Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart

55 Pages·2016·6.42 MB·English

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Canadiana – Canadian Writers
In this Module you will learn about three great writers who call Canada home:
Lawrence Hill, Tololwa Mollel and Maxine Tynes.

Here is a list of activities you will work on:
-­‐ KWL Chart
-­‐ Reading Activity
-­‐ Mapping Activity
-­‐ Video Activity

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KWL CHART
Look at the KWL Chart below. Think about what you already know about these
three Canadian authors. Write it down in the “K” column. What do you want to know
about them? Write it down in the “W” column.
K W L
What I know about What I want to know What I learned about
Lawrence Hill, Tololwa about Lawrence Hill, Lawrence Hill, Tololwa
Mollel, and Maxine Tynes? Tololwa Mollel, and Maxine Mollel, and Maxine Tynes?
Tynes?

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READING ACTIVITY
LAWRENCE HILL

http://lawrencehill.com/about-lawrence/
Lawrence Hill is the son of American immigrants — a black father and a white
mother — who came to Canada the day after they married in 1953 in Washington,
D.C. On his father’s side, Hill’s grandfather and great grandfather were university-
educated, ordained ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His
mother came from a Republican family in Oak Park, Illinois, graduated from Oberlin
College and went on to become a civil rights activist in D.C. Growing up in the
predominantly white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario in the sixties, Hill was greatly
influenced by his parents’ work in the human rights movement. Much of Hill’s
writing touches on issues of identity and belonging.
Hill’s first passion was running, and as a boy he dreamed of winning an Olympic gold
medal in the 5,000 meters. But despite years of intense training and thousands of
kilometers, he never managed to run quite fast enough. As a teenager, he consoled
himself by deciding to become a writer instead, and at 14 he wrote his first story
on his mother’s L.C. Smith typewriter. It was a bad story, and a good beginning.
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Hill is the author of ten books of fiction and non-fiction. In 2005, he won his first
honour for his work, a National Magazine Award for the article “Is Africa’s Pain
Black America’s Burden?” published in The Walrus. But it was his third novel, The
Book of Negroes (HarperCollins Canada, 2007) — published in some countries
as Someone Knows My Name and in French as Aminata — that brought his writing
to broad public attention. The novel won several awards, including:
• The Rogers/Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize,
• both CBC Radio’s Canada Reads and Radio Canada’s Le Combat des livres, and
• The Commonwealth Prize for Best Book, which came with a private audience
with Queen Elizabeth II.
The Book of Negroes television miniseries, which Lawrence Hill co-wrote with
director Clement Virgo, was filmed in South Africa and Canada and aired on CBC in
Canada and on BET in the United States in early 2015.
Lawrence Hill’s non-fiction book, Blood: The Stuff of Life was published in
September 2013 by House of Anansi Press. Blood is a personal consideration of the
physical, social, cultural and psychological aspects of blood, and how it defines,
unites and divides us. Hill drew from the book to deliver the 2013 Massey Lectures
across Canada. The lectures were broadcast on the CBC
Radio “Ideas” program. Blood: The Stuff of Life won the Hamilton Literary
Award for non-fiction.
In 2013, Hill published the essay Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book: An
Anatomy of a Book Burning (University of Alberta Press).
His fourth novel, The Illegal, will be published by HarperCollins Canada in
September, 2015 and by WW Norton in the USA in January 2016.
Formerly a reporter with The Globe and Mail and parliamentary correspondent
for The Winnipeg Free Press, Hill also speaks French and Spanish. He has lived and
worked across Canada, in Baltimore, and in Spain and France. He is an honorary
patron of Crossroads International, for which he travelled as a volunteer to the
West African countries Niger, Cameroon and Mali, and to which he lends the name
of his best-known character for the Aminata Fund, which supports programs for
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girls and women in Africa. Hill is also a member of the Council of Patrons of
the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, and of the Advisory Council of Book Clubs for
Inmates and is an honorary patron of Project Bookmark Canada.
He has a B.A. in economics from Laval University in Quebec City and an M.A. in
writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He has received five honorary
doctorates from Canadian universities, and in 2015 was appointed to the Order of
Canada. Hill lives in Hamilton, Ontario and in Woody Point, Newfoundland with his
family.

Body of Work
• The Deserter’s Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away
from the War in Iraq (written with Joshua Key) was
released in Canada and the United States in 2007. It was
later published in numerous countries including France,
Germany, Norway, Australia and Japan.
• The Book of Negroes was released in Canada in 2007,
and published as Someone Knows My Name in the United
States, Australia and New Zealand.
• Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White
in Canada (HarperCollins Canada, 2001).
• Any Known Blood (William Morrow, New York, 1999; HarperCollins Canada, 1997).
• Some Great Thing (HarperCollins Canada, 2009; originally published by Turnstone
Press, Winnipeg, 1992).

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Awards and Accolades for The Book of Negroes
• Winner of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads, 2009
• Longlisted for the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
• Winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Overall Best Book
• Winner of the 2008 Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen Award The Book of
Negroes Reading Guide 4
• Finalist for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award
• Longlisted for the 2007 Giller Prize
• Winner of the 2007 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize

Watch and Listen
http://lawrencehill.com/watch-and-listen/
1. Listen to Lawrence Hill read from the first chapter of The Book of
Negroes/ Someone Knows My Name
http://lawrencehill.com/TBON_chapter1.mp3
2. Watch Lawrence Hill give a reading from the opening of Blood: The Stuff of
Life on the Maclean’s magazine website
http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/lawrence-hill-the-power-of-blood/
3. Click on this link http://www.cbc.ca/bookofnegroes/ to watch video clips of
the series based on The Book of Negroes.

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TOLOLWA MOLLEL

http://www.tololwamollel.com/biography/
Tololwa Mollel is a children’s author, dramatist and storyteller, who has written
seventeen internationally published books, and several plays as well as stories that
he created or adapted for performance. His books, which include award winning
titles such as Rhinos for Lunch and Elephants for Supper, Big Boy, and My Rows and
Piles of Coins have been published in Canada, the U.S., Australia, England and
Tanzania where he was born. His work has been translated into various South
African languages, into Korean, Spanish, Serbian, Norwegian and Finnish, and of
course his native Kiswahili, Tanzania’s national language.
In Tanzania, his country of birth, Mollel was a University lecturer and an actor and
performer in a touring company that performed as far as Germany and Sweden. He
continued performing in Canada but came to devote himself to writing and to the
literary scene in Edmonton, serving as President of the Writers Guild of Alberta in
the late 1990s.
He does extensive work with schools and libraries, with literacy, arts and
educational bodies, and with community organizations. In all this work, Mollel has
presented, performed and conducted writing, storytelling and dramatic workshops
and writer-in-residence programs in schools, libraries and communities across
Canada and the U.S., as well as in England, Australia and Tanzania. Of his
presentations and his work with schools, libraries and communities, Mollel says, “I
aim to provide a feast of words – written and spoken – for the eye, the ear and the
mind; as well as for the creative imagination, and for performance.” Through
writing, storytelling and drama, Mollel hopes to empower the young, and others,
with the gift of story — to write, tell, share and enjoy stories; to mentor them as
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he was mentored. Mollel has increasingly come to combine the arts of storytelling,
story making and theater into story performance with music with collaborating
musicians and artists.
Tololwa Mollel has written sixteen children’s books, among them award winning
titles such as The Orphan Boy, Rhinos for Lunch and Elephants for Supper!, Big
Boy and My Rows and Piles of Coins. His books have been published in Canada, the
U.S., England, Australia and Tanzania, and they have been translated into various
Southern African languages and into Korean. Mollel’s passion for writing grew out
of his love of books and the written word early in his childhood. His love of the
written word, and later performance, grew out of his life with his grandparents in
Tanzania where words were and are still all important.
From Lands of Night Subira Subira

Rhinos for Lunch and Elephants for Supper

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Map Activity
Can you mark the country of Tololwa’s birth on the map below?

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MAXINE TYNES
Below is an article taken from the Globe and Mail about Ms. Tynes. Read though
the article in order to gain more knowledge of this celebrated poet.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/new/national/nova-scotian-poet-maxine-tynes-celebrated-her-
life-as-a-black-woman/article556560/

Nova Scotian poet Maxine Tynes celebrated her life as a
black woman

ALLISON LAWLOR
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Sunday, Oct. 09, 2011 10:21PM EDT

A celebrated Nova Scotian poet, whose roots date back to the black Loyalists’
migration to the province in the late 1700s, Maxine Tynes published her first book
of poetry in 1987 to critical acclaim.
Borrowed Beauty, which received the Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award, was an
anthology of her many different voices. In the opening piece, Tynes, who died in
Halifax on Sept. 12, writes passionately about the role that poetry, race and
womanhood played in both her life and work.
“Women are always looking into mirrors, looking for a mirror to look into, or
thinking about, regretting, sighing over or not quite believing what they’ve seen in
the mirror.
“We’re looking at ourselves; looking for ourselves. The girls we were, the women we
are, and what we will become. Searching, always searching in mirrors.
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