Review: Someone Knows My Name

Abducted from her tiny African village at the age of 11, stripped, chained in the dreaded “coffle” for days on end and forced to walk to a ship that would take her and those who survived to a life of slavery in America, the heroine of Someone Knows My Name, Aminata Diallo, determines to endure by viewing these atrocities as a “djeli”, or storyteller.

As a child, Aminata’s parents encouraged learning and her natural intelligence is constantly recognised throughout the book. It places her in positions of both relative privilege and occasionally jeopardy.

Aminata’s story journeys from her childhood in Africa, through various locations in America during the Revolutionary War, to Nova Scotia under the British, and her eventual return to the African continent as part of the establishment of a new British colony in Sierra Leone. Nearing the end of her long and remarkable life, she is persuaded to aid the abolishionist cause by addressing the British Parliament and exposing the harsh realities of the slave trade.

Lawrence Hill is Canadian-born and a descendant of Africans enslaved in the United States. The son of a civil-rights activist and a sociologist, Hill is obviously influenced by his parents’ work and his genealogy. He has painstakingly researched his topic, and skilfully combines historical fact and some actual people with his fictional characters.

The strength of Someone Knows My Name lies in the connection one feels with Aminata. Hill is obviously eager to educate the reader about this period and occasionally deviates from story to historical exposition. At these times — most notably the period in Sierra Leone — the tale feels removed from its heart.

The first few hundred pages in particular make for compelling, if disturbing, reading as Aminata relates her childhood and the horrors of her enslavement. While aware that the personal loss and tragedy that Aminata recounts is in this case fictional, it is sobering to realise that there were many thousands of genuine, personal stories from this time in history that are lost forever.

One of the most poignant and emotional moments occur on the slave ship as the captives struggle to maintain their identity and dignity in the face of unimaginable dehumanisation through the simple act of sharing their names and birthplaces- thus the title.

“In the darkness, men repeated my name and called out their own as I passed. They wanted me to know them. Who they were. Their names. That they were alive, and would go on living.”

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