The Book of Negroes

As a walking tour of a particular era in the Atlantic slave trade this is a very good book. The degree of awfulness on the part of participants in the slave industry is unfathomable, and the degree of incomprehension, hypocrisy, and wilful ignorance on the part of “civilized” beneficiaries of the slave industry is uncomfortably close to home in a world where Chinese labour toiling under conditions that are not at times very far from slavery dominates the world's productive capacity.

The book is very descriptive. This was probably a wise choice on the part of the author: really inhabiting the lived sensations of the narrator would have made almost impossible reading, but I still wish some of the scenes were more visceral in their impact. I felt like I was seeing into the past, but not inhabiting it in the way some historical fiction manages to achieve (read the opening chapter of Patricia Finney's “The Firedrake's Eye” and you'll know how it feels to come awake lying in an Elizabethan gutter, for example.)

Events are at times too clearly a result of the need to move the characters across the landscape and through time in a particular way, which makes them predictable, which also reduces the emotional impact of their eventual resolution.

But still: a solid, well-researched, and readable historical novel that covers the trans-Atlantic slave industry extremely well.

Normally, for me a five star book is one that I rush through and can't put down. Not in this case, Aminata had to be savoured. She stands for the many Africans who were abducted from their homes, treated like animals, killed, raped, sold, escaped, recaptured, freed and lied to. It is a miracle that anyone could physically survive that let alone still have all their faculties intact. A dreadful period of our history which seems to be made up of horrific events.

Reading Aminata Diallo's autobiography reminds me of reading Frederick Douglass earlier this year: stories of horror, atrocity, perseverance, strength, disappointment, hope, and sobering reality that tell us much about the experience of the solace, but even more about the inhumanity of the slave trade and how we were all complicit in its continuing effects. Hill's notes, acknowledgments, and further reading lists that close the book are well-worth diving into and will serve as fodder for my reading lists to come.

(originally published on inthemargins.ca)