My life in books

Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal is a complex, fast-paced novel that explores issues of race and the movement of refugees across borders, wrapped up in the form of a thriller, set in two imagined countries that stand in for the third world of the oppressed and disadvantaged people of colour who become refugees, and the privileged Western countries where white people accumulate wealth off the oppression of other nations.

“Keita had studied maps, and he knew that Zantoroland—only one hundred kilometres long and eighty wide—was but a speck in the Ortiz Sea in the Indian Ocean. Africa to the west and Australia to the east were far too distant to be seen, but Keita knew they were there. Looking down Blossom Street, Keita could see the port and the waters of the Ortiz Sea. There were fifteen hundred kilometres of open water stretching north to the nation of Freedom State. Like all schoolchildren, Keita knew that Freedom State had enslaved Zantorolanders for some two centuries but, after abolishing slavery, had deported most black people back to Zantoroland. Ever since that time, adventurous Zantorolanders had braved the Ortiz Sea in fishing boats, taking their lives into their hands as they tried to slip back into Freedom State, one of the richest nations in the world.”

Hill’s protagonist, Keita Ali, is a black man from Zontoroland, a brutal dictatorship, rife with intertribal power struggles, violence and corruption. From his childhood, he has wanted to be a distance runner. He has trained himself for it, through the violence he witnesses as a child, through the military coup, through the death of his mother, through the detainment and torture of his dissident journalist father, through the departure of his brilliant sister to be educated safely in a foreign country. He gains the attention of a second-rate sports agent from Freedom State.

When his father is killed, he uses the agent’s interest in him to get to Freedom State, and then he runs. Without passport or papers, he is an Illegal in a country that has a policy of hunting down and deporting all undocumented residents, Keita is alone, and hunted.

When he enters a marathon and wins it, not only does he draw unwanted attention to himself, he becomes embroiled in a mystery involving a young Freedom State citizen secretly deported to Zantoroland and murdered there, a mystery that also connects him to Viola, a black, disabled reporter, John Falconer, young man of mixed race who wants to become a journalist, and a number of other people from the Minister of Immigration to the woman who runs the black shantytown known as AfricTown. Worse, his sister Charity has been lured back to Zonotoroland and the government, having located him through the news stories about his race victory, are demanding money for her safe release from detention. And the agent he ran out on is threatening to have him deported unless he buys out his contract.

Every contact he makes places him in jeopardy because of his status as an illegal. The pretty runner he beds once and tries to avoid because she’s a cop. The elderly woman with the vindictive grasping son who offers him a place to stay in return for some housekeeping chores. The banker who cannot open an account for him without identification he does not have. Everything is a risk.

Hill captures the fear of the refugee, the fear of the undocumented resident in a foreign country, with precision. Through Keita, we understand why some people are so desperate to leave their homelands that they will risk everything, live in the shadows in a country not their own, where they may never gain the right to be called ‘legal.’

The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill
(published as Someone Knows My Name in the USA, Australia and New Zealand)

I cannot give high enough praise to Canadian author Lawrence Hill’s brilliant and multiple award-winning novel about the journey of one woman, Aminata Diallo, from her childhood as the intelligent and inquisitive daughter of a merchant father and a midwife mother in a small village in West Africa, to her old age as a freed slave invited to London by abolitionists who hope that her account of her life will sway Parliament to end trafficking in human lives.

Aminata Diallo is an unforgettable character. Her life encompasses the range of the experiences of slavery in North America, without once stretching credibility. The rich detail of every stage of Diallo’s life speaks of exhaustive research. The narrative rings with emotional truth.

The Book of Negroes is real – a document drawn up by the British during the last days of the American Revolution, listing the names and personal information of 3,000 Black Loyalist slaves and former slaves who rendered service to the British during the Revolution and who were transported to Nova Scotia as a “reward.” There, despite some initial assistance in establishing several Black settlements, they faced a pattern of official indifference and active racism from other settlers. Eventually, over a thousand of the Black Loyalists returned to Africa, where they founded Freetown, in what is now Sierra Leone.

Hill makes his indomitable Aminata Diallo a part of this story. Taken into slavery, she survives the Middle Passage to be sold to the owner of an indigo plantation. The story of how Aminata – or Mina Dee as she comes to be known - survives the brutality, deprivation and indignity of plantation and great personal loss of husband and children to become one of the Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, and then one of the founders of Freetown, is a compelling and deeply moving story, and a testament to the courage and endurance of the real men, women and children whose names can still be found in the Book of Negroes.