I must have this book! I’m searching for it online now! I just watched a video excerpt and am currently reading an except online. This book by bi-racial Canadian author Lawrence Hill has me as excited as I was the first time I held Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’ in my hands. What’s more is that I cant help thinking of Kunta Kinte and his story of freedom and entrapment that Alex Haley conveyed all those years ago when I researched more into this book. I just know this book is going to be just as much of a page-turner. Lawrence Hill has already won a roll of awards for the book and the reviews have been fantastic.
Funnily, the book is titled ‘Someone Knows My Name’ in the USA, Australia and New Zealand and only appears with its original title, ‘The Book of Negroes’ in Canada. I wonder what that says about the societies in which we live.
Here is an excerpt from the novel:
Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, Dear Reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied. Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God’s existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel?
SOURCE: LAWRENCE HILL & HARPER COLLINS CANADA