes, is a brave and important tale about one woman’s continuing quest for freedom. It is richly documented, giving all the regional dialects, local politics, economic details and all-around context a credible weight.

I long for two things when I read: I read to get chills, once in a book if I’m lucky; and I read so a sentence or an image inside a novel can move me so much I just have to stop reading, put the book down, look around me for a minute, and get back to my reading. Most books don’t offer me those moments, and in fact it might be too much to ask. But I’ve shivered at least twice during The Book of Negroes. The first time was from the mutiny scene on the ship. The second was during an altogether banal dialogue between a buyer, a seller, and the object of the transaction; Aminata Diallo, the new slave.

In fact I think this Chris Rock interview is pretty interesting: while she sometimes changes owners and belongs to gentler men, she is still, for all intents and purposes, a slave, and the men are still slave-owners:

I hate moralizing. People tend to do it too often, and it usually sounds off and not too credible. It’s easy to see how one could’ve taken the moralizing route while writing the latter scene: someone is being sold and their value is negotiated like that of sheep or furniture right in front of them. Despite that fact, the author isn’t using grand words or important principles or exaggerating the moment, he’s simply showing it. And it’s shocking. It’s expertly told so you retroactively understand where the author was taking you, without feeling he took your hand and pointed a finger to something saying “this is the point”.

I realize I may not have told you the whole, long story. I don’t feel I need to give too many details. It is, put simply, the heart wrenching story of a woman determined to be free, and fighting for over half a century to claim what was all that time rightfully hers: her freedom. And on the road to freedom she will meet grief, pain, loss, anger and an unending and incurable homesickness.

This is a great book. While I would love to find a common denominator between the novel and the relationship I no longer have with the woman who “led” me to it, it would be intellectually dishonest on my part, and incredibly condescending towards those victims of History. I’ll rather just thank her for the moments when that book was in our vicinity and happened to catch my eye.

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Thanks to Amy Shira Teitel and Elisabeth for the help on correcting the article.

The book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill, published at HarperCollins in 2007, 486 pages.