Abstract
The paper uses the rhetorical lenses to examine a neo-slave narrative The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. The exploration of emotive, ethical, and political dimensions of the text allows the author to demonstrate its emotional and moral effects, deriving within the triad author-text-reader. The article particularly highlights gendered aspects of bondage, which have been traditionally marginalized. The female protagonist and the message that her story conveys prompt the readers to assume a position on the subject of slavery which transcends the story as such and condemns the legal institution of human chattel enslavement in all its representation.
Highlights
Lawrence Hill’s novel The Book of Negroes (2007) is a cross-generational story that spans six decades and covers three continents, exploring the historical connections between the roles of Africa, North America and Europe in the slave trade
The fictional story of Aminata Diallo, an eleven-year-old girl abducted from her village in Mali West Africa in 1756, is built around a framework of historical facts, such as slavery, the American Revolutionary War, abolitionism, the first colonies of free Black people, and the problems of racial discrimination, such as they were in the 18-19th century society
Slavery severs family ties and other kinds of communal relationships, uprooting people and forcing them to make provisional bonds, such as with Georgia, who becomes her mother figure, friendships with Dolly and Daddy Moses, and her love for Chekura. These ties are provisional and, just like the protagonist, subjected to external forces. Since they can never replace the feeling of the only real happiness she felt in a childhood home, Aminata decides to go back to Africa to look for the lost past
Summary
Lawrence Hill’s novel The Book of Negroes (2007) is a cross-generational story that spans six decades and covers three continents, exploring the historical connections between the roles of Africa, North America and Europe in the slave trade. I examine Hill’s narrative as rhetoric, in which the triad author-text-reader allows to explore emotive, ethical, and political dimensions of the reading process. The author shapes his story in such a manner as to produce the greatest emotional and moral effect. Written retrospectively in the first person narrative voice and using the tropes of the genre, the story follows the protagonist’s life from an African childhood, through capture, transport to America, slavery, and a long road to freedom. Like Equiano’s or Douglass’s accounts that follow their freedom out of bondage, hers is the coming-of-age story, in which “the perpetration of racism against the body and the infringement of slavery upon the worthy intellect” (Yorke 2010, 129) play crucial roles in her transition from childhood to adulthood
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