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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.’

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Lawrence Hill's latest book, Blood: The Stuff of Life, is a meditation on the cultural and personal meanings of blood. An essential part of our anatomy, it is perhaps the only internal aspect of our physical beings that almost all of us, at some time or another, will see outside of its natural place. And it has come to mean so many things in addition to simply the red fluid that is so much a part of what keeps us alive.
It’s hard to imagine a single person in a school, restaurant, theatre, hockey arena, hospital room, or bookstore who does not have a set of personal stories about blood. Maybe it was the blood of a distant ancestor, persecuted because his or her blood was deemed to be impure. Maybe it was a grandfather who fell under the blade of a farm instrument and bled to death in the fields. Maybe it was an aunt who donated plasma weekly for decades, or a sister who won international attention for designing a more effective way to kill cancerous white blood cells before they multiplied madly and killed the patient. Maybe something happened to you in the blood lab, or in the operating room, and lodged so deeply in your mind that you have passed the story along to every single family member. Blood keeps you alive, for sure. Yet, the very blood in your veins and arteries can suddenly betray you. One day you feel healthy and have just hiked up a mountain with the person you most love in the world, and the next day what you thought was a routine blood test tells you that you have prostate cancer and had better decide, pronto, if you’re going to opt for surgery or radiation, or tempt the gods by doing nothing at all. Blood is the lubricant of our bodies and the endlessly circulating river supplying oxygen and nutrients to our cells. But it is far more than a sign of your physical health, or an omen of your mortality. It has the potential to reveal your most hidden secrets: How is your cholesterol level? How much alcohol have you consumed? Have you been snorting cocaine? Are there any other residual traces that might scare off an employer, or lead a life insurance company to deny your application? What has been the average amount of sugar in your blood over the past ninety days? Did you cheat in that Olympic marathon race? Are you the father of that child? Blood won’t tell all. But it can tell enough to get you in a whole lot of trouble.
Hill's book is exhaustive in its examination of matters of blood, from traditions of blood sacrifice to the gods to blood donation policies to blood as a marker of race. But while the range of topics mentioned is vast, one might wish for a fuller examination of them. In being encyclopedic, Hill has sacrificed depth of analysis. For example, in one section devoted to discussing blood as a symbol of honour and sacrifice, Hill covers Aztec religious sacrifices, Japanese seppuku, and honour killings of women in just a few pages, providing the literary equivalent of sound bytes on each, but little background or individual context.

It's an idiosyncratic book, organised as much by Hill's musings about blood and his life experiences, as it is by generally accepted themes associated with blood. I enjoyed much of it, though there were times that I wished Hill had spent more time on a topic, and other times when I thought he went into too much detail for something that seemed to me to be a relatively tangential aspect. But it's also a very personal book, and in many cases the amount of space given to an issue seems at least in part determined by the strength of its meaning in his own life.

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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.

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