The Postcolonial Female “Bildung” in Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes

Introduction

This article examines Lawrence Hill’s (2007) The Book of Negroes as a female bildungsroman and a postcolonial neo-slave narrative. This is because Hill engages in revising European historical and fictional records, a task that is considered “vital and inescapable” (Tiffin, 2006, p. 99) for postcolonial writers. He reconstructs the trans-Atlantic slave trade by fictionalizing the historical event and focusing on a female child slave whose experiences had been ignored in hegemonic historiography. He provides a voiceless African subaltern with the opportunity to universalize her values and make Africa a central point of reference. Even though this article draws heavily on postcolonial theory and by extension postcolonial feminism, it is aware that the novel also highlights Hutcheon’s (1988) ideas on historiographic metafiction as it self-reflexively lays claim to historical events and personages. The selected novel is primarily examined from a postcolonial perspective as postcolonialism endeavors to rewrite hegemonic history by attempting to “recover the lost historical and contemporary voices of the marginalized, the oppressed and the dominated” (McEwan, 2001, p. 95). By utilizing postcolonial representative strategies, Hill validates and humanizes what he perceives as the experiences of the enslaved Africans against Eurocentric and Negritude accounts.

This study is predicated on the assumption that in spite of the cruel nature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, quite a number of female slaves were able to develop their personality, retain their African identity, assist in nation building, and were also instrumental to the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These, therefore, raise the following questions that guide the study: (a) How does Lawrence Hill reconstruct the trans-Atlantic slave trade hegemonic history from a postcolonial perspective? (b) How does The Book of Negroes represent the notion of female slave development?

The Book of Negroes: A Postcolonial Counter-Hegemonic Discourse

The Book of Negroes is a fictional work that is inspired by an actual historical document also called “The Book of Negroes.” Similar to the historical document, the novel chronicles the evacuation of 3,000 loyal African American slaves who are able to fight for the British during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and are rewarded with a safe passage to Nova Scotia (Canada). More importantly, the novel centers on the experiences of the protagonist, Aminata Diallo, over six decades and across the continents of Africa, North America, and Europe. Aminata is a slave who eventually matures into a notable personality who registers the Black Loyalists on their passage to Canada, assists in the resettlement of the Loyalists in Sierra Leone, and testifies in London on behalf of the abolitionists against the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Hill’s novel fits into what is classified as the “canonical counter-discourse” (Tiffin, 2006, p. 100) because he selects a number of characters from British canonical texts and subverts them for postcolonial purposes. Hill’s intention is not to supplant the historical “Book of Negroes” but to subvert and reconstruct it within a counter-discursive postcolonial discourse. The Book of Negroes approximates a fictional autobiography because it is a narrative that Aminata writes while in London during the process of testifying about the evils of the trans-Atlantic slave trade before the abolitionists and the British Parliament. Aminata refuses to have a ghost-writer write her narrative but insists on narrating her story in her own words. What Hill achieves, in other words, is to make Aminata own her story as the narrator and the focalizer.

Hill uses his title as a strategy of counter-discourse to resonate the postcolonial concept of writing back with self-perception. Taking a cue from Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s (1989) The Empire Writes Back, Hill’s work engages in a relocation from the periphery to the center. The novel not only addresses the thematic preoccupation of imperialism like Third World literatures but also foregrounds how Canada and the United States are the results of colonialism and the forerunners of postcolonialism. The Book of Negroes is published under this title in Canada and the United Kingdom, but in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, it is published under the title Someone Knows My Name, a statement which Chekura makes to Aminata in the hold of the slave ship after she mentions his name at his request (p. 81). The Canadian title, The Book of Negroes, echoes Langston Hughes’s (1952) The First Book of Negroes which Parker (1953) describes as a “saga of black folk” depicting the positive side of Negro life (p. 496), as well as Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps’s (1958) The Book of Negro Folklore. From the American title Someone Knows My Name, Hill (2008) is able to subvert James Baldwin’s (1961) collection of essays titled Nobody Knows My Name and humanize the African slaves with names as against mere numbers that were used to identify them in historical documents and Eurocentric novels.

Inasmuch as this article contends with Hill’s literary imagination which is a fictional universe that he creates through his play on the title, The Book of Negroes, it is pertinent to note that the historical text by the same name is equally significant. The historical “Book of Negroes” is a military ledger of about 150 pages that was written in ink by the British officers. It chronicles the particulars of the 3,000 Black Loyalists who fought on the side of the British during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and were granted a safe passage from New York to Nova Scotia (Canada) in 1783. Hence, those whose names were not recorded in the “Book of Negroes” could not escape to Canada. The Black Loyalists were transported from New York to Nova Scotia between April and November 1783, thereby becoming the first settlement of Black Canadians. Therefore, the historical “Book of Negroes” is an original document that helps African Canadians to understand the origins of the Black people in Canada and further enables them to trace their ancestors’ names on the ledger.

The actual “Book of Negroes,” which is photographically reproduced on the inside of the novel’s cover, documents the names and brief descriptions of the slaves including the names of their former masters. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education Foundation, Inc. (2009) considers the entries offensive as they include: “Bill, 25, stout ugly fellow, property of William Douglass . . . James Rea, 24, ordinary fellow without legs” (p. 28). In the novel, Colonel Baker informs Aminata,

These ledgers were to form part of a registration book listing all Negroes carried to the British colonies at the end of the war. If the Americans chose later to press for compensation . . . the Book of Negroes would show who had left New York. (p. 307)

Two original versions of the original “Book of Negroes” were created simultaneously by the British and the Americans as they registered the refugees. While the British version is kept in the Public Records office in Kew, England, the American version can be found at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., USA. Other copies of the “Book of Negroes” which are known to exist are kept in Nova Scotia Public Archives in Halifax, Canada, and the National Archives of Canada, as well as the New York Public Library and the Rockefeller Library at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, USA.

Hill falls in the category of novelists who interpose their narratives with their immigrant and ethnic backgrounds to seek “representations of themselves in the literature of their new homeland” (Teleky, 2001, p. 210). Not only does he explore a subaltern consciousness and reconstruct a retrospective account, he also establishes his own identity and lived experiences as the son of immigrants, Daniel and Donna Hill, and a writer of African descent. The Book of Negroes offers an insight into the migratory experiences of Black people as Aminata and many others travel from Africa to South Carolina, New York, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leona, and England. The migration of the Blacks from the United States to Canada therefore reflects Hill’s parents’ migration from the United States to Canada in 1953.

Hill is the son of American immigrants—a Black father and a White mother—who migrated to Canada from the United States after their wedding in 1953. Hill grew up in a predominantly White suburb of Ontario and was greatly influenced by his parents’ human rights movement. While Donna Hill became a civil rights activist in Washington, D.C., after her graduation from Oberlin College, Daniel Hill became the Chair of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1971. On Lawrence Hill’s (2014) website, Daniel Hill is described as “a prominent writer and community activist with a sustained interest in the history of Blacks in Canada, [and] a business person who created Canada’s first human rights consulting firm.” The miscegenation and activism of Hill’s parents have an impact on his thematic preoccupations which range from identity to a sense of belonging. In The Book of Negroes, Georgia tells Aminata that Mamed, the mulatto overseer of Robinson Appleby’s indigo plantation, had an African mother and a European father. As a result, he is considered as a “nigger” and a slave (p. 151). This attests to the one-drop rule of racial identification that was prevalent in the United States during the era of slavery and its subsequent Jim Crow segregation system that was highly practiced in the Southern United States between 1910 and 1965. The one-drop rule, which is also known as “traceable amount rule” and “hypo-descent rule” (Davis, 2014), means that anybody with one drop of “Negro” blood (one Black ancestor) should be classified as possessing an African ancestry and should be considered to be Black.

The notion of Blackness became associated with negative connotations in the era preceding the one-drop rule of racial identity. Hall (2010) posits that to many Euro-Americans, “the color black symbolizes lust, sin, evil, dirt, feces, death, and so on” (p. 4). Scholars such as Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (2001), Patricia Williams (1991), Toni Morrison (1992), as well as Richard Schur (2004) employ critical race theory to explicate how Blackness was purposefully repackaged as being undesirable through legal systems, executed policies, and social practices. Such were used to relegate Blacks to the second fiddle position, restrict their access to social facilities and governmental institutions as well as regulate interracial relationships. According to Modiri (2012), critical race theory “allows us to examine racial issues more critically and directly in the context of their social, economic and political implications for law and legal rules” (p. 232). The negative connotation associated with Blackness was codified into law under The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that was enacted in Virginia to prohibit miscegenation and categorize the mulattoes as Blacks. Jones (2000) attests,

From 1785 until at least 1910, mulatto was defined as a person with at least “one-fourth part or more of negro blood.” Many Virginians feared that one-fourth was too generous a percentage, and in 1910, the Virginia legislature broadened the definition of “a colored person” to include any person who possessed at least one-sixteenth Black blood. Subsequently, in 1924, as paranoia about Whites being contaminated with Black blood grew, the Virginia legislature determined that a “white person” was a person with “no trace whatsoever” of Black blood. Similarly, in 1930, the legislature defined “colored” as “every person in who there is ascertainable any negro blood." Hence, the legislature codified the one-drop rule. (p. 1512)

The Racial Integrity Act was eventually overturned in 1967 by the United States Supreme Court’s judgment in the legal case Loving v. Virginia which declared the one-drop rule and The Racial Integrity Act as being unconstitutional. However, the need to maintain control over the enslaved Black population and retain White supremacy in the United States made the Euro-Americans to institute the policies that rendered the Blacks as being inferior.

Over the years, the concept of race has been discovered to be a social construction, not a biological one. Morrison (1992) demonstrates that “Race has become metaphorical—a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic than biological ‘race’ ever was” (p. 63). In her novel titled Paradise, Morrison (1997) portrays the effects of racism and sexism in the United States and constructs Blackness as a reality in the world. By foregrounding the challenges faced by the townspeople of “Convent,” “Haven,” and “Ruby” between the 1960s and the 1970s, “Paradise thus testifies to the difficulties of building a real home within the racialized soil of the United States” (Schur, 2004, p. 277). This further confirms the observation of Ladson-Billings and Tate IV (1995) that “the intersection of race and property creates an analytic tool through which we can understand social inequity” (p. 48). The Black race in the United States is therefore less likely to own good homes, as the Black people further struggle with low educational and occupational opportunities when compared with their White counterparts.

In addition, as a postcolonial migrant writer, Hill accentuates the feminist concept of positionality to reveal the effects of his subject position on his narrative. From his novel, we can assess how his subjectivity as a migrant writer of African descent is implicated in the narratives. This is because the situation of migrant and diasporic writers is “regarded as representative, if not iconic, of postcolonial writing” (Boehmer, 2005, p. 215). Hill’s identity reflects in the background of his novel, and his position becomes helpful in the construction of the narrative. To a large extent, he employs the feminist technique of merging the self as actual biographical referent and self as narrator. Hence, he uses his positional location to construct meaning and infuse his positional self in his narrative. As a counter-discursive strategy that is typical of postcolonial writings, Hill proactively represents the phenomena from his own viewpoint. Young (2009) attests,

Postcolonialism, therefore begins from its own counter-knowledges, and from the diversity of its cultural experiences, and starts from the premise that those in the West, particularly, both within and outside the academy, should relinquish their monopoly on knowledge, and take other knowledges, other perspectives, as seriously as those of the West. (p. 15)

Hill writes from a former colonized perspective. He represents Africa by relocating it from the margin to the center. For instance, The Book of Negroes is prefaced with a biblical passage, Deuteronomy 30:19, and a famous quatrain from Jonathan Swift’s (1733) poem, “On Poetry: A Rhapsody,” where Swift observes how the early European geographers drew maps depicting Africa as being uninhabitable and replete with savages and beasts. Aminata reads the same quote as she visits Governor Wentworth’s house with John Clarkson in Halifax for dinner. While looking at the maps, she discovers the poem copied on a piece of paper from Jonathan Swift’s poetry. Aminata expresses her frustrations at the ill-conceived notions and prejudices against Africans, especially since the maps of Africa show the stereotypical paintings of naked Africans with proximate wild animals. She reflects on how “Swift had expressed the very thing I was feeling now . . . every stroke of paint told me that the mapmakers had little to say about my land” (p. 384). By relying on the Swiftian observation, Hill affirms Ashcroft et al.’s (1989) denunciation of “privileging European perspective” in areas like Africa (p. 22).

Hill addresses the negative and erroneous notions the early European explorers had on Africa as they carved the image of Africa from their own biased cartographic perspectives. Cartography is a technique of representing the world and locating indigenous people within a “grid of intelligibility” (Wainwright & Bryan, 2009, p. 155). However, the Eurocentric representation of non-Western people in Western cartography is considered to be “a falsely essentialist view of the world which negates or suppresses alternative views which might endanger the privileged position of its Western perceiver” (Huggan, 1989, p. 116). In other words, colonial cartographers not only produced maps that represented their prejudiced perception and myopic imagination of the world but also designed them to empower the colonialists to exercise control over the other. According to Spivak (2005), the cartographic engraving of the colonized by the colonizer ends up creating a force that makes the colonized “see himself as other” (p. 133). Postcolonial writers therefore employ counter-discursive strategies to deconstruct the colonial map and challenge the tools that reinforce hegemonic colonial power by resisting the Eurocentric cartography and revising the map in different postcolonial compositions.

In a further attempt at reconstructing the trans-Atlantic slave trade from a subaltern perspective, Hill portrays the narration of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from the viewpoints of those who have, over the years, been traditionally excluded in slave narratives—female children. He foregrounds the potentialities of an enslaved African female child during the trans-Atlantic slave trade as the adult protagonist switches from the adult point of view to that of the girl child to reveal the age characteristics that occur through language and the conception of reality. Hill gives the doubly silenced female child voice a crucial part to play in The Book of Negroes. At the beginning of the novel, the elderly Aminata uses her retrospective first-person adult female voice to introduce her tale with a warning for her African readers to distrust the seas and the color pink because of their involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade:

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 for 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. (p. 19)

Afterward, Aminata switches to her girl voice to narrate how she is born and captured in Bayo before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. Aminata employs her girl voice to narrate her childhood struggles as she seeks to understand and escape her experiences and how these experiences shape her identity and self-development.

Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes shares some similarities with Charlotte Brontë’s (1847/2001) Jane Eyre which was originally published in 1847. Aside the fact that both novels are written in a first-person narrative point of view, Aminata’s self-introduction employs a Victorian performative English that is deeply intertextual with Jane’s confessional mode. Jane confesses her fears through emotionally laden metaphors that reveal her inherent abilities and innermost thoughts, especially those related to her fear of pregnancy and motherhood. In addition, Jane constantly has nightmares of children who seem to run away from her. She explains,

Superstition was with me at that moment; but it was not yet her hour for complete victory: my blood was still warm; the mood of the revolted slave was still bracing me with its bitter vigour; I had to stem a rapid rush of retrospective thought before I quailed to the dismal present. (Brontë, 2001, p. 11)

It was a wailing child this night, and a laughing one the next: now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me; but whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore, it failed not for seven successive nights to meet me the moment I entered the land of slumber. (Brontë, 2001, p. 188)

Jane Eyre’s experiences begin as a child like Aminata, and she grows up to engage in a romantic relationship with Rochester while Aminata’s relationship is with Chekura. In the midst of diverse challenges and oppositions, Jane exhibits maturity and emotional stability that can be seen in Aminata’s character. The effect of such mirroring is to “move us from an impression of lucky irony, tinged by melancholy, to the different valence of arch commentary” (Skopik, 2003, p. 269). In effect, Hill’s novel exposes Victorian literature to an analysis in Postcolonial Studies with regard to issues relating to race, gender, identity, and social class. Hill’s novel therefore shows “that there exist multiple points of thematic interface and historical overlapping between the Victorian period and the postcolonial era” (Cheng, 2006, p. 1).

Hill makes Aminata retain her African identity as an ultimate act of resistance to hegemony. She asserts, “I am Aminata Diallo, daughter of Mamadu Diallo and Sira Kulibali, born in the village of Bayo, three moons by foot from the Grain Coast in West Africa” (p. 16). This is to assert the subjectivity of the slaves who were portrayed as objects in history. On the slave ship, Tom, the ship surgeon, names her Mary but she secretly refuses to accept the name. Aminata later observes that European men called African women “‘Mary’ when they did not know their names” (p. 186). This is a usual practice because right from the point of sale at the slave castles in Africa and across the Middle Passage to the New World, the African captives were identified with numbers not names. This affirms Benston’s (1982) assertion that the African identity “was usurped during Middle Passage” (p. 4). The instant renaming of the Africans at the point of boarding the slave ships and arriving in the New World was a way to efface the memory of the slaves and sever their contact with Africa.

Renaming slaves was also an act of immense power and violence on the part of the slavers. By insisting on her African name, Aminata resists the attempts of the slave masters to violently impose a new identity on her. Aminata lays claim on her African name to assert her identity in the New World but merely permits its variant, Meena Dee, because people some find it difficult to pronounce Aminata Diallo. Despite this, she asserts her identity and refuses to accept any other renaming. When Lindo puts Aminata on a self-hire system, he places an advert in a gazette advertising Aminata as a Guinea wench. Aminata reactively retorts, “I’m not from Guinea . . . And I’m not a wench . . . I am a wife. I am a mother. Aren’t I a woman?” (p. 217). This echoes the title of bell hooks’s (1981) work Ain’t I a Woman but more importantly makes references to Sojourner Truth’s famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” which she made at a convention on women’s rights in 1851 in Akron, Ohio, to debunk the claim by male Protestant ministers that men were superior and should be accorded greater privileges.

Sojourner Truth employs her 1851 speech at a Women’s Convention to address the peculiar conditions that women are subjected to, ranging from racism to sexism and classism. Truth speaks against the injustices against women, especially Black women. She indicates the valuation of a White woman as the proper subject of an oppressed victim while the Black woman is seen as neither woman nor person. Truth utilizes her personal experiences and scriptural references against the stereotypes that men have about women and retorts with a rhetorical question, “Ain’t I a woman?” In the middle of her speech, Truth points to a man in the audience and exclaims,

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? . . . I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Truth reveals the intellectual capacity and strength that women possess in performing diverse tasks the way men do. To an extent, she is stating equality with men even though women are perceived to be weaker than men. Furthermore, she reveals how strong women can be when faced with the grief that comes from the sale of their children.

Aminata’s success in retaining her African name instead of adopting the name given to her by the slave masters makes her different from most slaves portrayed in nonfictional and fictional narratives. For instance, Olaudah Equiano (1789/2007) is renamed Gustavus Vassa, Alex Haley’s (1976) Kunta Kinte is renamed Toby, and Manu Herbstein’s (2000) Ama is renamed Pamela. Aminata proves that some slaves were able to retain their African names and cultural heritage as a result of obstinacy or favor with their masters. It soon becomes clear to Aminata, however, that regardless of how much she tries to affirm her African identity, her experiences in the New World by virtue of the trans-Atlantic slave trade have given her multiple identities which are not accepted in the New World or Africa. In addition, the fact that Aminata fails to find her village of birth despite her quest shows the complications attendant on identity in essentialist terms.

Hill complicates the question of identity when Aminata returns to Africa and realizes that although Black, she is no longer accepted as an African. On arriving in Freetown, the African natives of the Temne tribe trade with the African settlers but prohibit them from getting beyond the limits of Freetown into their villages because they see them as “toubabs” (Whites). Aminata expresses her frustrations at such hostility because it hinders her from reclaiming her African identity. She observes that

in South Carolina, I had been an African. In Nova Scotia, I had become known as a Loyalist, or a Negro, or both. And now, finally back in Africa, I was seen as a Nova Scotian . . . they (Temne women) seemed to think that I was just as foreign as the British. (pp. 401-402)

Hill shows that identity is a social construct rather than a geographic one. The rejection of diasporic Africans in the homeland and in the diaspora has become an issue to be addressed. After Aminata acquaints herself with Fatima, a Temne trader in Freetown, she solicits Fatima’s assistance as a guide to her native land, Bayo. As Aminata informs Fatima that she is a native of Africa, Fatima bluntly tells her, “You are a toubab with a black face” (p. 411). Therefore, Hill employs his novel to address the identity crises of many diasporic Africans in general and contemporary African Americans in particular. They are not regarded as Americans or Canadians in North America (the same with those in Europe) and in Africa, they are also not regarded as Africans but as foreigners. Hence, their lives and developments are repeatedly affected by race, migration, and their trans-Atlantic slave trade ancestry.

In order for the Blacks to be regarded as Canadians or Americans, authenticity becomes the opaque parameter against which Black lives are measured to establish an internal discursive order that remains deterministic and entrenched in suffering as well as in crossing borders. Rather than measure contemporary Black people with the preconceived notions of Blackness which Eurocentric prejudices conceive to include crime, poverty, poor grades, inferiority, and civil rights activism, Black people continually show that the notion of authentic Black identity is multifaceted, behaviorally and linguistically, the way Black people and Black cultures are different. Blacks do not need to rely on any affirmative action to get educated rather do they need to act or pass off as being White. In the same vein, Black people do not need to engage in rap music or athletics in order to be accepted as being Black. As a consequence, Black people continually aim to increase the social consciousness on the intricacies of Blackness as an identity and an existing reality.

Reading The Book of Negroes as a Postcolonial Female Bildungsroman

The term bildungsroman was first coined by Karl Simon Morgenstern (1820/1988) in his text Über das Wesen des Bildungsromans. It is a neology of the German “bildung” which means “education” or “formation” and “roman” which means “novel.” The origin of the bildungsroman as a novelistic genre can be traced to Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s (1795-1796/1979) Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre which was translated as Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in 1824. The novel depicts the experiences of the protagonist and how they contribute to his growth and assimilation into his society. Similar to this are Charles Dickens’s (1861/2009) Great Expectations and Charlotte Brontë’s (1847/2001) Jane Eyre. However, in recent years, the bildungsroman has expanded its definition to accommodate postcolonial, feminist, minority, multicultural, and immigrant literatures that resemble the “nineteenth-century European models” (Boes, 2006, p. 231). It is against this background that The Book of Negroes falls within the purview of a bildungsroman which Marianne Hirsch (1979) brands as the novel of formation. According to Hirsch, the novel of formation focuses on the growth and development of one character who eventually assesses himself and his place in the society.

As a corollary, even though the characteristics posited by Hirsch (1979) are associated with “male bildungsromans,” they are employed to appraise The Book of Negroes as a postcolonial female bildungsroman. This is mainly because, these characteristics structure The Book of Negroes by foregrounding the development of Aminata in relation to her society and presents her life as a didactic experience for her and for the readers who are unaware of some aspects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

A bildungsroman portrays the development and education of the protagonist, which are situated in “a community within which the story of development unfolded" (Amigoni, 2000, p. 54). Accordingly, Hill’s novel locates the formative years of Aminata in her childhood village in Africa. Aminata’s tale reveals that she is born in 1745 in a village called Bayo, near Segu in the present day Mali. Aminata describes Bayo as being “three moons (months) by foot from the Grain Coast” (present day Sierra Leone) in West Africa (p. 16). As a young girl, Aminata accompanies her mother everywhere and learns how to “catch babies” (p. 28) from her mother who works as a midwife. She later informs Chekura, “I have helped at births. My mother and I bring babies to the light. It is our trade. Our work. Our way of life” (p. 61). The training Aminata receives from her mother contributes immensely to her growth and is therefore significant in the analysis of her development. Hence, Aminata is able to assist women as they are giving birth to their babies and she is able to make a career out of it.

As being typical of a bildungsroman, the protagonist is displaced from her society by an established social order which becomes her “locus for experience” (Hirsch, 1979, p. 297), in this case the institution of slavery. Kidnapping is a major means of capturing slaves, especially women and children. It dislocates them from their families and displaces them from their communities thereby setting them on an unimaginable course of life. While Olaudah Equiano is kidnapped around the age of 10, Ottobah Cugoano (1789/1969) is kidnapped around the age of 12. At age 11, Aminata is captured while returning from a neighboring village where she and her mother have gone for their midwifery duties. In an attempt to save Aminata from her captors, Aminata’s parents lose their lives. This loss becomes the bildungsroman trope that displaces Aminata from her homeland and spurs her on her trans-Atlantic journey.

The development of a bildungsroman heroine is further predicated on political, psychological, and sociocultural factors that make her a round character. These are enhanced as she comes in contact with other characters that perform constructive and destructive roles in the process of her maturation. Sociocultural, political, and psychological factors are at play in the events surrounding Aminata’s trans-Atlantic life. The social conditions that Aminata initially experiences as a slave on the slave ship are favorable to her when compared with the circumstances of other slaves:

A series of coincidences saved my life during the ocean crossing. It helped to be among the last persons from my homeland to be loaded onto that vessel. It also helped to be a child. A child had certain advantages on a ship vessel. Nobody rushed to kill a child. (p. 71)

Aminata’s luck increases as she also gets a preferential treatment from Tom, the surgeon, on the slave ship; is mentored by Georgia on Appleby’s plantation in South Carolina; and is secretly educated by Mamed, the mulatto plantation overseer. Unfortunately for her, she is raped by her plantation master, Robinson Appleby, who sells her son a few years later. While Georgia and Mamed epitomize the helpers in the course of Aminata’s character development, Appleby is the antagonist who creates obstacles for the protagonist.

Many of the problems the heroines of the bildungsroman face are usually different from those of the men and the “society has different expectations of women” (Marrone, 1997, p. 336). This is true in Aminata’s case as her experiences reveal how the problems encountered by girls and women include rape and the sale of their children. Aminata is raped by Robinson Appleby, the slave master who afterwards sells her son to become a slave on another plantation. At this point, Hill underscores the tenets of postcolonial feminism in his novel. Postcolonial feminism rejects the Western stereotypical delineations of women as being homogeneously oppressed based on their gender and foregrounds their diverse experiences ranging from slavery and colonialism to forced migration and genocide which are predicated on their “ethnicity, class, culture and religion” (Gunjate, 2012, p. 286). Owing to Aminata’s grief-stricken state at the loss of her son, she is sold by Appleby to a Jewish indigo trader named Solomon Lindo in Charles Town. Aminata becomes a midwife in Charles Town but a percentage of her proceeds is forcefully collected by Lindo who in turn teaches her arithmetic and accounting while his wife grants Aminata the liberty to read and write openly.

As part of having contact with other characters who perform important roles in the life of the protagonist of a bildungsroman, it is characteristic for her development to be intertwined with that of her lover. The lover who Aminata’s development is intertwined with is Chekura. They first meet as Aminata walks in the slave coffle soon after her capture because “the abductors had used him to help march captives to the big water” (p. 50). On arriving at the coast with Aminata’s slave coffle, Chekura is betrayed by the African slave abductors and put on the same slave ship as Aminata. Chekura eventually moves from being Aminata’s captor to becoming her companion and later her husband. The relationship Aminata develops with Chekura becomes fundamental in the course of her growth into adulthood. Following the death of Mrs. Lindo, Solomon Lindo takes Aminata to New York. Aminata avails herself of the American Revolutionary War to escape from Lindo in New York after Chekura informs her that Lindo had conspired with Appleby to sell their son Mamadu.

A protagonist of a bildungsroman is usually presented with an offer that involves her becoming a part of a projected resolution to societal problems or be accommodated into an existing society. Every protagonist therefore has the choice to either accept or reject the proposed resolution (Hirsch, 1979). As a result of her education, Aminata is offered a job as a scribe for the British Army during the Revolutionary War to register the loyalist slaves seeking asylum in the British colonies in Canada in the “Book of Negroes.” Aminata is subsequently permitted a safe passage in the form of expatriation to Nova Scotia after being granted her freedom along with several other slaves in 1783. Unfortunately, on arriving in Nova Scotia, the Africans become disillusioned as they grapple with racism and poverty while their new society becomes their antagonist. After residing in Canada for a few years, Aminata meets John Clarkson, a British naval officer vested with the responsibility of recruiting a number of African Canadians to the colony of Sierra Leone in Africa. In 1792, Aminata along with about 1,200 freed Black slaves who have been exiled in Nova Scotia migrate to Sierra Leone under the auspices of the Sierra Leone Company to establish the colony of freedmen in Africa thereby becoming the original settlers in Freetown. Aside the fact that Aminata’s migration to Canada enables the reader to explore the origins of Black people in Canada, her subsequent migration to Sierra Leone brings into focus her representational leadership role in nation building.

A bildungsroman usually ends with the protagonist making an assessment of herself and her society. As a mature person, she evaluates her past “in terms of conscious cause-effect relationships” of her own behavior (Garasym, 2012, p. 186). In addition, the narrator of a bildungsroman is usually an adult with some accomplishments that make her reflect on her past experiences and evaluate her “development of selfhood” (Hirsch, 1979, p. 298). As a typical example, The Book of Negroes begins in London in 1802 where Aminata is expected to meet King George at the request of the abolitionists like John Clarkson to testify against the cruel nature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. While waiting, she commences her tale by tracing her development from childhood to old age. By employing first-person retrospection, the narration of her experiences from memory form the pages of the novel. The elderly Aminata further describes how John Clarkson once again convinces her to relocate from Freetown to London, a place she eventually calls home. John Clarkson informs Aminata in London that the British abolitionists hope to abolish the trade in slaves but not slavery. Therefore, her help is needed to narrate her ordeal. Borrowing the words of Bakhtin (1986), Aminata “is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point of one to the other” (p. 23). This historical transition becomes accomplished through her because Aminata is able to testify against the injustices and cruel nature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and lives long enough to witness the British Parliament pass a bill to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807.

Conclusion

The characteristics of the bildungsroman structure The Book of Negroes in ways that foreground the development and experiences of Aminata. These in turn render the novel a realist narrative that enables us to explore the representational contexts of postcolonial forms. Realism permeates through the experiences of the heroine, as a female slave who is commodified in the hands of men. Hill therefore succeeds in representing a convergence of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s (2006) notion of postcolonialism—“slavery, migration, suppression and resistance, difference, race, gender, place, and the responses to the discourse of imperial Europe” (p. 2). By employing the narrative to depict the development of the female protagonist as she grows from childhood to adolescence and motherhood, Hill details, as a postcolonial and realist work, the tragedies of the lives of female slaves during the trans-Atlantic slave trade era. He further employs the resistance of a radical figure like Aminata to speak to the resistance of the commodified, exploited, and brutalized bodies of the slaves. Hill utilizes nuanced postcolonial representative strategies to validate and humanize what he perceives as the experiences of the enslaved Africans, especially women, against Eurocentric and Negritude accounts. In essence, Hill addresses the subject of enslaved Africans by elevating the voiceless subaltern to a speaking woman whose voice is heard all the way by the lawmakers in the British Parliament.