Someone Knows My Name

Someone Knows My Name (#239) by Canadian Lawrence Hill is a multi-award-winning novel which was recommended by my library book club.  It's a well written book that follows the life of Aminata Diall from freedom to slavery and eventually back to freedom again.

As a young girl Aminata, or Meena as she is commonly known, is captured by tribesmen who attack and destroy her native African village, and witnesses the murder of both of her parents.  As she is forced to march to the sea in bondage, she begins a journey which will take her on a horrific voyage across the Atlantic on a slave ship to the slave market in Charles Town, South Carolina.  Her path takes her to a Low Country plantation, a comfortable home in Charles Town, New York City as the British invade during the Revolutionary War, Nova Scotia as a Black Loyalist, a longed-for return to Africa's Sierra Leone and finally to London as an old woman where she works with the Abolitionists to end slavery.

Along the way she acquires new languages, the ability to read and write and drive a hard bargain, and the determination to return to her African home one day.  She endures great losses in her life as her husband and children are all forcibly separated from her, and friends left behind or perished through disease, accidents or murder.

On the one hand, I did find this book both interesting and informative to read.  I was aware of the "Return to Africa" movement, but I had no idea that blacks who had served the British for at least one year behind their lines were removed to Canada along with their white counterpart Loyalists.  Apparently life there was not much better for them than in the Colonies, but they did have some freedom to make their own way.

However, I did feel that the book was very black and white. Literally.  If the character being described was black, he or she could be good, bad or indifferent, but most, at least, had some depth.  But if the character was white, he or she was invariably described as ugly, diseased and duplicitous.  Even the nominally well-intentioned white characters (and there certainly weren't many of those!) like the Abolitionists used Meena for their own agendas which makes it all the more puzzling to me why Aminata would want to spend her final years among them.  Even more puzzling was the fact that a supposedly intelligent protagonist who lived by her wits for years could so blindly pursue a path to her own destruction by paying slavers to take her back to her home village and believing that they were trustworthy.  What on earth did she expect to find there when she knew her parents were dead, and the village might not even exist any more?  Besides, if the slave raiders came there once, what would prevent them from coming back in the future?  How would she even live there without her beloved books?  What was she thinking?    About halfway through the book, I realized my opinion had shifted from a positive response to a negative one.  Not even the reunion at the end (which I felt was contrived) could salvage this one for me.  Sorry, Aminata.