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Fiction. African American Fiction. Literature. Historical Fiction. HTML:Aminata Diallo (�??an amazing literary creation,�?� Literary Review of Canada) is the beguiling heroine of Lawrence Hill�??s SOMEONE KNOWS MY NAME. In it, Hill exquisitely imagines the tale of an eighteenth-century woman�??s life, spanning six decades and three continents. The fascinating story that Hill tells is a work of the soul and the imagination. Aminata is a character who will stir listeners, from her kidnapping from Africa through her journeys back and forth across the ocean. Enslaved on a South Carolina plantation, Aminata works in the indigo fields and as a midwife. When she is bought by an entrepreneur from Charleston, she is torn from friends and family. The chaos of the Revolutionary War allows her to escape. In British-held Manhattan, she helps pen the Book of Negroes, a list of blacks rewarded for wartime service to the King with safe passage to Nova Scotia. During her travels in Canada, Sierra Leone, and England, Aminata strives for her freedom and that of her people�??even when it comes at a price. In this captivating novel, Hill portrays one woman�??s remarkable spirit and strength in the face of adversity, and he brings to life crucial and little-known… (more)
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Aminata Diallo is in the twilight years of her life in 1802 when she is convinced by abolitionists in London to tell the story of her life. She is happy to finally be the djeli, or storyteller, that she had always hoped to be. Snatched from her parents when she was eleven and living in an inland African village, Aminata survived the horrific voyage across the Atlantic aboard a slave ship to South Carolina, where she is sold to an indigo plantation owner. From there we follow Meena to NYC where, due to the chaos of the Revolutionary War, she escapes from her owner and becomes a candidate for the offer of a free tract of land and freedom in Nova Scotia for anyone who helped the British during the war. Unfortunately, the British promise turns out to be a lie not once, but twice and she follows her heart back to Africa and, eventually, Great Britain.
Throughout her life, Aminata has only one wish: to return to her homeland and Hill goes to great lengths to portray the longing in her heart. She uses all her resources to develop her reading, writing and language skills, all which serve her well over the years. Aminata suffers one loss after another and the cruelty she endures is unbearable.
Lawrence Hill is an extraordinary storyteller and with this novel presents a little known event following the Revolutionary War: Nova Scotia as a haven for Black Loyalists. He also exposes the British as holders of false promises and, through his characterization of the protagonist, illustrates the ghastly conditions of the slave trade maintained by British traders. Yet Aminata’s indomitable spirit is the shining star here. Thoroughly researched, luscious prose, remarkable characterizations and highly recommended
The mix of historical fact with
But everything changed when another village attacked Animata's village. Her father and mother were killed, and Animata was forced to march in shackles across hundreds of miles to the coast to be sold as a slave and boarded onto one of the infamous slave ships bound for the American colonies.
We see the horrors of the slave ship through Animata's child eyes. She barely survived the most horrific conditions. Weak and sick, she was sold with the other unsaleables into the devastation of being a non-person, a slave.
Because of her previous education and training with her parents, she was able to covertly learn to read and write English and also became quite valued for her midwifery skills.
During the chaos of a British attack during the American Revolution, she was able to escape to the British lines. There she worked as a scribe for the British who promised freedom to former slaves who would work or fight for them for the duration of the war. When the British were defeated, they convinced the former slaves to sign up for free land and a supposedly free life in Nova Scotia. All blacks transported this way had their names written in a volume called The Book of Negroes, (the original Canadian title of this book).
But promises were broken and Animata continued to search for freedom, her lost children and husband and a life of human dignity.
This novel puts a very human face on slavery and the slave trade through the eyes of an intelligent and resourceful woman. It's a story of betrayal at every level by her masters and white people who portrayed themselves as friends.
In addition it highlights a chapter of black history that I was not aware of. Although I was somewhat familiar with Freetown in Sierra Leone, I found it fascinating that the British sent former slaves to Nova Scotia and the lives they endured there.
3.8 stars
Aminata’s story is horrific. Hill spares no details of the cruel treatment of slaves aboard the slave ships or at the hands of white plantation owners. The reader experiences the grief of women who lost their children to slavery…often before the age of two years old; the terror of rape and abuse; the longing to be free. In many ways, this is a difficult novel to read.
Near the platform stood a group of Africans, some barely able to stand and others with pus dripping from sores on their legs. Five of them looked like they would not regret the closing fist of death. I felt my stomach churning, my throat tightening. I looked down to avoid meeting their eyes. I was fed, and they were not. I had clothes, and they had none. I could do nothing to change their prospects or even my own. That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn’t matter; in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future. – from Someone Knows My Name, page 189 -
Hill’s research and the historical background of the novel is impecable. He explains in an afterword:
In terms of the sheer number of people recorded and described, the actual Book of Negroes is the largest single document about black people in North America up until the end of the eighteenth century. It contains the names and details of 3,000 black men, women and children, who, after serving or living behind British lines during the American Revolutionary War, sailed from New York City to various British colonies. – page 471 -
In Aminata, Hill gives a voice to the thousands of blacks who were enslaved in the latter part of the eighteenth century and in this way, the novel becomes more than just an historical document, but instead becomes a personal story of one woman’s courage and determination. Hill’s novel is really a family saga immersed in an historical time period.
I cannot say I enjoyed this book – but I feel I am a better person for having read it. Hill’s narrative is well written and stunning. Aminata’s story is one which we should not forget.
Highly recommended.
This was a very readable account of the sufferings and abuse of slaves taken from Africa in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Their struggles were represented by Aminata Diallo who we meet at the beginning of the book as an old woman helping the
In order to support the cause Aminata (known as Meena) writes her life story and it is this account that we read in the succeeding pages.
She was abducted from her villiage in the interior of Africa, where Whites, or Toubabu, had never been seen but were widely feared. At the age of eleven she was forced to walk for 3 months to reach the coast where the slave ships waited. She was branded with the name of her owner and forced on board a ship whose stench could be smelt for miles away.
In America Meena worked on an indigo plantation, but also used the skills she'd learned from her mother, a midwife. She learned the use of medicinal herbs through Georgia, who took her in and nursed her to health after the arduous crossing. She also learned to read from the overseer, who noticed a spark in her. Reading was strongly forbidden amongst the slaves and had to be done in secret.
From here, circumstances took her to Charlestown, New York and on to Nova Scotia in Canada where freed slaves who had fought for the British were offered a 'new life'. Finally the oportunity come to return to Africa, occupying an area of Sierra Leone known as Freetown. Many of those settling down here had never set foot on African soil; they had been born under slavery in foreign lands.
The book is filled with details of the struggle of slaves at this time and the apalling way that they were often treated, but it also glows with joyous times and friendships, sharing and hope.
And there was a wonderful quote from Jonathan Swift, writing about the failings of the cartographers of Africa who had no idea what was in the interior of the country:
So geographers, in Afric-maps
With savage-pictures fill their gaps
And o'er uninhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.
Highly recommended.
Published as "Someone Knows My Name" in the USA, Australia and New Zealand and "The Book of Negroes" in Canada, the author was inspired by a historical document entitled "Book of Negroes." which listed the names of slaves who escaped the US for freedom in Nova Scotia, and is available in national archives in both countries.
The end part that deals mostly with the Abolitionist movement in Britain brings up most of the outside conflicts of the pro- and con-abolitionist movement. Meenah's
I was thrilled and amazed at the changes the author's voice went through as he wrote this woman's "memoirs": from happy child to confused child to frightened, dying child, and finally into slavery. Meenah has a few happy moments in her life but most of it is misery well-described, whether she is working on the indigo plantation (and instructed in the Gulah dialect) or spending long hours transcribing and learning letters and numbers, she is always working. And her life is not her own.
Highly recommended for readers who are ready for a mature story on slavery and its effect on the slaves.
Aminata is a wonderful character with stregth, intelligence and, in spite of all that happens to her, she retains a good heart and kind spirit.
The story is well researched (historical fiction). I learned many things I hadn't fully realized before. As a Canadian, I was especially interested in the migration to Nova Scotia where the black loyalists were not as welcomed as I was taught in school.
Somewhere in the
Minor nitpicks aside, it kept me reading and I think it's a good story. Just not quite as good as I was expecting.
An unfortunate title -- renamed "Someone Knows My Name" in the US.
DEFINITELY WORTH READING - GREAT BOOK CLUB READ - WHY HASN'T OPRAH PICKED THIS UP YET ???
Hill is part black himself (or I guess in these Obama days we should call him bi-racial). His father is a sociologist descended from Africans enslaved in the united States and both his parents were civil rights activists. In fact, the idea for this book came to Daniel from a book he took from his parents, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870 by James W. St. G. Walker. Lawrence's brother Dan Hill was a musician and singer that I much admired in the 60's and 70's. Recently Dan Hill wrote a piece in Maclean's about the struggles his son faces as a young black man in Canada. Although we no longer enslave black people I don't think we can say that they are yet treated as equals. I hope that lots of people will read this book and think about the struggles black people (and other visible minorities) face here and now.
Aminata Diallo is eleven and on the verge of becoming a woman. She helps her mother catch babies in their village and neighboring villages. She is pretty happy and generally doted upon by her parents. But one evening, returning from delivering a baby, she and her mother are set upon by strange men and Aminata is stolen, her mother killed. As she is forced past her village, she witnesses her father's brutal death as well. After a three month trek, she arrives at a slave trading post on the coast and ultimately embarks on a slaver journeying to America, specifically South Carolina. This book covers Aminata's, called Meena, incredible life. From a free young girl in Africa to a slave in the southern US and ultimately a free woman in the north who chooses to use her incredible intelligence to carve out a life for herself both in the US and Canada and back in Africa and to become a potent symbol for the abolitionists in London. The scope of the novel is immense but it works. In focusing in on one main character, Hill has personalized history that makes us uncomfortable, history that we've forgotten, and history that we choose to forget or to ignore.
Meena is an amazing woman and she is incredibly gifted, learning languges like a sponge, picking up monetary systems, and practicing midwifery and some natural medicine in order to increase her value. Slavery is portrayed brutally, although Aminata, while suffering it, certainly doesn't have the appalling existence that some slaves did, thanks in large part to her skill in becoming whoever her current master wants. She faces the heartbreak common to slaves where family is torn from her and friends who have become a makeshift family themselves also disappear forever. Her desire for someone to know who she is, what her experience is, and to see into the truth of her soul is agonizing.
Highlighting the issues of survival and identity, strength and love, trust and despair, this book never shies away from the true horrors of existence as a slave and even as a free black woman dependent on the duplicitousness of the white community that wants to use her. Hill has written a marvelous and historically important book. My only quibble with it was really at the end when an unbelievable coincidence changed the tone of the book a bit abruptly. Aside from that, the writing was engrossing and Aminata was a wonderful character. Even as thick as the book is, it takes no time at all to be so comsumed by the plot and characters that you'll have a hard time putting it down. Highly recommended reading.
Incidentally, in Hill's native Canada, this was titled The Book of Negroes. For some reason, the publisher felt compelled to change the title here in the US but the replacement title does reflect the story very well.
However, once I got over my initial hesitation and read the first few pages I was spellbound by Aminata's amazing voice. The magic of Hill's book is that, while Aminata's story is indeed horrific and gut-wrenching, and while Hill spares us no details, the book itself manages to be lyrical and beautiful and even -- dare I say it -- hopeful.
While Hill does not claim perfect historical accuracy, the book would also have enormous value as an accessible introduction to 18th and early-19th century African, North American and British history and the history of the slave trade, as well as to the foundations of race relations and human rights abuses on three continents (including here in Canada).
Canada Reads got it right -- this is the book everyone in Canada (and elsewhere) should read this year.
Meticulously researched, steeped in history and harsh reality, Someone Knows My Name entertains, educates and resonates. After finishing the book in a weekend marathon of reading, I scoured the internet for more details and facts surrounding this facet of slavery I knew little, if anything, about. British relocation of American slaves to Novia Scotia at the end of the Revolution, and their subsequent resettlement with other former slaves in Freetown, Sierra Leone was both fascinating and sobering. Observed through the intelligent eyes of Aminata, the irony of the American patriots' fight against British oppression is painful. Aminata carries herself with dignity, strength and pride through repeated and shameful acts of inhumanity, living to tell her story in her own words, on her own terms. This book is beautifully written, heart wrenching and deeply moving, and I recommend it highly.