CAMBRIDGE - If Canada is a big empty space in the minds of many Americans, its history is even blanker, especially in black-white relations. Now Lawrence Hill, a Canadian who has written extensively on the African-Canadian experience and whose family story spans the US-Canada border, has written a novel, based on real events, that draws together the tangled racial history of Canada, the American colonies, Africa, and England.
"Someone Knows My Name" is narrated by Aminata Diallo, an African Muslim girl captured by slave traders in 1757, sold in South Carolina, taught to read, then taken to New York. When revolution breaks out, she escapes from her owner and serves the British side. When slaves and free blacks who stayed with the crown are offered land in Nova Scotia at war's end, she helps make up the list of 3,000 persons to be evacuated. In Canada, the promise is broken. Twenty-eight years before the American establishment of Liberia, she accompanies the first back-to-Africa project, the 1792 migration of 1,200 former American slaves from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Hill, who is 50 and lives near Toronto with his wife and five children, has migration in his own family background. His American parents, African-American sociologist Daniel Hill and Donna Bender Hill, a white woman, emigrated to Canada soon after they were married in Washington, D.C., in 1953. They raised three children, including Hill's older brother, singer-songwriter Dan Hill.
Hill has worked as newspaper reporter, customs official at the US-Canada border, and freelance speechwriter. He is fluent in French and worked as a youth in French-speaking western Africa, which he says profoundly affected his writing and sense of identity. Besides three novels, he has written several nonfiction books about the African-Canadian experience. Before a Cambridge reading last week, Hill talked about his and his parents' lives, and his novel about a woman who wants to be known for who she is, and to tell her story.
Q. How did you conceive this novel?
A. More than 15 years ago, in reading an obscure scholarly history of the people known as the black loyalists, I discovered that among the former African-American slaves who sailed from Halifax to Sierra Leone in this fascinating, completely forgotten venture, a number had been born in Africa. The concept of going back, in the same lifetime in which one has been ripped from Africa, entranced me. I started to imagine the life of a woman on one of those ships, a former slave born in Africa.
Q. Your biographical sheet says that your parents "fled" to Canada. Was someone chasing them?
A. Most people in their 20s or teens cannot appreciate how hostile the world was to an interracial marriage, especially a black man and a white woman, in the early 1950s in the South. A couple was convicted of an interracial marriage in Virginia, just six months after [my parents] were married. My mother's sister, one of the few people in her family to stand by her, said, "Donna, you're going to marry this man, but where are you going to live? Sweden?" They didn't feel they could stay in the states, so they came to Canada.
Q. How did that history affect your upbringing?
A. It was a binational, bicultural growing-up experience, in a white suburb of Toronto. We traveled often to the United States. We were connected primarily to the black side of the family because most of the white side had cut my mother off. They were the people we went to visit, in Washington, Brooklyn, and North Carolina. As a result, most of my family identity as a boy was rooted in the African-American experience.
Q. You also had the bilingual context?
A. I made an effort to learn French fluently, and then Spanish, partly by living in Quebec and France and in French-speaking countries of West Africa - Niger, Mali, and Cameroon. I went to Laval University, a French university in Quebec.
Q. What did you read as a boy?
A. My parents had hundreds of books about the African-American experience - novels, essays, everything that emerged in the 1940s and '50s. So the first thing I started to read as a 14-year-old was the stuff on their shelves. I read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Gwendolyn Brooks. Eldridge Cleaver and Alex Haley a bit later. I devoured everybody.
Q. What was your personal experience of Africa?
A. Part of me wanted to connect with the mother continent, to have a better sense of where my own ancestors came from. In the 1970s and '80s, I worked with a nonprofit NGO called Canadian Crossroads International. We worked side by side with young West Africans, primarily on tree-planting projects that involved efforts to keep the Sahara Desert from eating up the little bit of arable land. We were staying with polygamous Muslim families in remote rural villages. It was moving and humbling to see people without a thousandth of what I grew up with, who would just inhale an opportunity to learn and expand their minds. I came back a lot more quietly confident about who I was, no longer needed to prove anything, to have my racial background recognized or validated.
Q. How did your African experience affect the writing of this novel?
A. I lived in villages that physically resembled Bayo, the village that Aminata grows up in before she is abducted. I don't think I could have written those scenes, or set the novel there, if I hadn't lived in such villages myself.
Q. Your title is "Someone Knows My Name." Naming, being known, seems to be an important theme.
A. When Aminata is on the slave vessel, she sees men whose names she recognizes. She says them out loud, and one, a boy from a village not far from hers, is uplifted profoundly, and says to her, "Someone knows my name." It makes him feel the glimmer of his own humanity again. This concept is threaded throughout the book and [Aminata's] life in the new world - the difficulty of having people recognize who she is, that she has a humanity, even that she comes from a real place.
Q. Your character is named Aminata, and your novel is dedicated to your daughter, Genevieve Aminata. Is there a connection, in your mind, between the two girls?
A. I gave my eldest daughter's middle name to my protagonist. She was 11 when I started on the book in earnest, and I don't think it's coincidental that Aminata, the protagonist, is abducted at the age of 11. I asked myself, "What if this were my daughter? How would she have survived?" Her emotional survival is what interested me most. I tried to think of Aminata as my child, and tried to love her the way I love my own daughter, and I hoped that that investment would bring her off the page.
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.
