I've been doing a lot of reading lately. I've made the decision to make a significant dent in my ever growing reading list, which means the time I have for blogging is greatly reduced. The trade off is an investment, so I'm fine with that. Reading works of fiction and non-fiction... my interests are a varied and wide-ranged... is the door through which I feed my creativity and imagination. I find lately that I need more substance than I am getting from blogs and magazine articles. My wife recently bought me an Amazon Kindle, which I absolutely love. I can purchase books at a much cheaper price and carry a whole library around with me in that device.
I will do a review of all the books I've been reading and will read in the coming months. The first is the novel by Canadian author Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes. Due to political correct based marketing, it is published as "Someone Knows My Name" is U.S.A., Australia and New Zealand. The title caused quite a stir in Holland, where a Dutch based group burned the cover of the book to protest the use of the word "Negroes" in the title (see here).
Hill crafts a fascinating story of Aminata Diallo, an African woman stolen as a child from her village and taken as a slave to America, where is able to travel to Nova Scotia by being a recorder of "The Book of Negroes" for the British after the American Revolutionary War, returns to Africa via Sierra Leone and finally settles in London England, where she becomes a spokeswoman for the abolition movement. Throughout her life journey she endures, survives and overcomes horrific, traumatic as well as heart-breaking experiences. Hill blends this fictional slave narrative with personal, African, US, Canadian and European history in such a way that stirs both our emotions and imagination.
As a person of African heritage living in Canada, this book opened my eyes to the unfortunately familiar harsh realities of the early history of African peoples in Canada. It also pointed me to important and largely unknown and/or forgotten Black Canadian historical references, which I share below:
This book is on my to be read list. I live in the US and I think 'The Book of Negroes' is a much more appealing title than 'Someone Knows My Name'. I think 'The Book of Negroes' has a better cover as well. I still have to purchase the book and I likely order from Canada for those reasons.
ReplyDeleteThis will probably be the first book I get to scratch off of my TBR list in 2012