Middle Passage In The Book Of Negroes By Lawrence Hill

The Book of Negroes is a 2007 honor winning novel of several prizes by the Canadian author Lawrence Hill. The main character of Lawrence’s novel is Aminata Diallo, a young African girl from a village called Bayo. Lawrence Hill put the spotlight on the force immigration of the crossing from Africa to America, in which the ships made conveying their "freight" of slaves. In the Book of Negroes Lawrence Hill describes and illustrates the historical event of the middle passage through Aminata and the struggle that her life goes through during that time, in which he provides specific details about the middle passage that shows correctness of using the right historical facts in his novel.

The middle passage was alleged in light of the fact that it

In other words, Lawrence Hill did not hesitate to show the extreme parts of slavery, as he mentioned in his interview at our class, “it easy to show a naked baby or a women killing her baby in a novel, but it would not be as easy to show so on a TV show”. He used his novel to spotlight on the middle passage as an unforgivable historical event. According to Marisa Zhuño, “The authentic portrayal of life as a slave, from capture to eventual freedom, creates a dynamic backdrop for the character-driven novel; however, his attention to detail does not derail the effect of the novel” (Zhuño). Which means that the real depiction of life as a slave, from catch to inevitable opportunity, makes an effective scenery for the characters. Although Hill has described the middle passage as bloody scene, but that did not affect the purpose of the novel. Moreover, Marisa Zhuño certifies the correctness of Hill’s historical descriptions of the middle passage in his novel, after examining huge numbers of the particular insights about slavery in the novel. In addition to my own investigation about both authors, it seems that Hills research about this historical event gets to be right. Based on the book Crossing for James Walvin:

“The slave ship was startlingly violent vehicle for a massive international movement of humanity, peopling swathes of America with Africans. Those same

Waste and blood streamed along the floorboards, covering my toes…Piled like fish in a bucket, the men were stacked on three levels—one just above my feet, another by my waist and a third level by my neck…The men couldn’t stand unless they stooped—chained in pairs—in the narrow corridor where I walked. On their rough planks, they had no room to sit. Some were lying on their backs, others on their stomachs. They were manacled at the ankles, in pairs, the left ankle of one to the right ankle of the other. And through loops in these irons ran chains long enough for a man—with the consent of his partner—to move only a few feet, toward the occasional cone-shaped bucket meant for collecting waste” (Hill