Interview: Lawrence Hill

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Being an author means having the audacity to think that people will pay to read what you write. Gaining publishing rights is an admirable feat on its own, so imagine Lawrence Hill’s elation when Clement Virgo and Damon D’Oliveira decided that his story is one worth telling again - only this time on TV.

“Of course the world needs artists, and I am proud to be one, but … my father would have said that we ‘have a loose chromosome’ as a reference to the fact that you have to be a little bit nuts to want to write. I mean let’s face it – you live for five years inside of your own head, with your own ideas, with no guarantee that anybody will be remotely interested, let alone buy it.”

For Hill, the release of The Book of Negroes as a miniseries was a both affirmation and a second chance to shine a light on the parts of Canadian Black history often left in the shadows. When it comes to Black history, Canadians’ hands aren’t exactly clean.

“The inspiration [for the novel] was to imagine Aminata standing on a ship in 1792 in Halifax Harbour about to leave Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone – who is this woman, where are her children, where is her lover, what happened to her parents, and why on earth is she leaving Halifax, where she is relatively safe, to cross the Atlantic Ocean one more time? It’s a miraculous back and forth across the ocean story. She is sort of on a milk run, this whole life of hers.”

Aminata, as a woman and slave of African descent, is at the bottom rung of the ladder that minorities are forced to climb. Sold into slavery at 11 years old, womanhood is a concept she stumbles into not alongside the bandaging words of a mother but among strange faces and coffle chains. For Hill, Aminata’s real-life namesake is a lot closer to home.

“My eldest daughter’s middle name is Aminata, so I named the character after her. I thought of her, and I asked myself to get into the story and to believe in the character I was creating. What if this was my own daughter, how would she have survived what Aminata in the novel and the miniseries has to endure, how would she have kept going? My eldest daughter was 11 when I started to write this story, and significantly it is the same age that Aminata in the novel is when she is stolen from her village and sold into slavery. 11 is a very interesting age. You’re young enough to nourish this impossible, unrealistic dream to go home. Yet you’re old enough to remember who you are and where you’ve come from and who your people were.”

For Hill, co-writing for the mini-series was an immeasurably different experience in comparison to writing the novel  eight years ago. Comparing the two processes, Hill finds little resemblance between the two, other than the obvious fact that the miniseries borrows from the novel. Surprisingly, only a few original lines in the novel made it into the miniseries in the form of dialogue. The two media forms – book and miniseries – are driven by two wholly different canons.

As far as the novel goes, interior narrative and thought carry the novel from start to finish. The reader is Aminata and Aminata is the reader. Yet in the miniseries, viewers find themselves outside of her head and outside of her thoughts. This changes the way that character is revealed, relying instead on action and dialogue.

Condensing a 500-page novel into a six-part mini-series was no easy feat, and it’s nearly impossible to decide what comes out and what stays in. Yet Hill insists that people focus far too much on what is lost, when there is so much that is gained.

“Sometimes scenes that I had to cut out of the novel, we were able to use in the miniseries. Sometimes the novel was slow on plot, so we had to add some pieces to brighten the story and give it some action. What can take you five pages in a novel you can communicate through one look between two lovers. There is a great economy there. Plus there is the sound of the voice, and the way people look, which you can’t communicate that much in the book.”

On screen adaptations of novels are not all that common, so what is it about Hill’s story that is compelling even the second time around? Perhaps it is the august pull of this fictitious woman’s story of trial, tribulation and ultimate resilience – or perhaps it is the fact that Aminata’s life is not that far of a stretch from our own.

“No matter who you are, where you come from, who your family is, whether you’re a boy or a girl, man or woman, or whether you’ve changed genders, I think we can all relate to identity. Identity is always something that is in flux for your whole lifetime. We have this notion, which is ridiculous, that identity is up for grabs when you’re young, but once you become an adult everything is set in stone and you’re good for life. Actually, most people would probably say that over their entire lives the way that they see themselves and the world that they move through changes according to circumstance and environment and geography.”

And not just identity, but identity in the face of those whose goal is to wipe you into a blank slate. No one can argue that Book of Negroes isn’t a story of loss. It is. Yet Aminata refuses to stop giving to others even as her hands are bound, refuses to stop telling her story even as her mouth is shut, and refuses to stop loving life even as the list of things she has lost runs off the page.

“Physical survival itself is a miracle, but what interests me more is the emotional survival. How do you go through all of those insults to your humanity, how do you lose everything but your own life, and not become a bitter, angry, hateful person. Yet we see this all around us in our daily lives, people carry on with that same strength that Aminata showed … any person who lives to a ripe old age, although that’s a lucky thing, is going to endure a lot of loss… and so Aminata is not the only person in this world who has lost a lot. Most people lose a lot. So I don’t think her journey is really that remarkable in a broader sense. We all have a remarkable journey.”

It is hard to ignore the glaring differences between our lives and Aminata’s - you are probably reading this from behind a laptop screen that did not exist in 1792 or in a coffee shop whose coffee grounds were not borne on the backs of slaves. Whether in print or on screen, there is a page or two for all of us in Aminata’s story.

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