Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International Symposium October 4-6, 2012 ...

45 Pages·2012·0.47 MB·English

by  Melody Trantham

Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Opening Keynote: Faction: Merging History and Fiction
in Someone Knows My Name / The Book of Negroes

Speaker: Lawrence Hill
Introductions: Susan Levine, Lon Kaufman , Natasha Barnes

Susan Levine: Good afternoon, greetings. Welcome to this wonderful occasion. My
name is Susan Levine; I'm the director of the UIC Institute for the
Humanities, and I'm very pleased to welcome you this afternoon.
On behalf of the Institute and all of the academic and
administrative units and individuals who came together in really
unprecedented ways to bring you this international symposium on
slavery and it's aftermath in the Atlantic world. And the
concurrent UIC Library Exhibit Commerce in Human Souls, the
legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. We're very excited to be hosting
this event as part of UIC's 30th anniversary celebration and also as
part of the 30th anniversary of the Humanities Institute as well. I
especially wanted to thank Chancellor Paula Allen-Meares,
Provost Lon Kaufman, the Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean Astrida
Tantillo for their support and to acknowledge the hard work of
faculty in the departments of African-American studies, English,
History, and Political Science. In addition, the symposium has
enjoyed the support of the Social Justice Initiative at UIC as well
as the University Library, the Office of International Affairs, the
Great Cities Institute, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs,
the Honors College, and the Program and International Studies.
We also received generous support from the Illinois Humanities
Council and the British Council at General of Chicago. So you can
see it's really quite a collection of units that have come together to
sponsor this event. Finally, I also want to say that this symposium
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Opening Keynote: Faction: Merging History and Fiction
in Someone Knows My Name / The Book of Negroes

was inspired initially by the UIC Library's unique collection of
works on abolition, the founding of Sierra Leone, the transatlantic
slave trade, and modern Caribbean literature. And the Library, as
you probably know, is featuring some of these rare documents in
an exhibit, which you'll be able to see tomorrow afternoon as part
of the symposium. So keep your eyes open for that. Before we
start, I do want to remind you that this symposium will begin
tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. in the Cardinal Room, which is right
around the corner, I think. With a panel on abolition, free town,
and empire. And now I'd like to introduce UIC Provost Lon
Kaufman to offer some words of welcome.

Lon Kaufman: Well welcome, everybody. I bring greetings on behalf of Chancellor
Paula Allen-Meares who couldn't be here today. This turns out to
be one of those weeks at UIC that are – where there are so many
things going on that are great. It's impossible to go to all of them.
Starting earlier this week with Nobel **** Jody Williams and
Jesse Jackson for the first time in this life in Hull House, having a
conversation about violence. Certainly, uniquely related to today's
program and to the next two days as well. This event is one that
would not happen any place else, except UIC. It's over 200 years
in the making, clearly, and but the series of events that lead to this
potential for events like this at UIC are commonplace here, but not
any place else. And I hold the key to the mystery that many of you
want to know how did the British Consulate get involved and it's a
uniquely typical story of UIC in this event. The British Consulate
became involved at a luncheon at the Honor's College. Now the
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Opening Keynote: Faction: Merging History and Fiction
in Someone Knows My Name / The Book of Negroes

luncheon at the Honor's College was really – have some people
meet the British Consulate General who was there and he
happened to be there because he wanted to come on campus to
meet with a set of students who might be thinking about applying
for roads and other kinds of scholarships and fellowships. And so
the Dean **** had put together a set of people to come to lunch,
which included Dick and Nancy Cirillo, and Jennifer Woodard.
And Jennifer Woodard knew about the collection that had come
from Sierra Leone and said, "What about that collection from
Sierra Leone?" Does the British Consulate have any interest in
that?" And that started the ball rolling. And so it's one of these
ropes of sand that happens on this campus because of the way this
campus views the world and thinks about individuals and thinks
about history and thinks about Chicago and the people who are
here and how they come to be here, and where they're going next.
And it's what makes this campus special. So thank you to all of
you for making this happen. It should be a great three days and
hopefully at the end of the three days we will start another week
with another three days. Thank you very much for coming.

Susan Levin: Thanks, Lon. I hope the next week actually has seven days or five days at
least. I'd like now to introduce Natasha Barnes, associate professor
of English and African-American studies who will introduce our
speaker this afternoon.

Natasha Barnes: Thanks, Susan. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Natasha
Barnes. I am an associate professor in English and African-
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Opening Keynote: Faction: Merging History and Fiction
in Someone Knows My Name / The Book of Negroes

American studies. I have the tremendous honor to welcome
Lawrence Hill to Chicago and UIC and on behalf of the committee
we're especially fortunate to have a writer of his renown to open
our symposium and the Library exhibition attached to it slavery
and the aftermath of the Atlantic world. Lawrence Hill was born
in Canada to civil rights activists parents who devoted their lives to
telling the history of black Canadians. After a short career in
journalism and newspaper journalism, Mr. Hill turned his talents to
fiction and essay writing, but explored the meaning of racial
identity in Canada and he very quickly became one of the most
important young literary voices in contemporary Canada. Since
1992, Lawrence Hill has published many award-winning short
stories and novels, including Some Great Thing, Any Known
Blood, and of course his 2007 Magnum Opus, The Book of
Negroes, published in the United States under the title: Someone
Knows My Name. Someone Knows My Name is the American
version of this book, to the disappointment at consternation of
those of us who preferred the old title, Book of Negroes but you
can ask Mr. Lawrence about that in questions. But this book was
an amazing book. It won the prestigious Commonwealth Writers'
Prize and I know we're in the States and I think I see a few of my
students, so I need to tell you how important that is. The
Commonwealth Prize is actually an annual prize written for the
best novel in English from four major geographic regions. So Mr.
Lawrence Hill sits in the company of writers like Vikram Seth,
Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, V.S.
Naipaul. I could go on and on. In addition, the novel won the
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Opening Keynote: Faction: Merging History and Fiction
in Someone Knows My Name / The Book of Negroes

Rogers Writers' Trust Fictional Prize, the Ontario Library
Association Evergreen Award, and it was long listed for the
Scotiabank Giller Prize. In 2008, under its American title, the
novel was a finalist in the United States for the Hurston/Wright
Legacy Award. Lawrence Hill's interest in challenging the archive
of Canadian history has led to many other interventions. He's
written – I love this. It's a scene it to a beautiful children's book
called Trials and Triumph: The Story of African Canadians, and
he's written Women of Vision in Important History of the Canadian
Negro Women's Association. Mr. Hill also wrote the script to the
documentary Seeking Salvation: A History of the Black Church in
Canada, which won the Wilbur Award for the best national
television documentary in 2005. Now, permit me, I just need to
spend a few minutes talking about the achievement of Somebody
Knows my Name, or my favorite title, The Book of Negroes
because it's a gloriously written fictional autobiography of an
enslaved African woman Aminata Diallo, who was captured as a
girl from the coast of West Africa and survived the middle passage
and enslavement in South Carolina. With the outbreak of the
American Revolution, this war gives her a tenuous freedom as a
black loyalist working under British officers who promise freedom
to enslaved Blacks who assisted the British in the war against the
13 colonies. So Aminata's odyssey continues; she goes to Nova
Scotia as a community of free loyalist blacks and eventually
becomes a member of those Nova Scotia settlors who set up a free
colony of returned Africans in Sierra Leone in the 19th century.
And please go to the exhibit, which is going to open formally
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Opening Keynote: Faction: Merging History and Fiction
in Someone Knows My Name / The Book of Negroes

tomorrow because the Sierra Leone is such an important site of a
lot of the documents we have. But let me get back to the book.
Lawrence Hill's narrative is a bit of all of the black Atlantic voices
that have helped us know a little something about the history of
forced migration and terror from those who experienced that
history from below. Aminata is a bit of ****, a bit of Frederick
Douglas, a little of Phyllis Wheatley; Phyllis Wheatley lived in an
environment that would have permitted her to write oral history as
opposed to proving herself with neoclassical poetry, but what this
novel does most forcefully for those of us who are gathered here
for the next few days is to speak to what the archive enables and
forecloses. Hill has Aminata act as the official scribe of one of the
most fascinating documents of the Revolutionary period, a
document called the Book of Negroes, which lists the names of
some 3,000 African descended men, women, and children, black
loyalists who the British offered freedom and safe sanctuary to the
Canadian province of Nova Scotia in exchange for their service to
the British war effort. So in this book, Lawrence Hill images and
of course only the way a novelist could, what it means for an
African woman in 18th century America to act as a scribe to
commit to posterity a list of names, ages, and physical descriptions
of a new community of African-Americans who are to embark on
another global journey that promises uncertain futures. When we
visit that Library exhibition tomorrow, commerce and human souls
– an exhibition that has these marvelous, incredibly telling, but
always in some way ethically compromised documents that will be
on display. Please remember what Lawrence Hill tells us about the
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Opening Keynote: Faction: Merging History and Fiction
in Someone Knows My Name / The Book of Negroes

many layers of necessity and compromise in the production of
history itself. Ladies and Gentlemen, please join me in giving a
warm UIC welcome to Lawrence Hill, whose talk today is entitled
Faction: Merging History and Fiction in Someone Knows My
Name/The Book of Negroes. Thank you. Please join me.

Lawrence Hill: Thank you very much, Natasha, for that warm introduction. Can you
hear me okay in the back seats? Thank you as well to Provost
Kaufman and to Susan Levine and Linda Vavra and all of your
colleagues at the Institute for the humanities. This is actually, I'm
ashamed to say my first visit to Chicago and I'm delighted to be
here. I live near Toronto, Canada where I was born and raised, and
my mother was from Oak Park, actually. She was raised in an
extremely conservative, I guess you might say down here,
Republican, white family in Oak Park. She lost actually access to
most of her family when she married an African-American man
and on the campus at Howard University in 1953 as they left the
United States the day after they married and moved to Toronto
where they set up base and became life-long human rights activists
fighting for the enactment of human rights legislation in Canada
and raising a family; my brother and sister and I in Don Mills, a
suburb of Toronto. Where we grew up in the early '60s, I suppose
it was a natural reaction to living and being reminded daily in the
States, my father having served in the U.S. Forces in the second
World War, that of course he was black and she was white. They
could never escape that here and so they set up in an entirely white
suburb of Don Mills, Ontario – not necessarily a great service to
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Opening Keynote: Faction: Merging History and Fiction
in Someone Knows My Name / The Book of Negroes

their children, but an understandable move on their part. And I
suppose growing up in an environment of complete ambiguity
where you're not quite sure who you are or where you fit in and
our sort of doses of black culture where limited, for the most part,
in my early childhood to ****, to D.C. or North Carolina,
Brooklyn, where all of my father's family was. We didn't really
have access to my mother's family except for a twin sister with
whom she's always remained close. So it was my father's family
that became our American family in the States. So I grew up with
a foot really in both cultures and in both countries, but planted
legally in terms of my passport in Toronto, Canada. My father was
the son of an African Methodist Episcopal church minister and also
the grandson of one, both of whom had studied at University and
gone to Lincoln or Howard. My grandfather was a Dean **** at
Howard University until his retirement in the 1960s. He was
understandably obsessed my father with the notion of education as
a means of endearing oneself perhaps against the vicissitudes of
discrimination or racial injustice. So he was very anxious that we
the children should become literate and be embarked on
professional paths. So I remember such – well, really, I must say
as a novelist that no self-respecting immigrant in Canada wants to
see their child become a novelist. They're looking for doctors,
lawyers, engineers, architects. Anything that they consider
respectable. It was with great concern that my father saw his first
son, my oldest brother, drop out of high school to become a
singer/songwriter and it was with equal palpitations that he saw me
embark in a career as a novelist. Such was his obsession that we
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Opening Keynote: Faction: Merging History and Fiction
in Someone Knows My Name / The Book of Negroes

should become literate and become thus professionals that at the
age of six he decided that I should begin to write letters for the
things that I wanted and if I wanted something badly enough I
should deliver a letter for it. He already was the Chair of the
Ontario Human Rights Commission and true to form as a
bureaucrat I had to write for the things I wanted. So at the age of
six I wanted to have a kitten and he said he can't. He would then a
veteran pet hater. You can't have a kitten, Larry. I asked a second
time. No! I asked a third time, no. But any self-respecting six
year old should ask at least a few times for something they want.
So on the third request he said if you really want that kitten go up
to your bedroom and write me a letter and tell me in the letter why
you deserve to have the cat and whose allowance will pay for its
cat food and how you will prevent it from having babies in the
closet. And if you can write me a well-rendered letter with no
spelling mistakes, I'll give your request due consideration. I got
the cat and from that point on I had to write for every single thing I
wanted. So he should never have asked me to write those letters if
he wanted me to become an architect or a doctor. He shot himself
in the foot because I became a novelist. There is really no better
way to learn to write with passion than to write for something you
want, to write to change your world, to write to obtain something,
to change the fabric of your daily life. So I wrote to get things,
which children should do, and my own five children have learned
very quickly how to get the things they want from me. So, it's
great to be here and although my father passed away ten or so
years ago my mother is still around and reads all of my
Slavery and its Aftermath in the Atlantic World: An International
Symposium
October 4-6, 2012
University of Illinois at Chicago
Opening Keynote: Faction: Merging History and Fiction
in Someone Knows My Name / The Book of Negroes

manuscripts and draft form, which is a wonderful service. Its great
to be here at this conference; Slavery in its Aftermath in the
Atlantic World. And it's interesting. I don't know if you can
identify with this but as a Canadian who, although I'm a novelist
and a former journalist, I still go in to schools, high schools and
universities to talk preps once every couple of weeks to students,
mostly in Canada. I run into a lot of opposition from students and
some teachers who really kind of roll their eyes and say, "Do we
really have to hear about slavery again? Is this doing me any
good? Do I need to hear this? What good is it? All it does is
make me feel bad and I'm tired of it. Can we get on with it? Do
we have to discuss this?" So it's a challenge to actually make the
issue of slavery relevant to students, certainly in Canada in the year
2012. I have to fight pretty hard to do it, and one of the things I do
is to talk about contemporary slavery. And although, thankfully,
the transatlantic slave trade ground to an end, for the most part, I
guess for the abolition, the British abolition of the slave trade in
1808 and then moving forward – 1807 I should say – and then
moving forward. Various forms of colossal injustice continues to
this day including contemporary slavery, and I know that experts
in the States and Canada and the UK estimate that as many as 30
million people are currently held in conditions that can only be
described as slavery. Many of them women and girls. I make this
connection, so that students aren't allowed to think that this issue is
dead and gone and doesn't need to be discussed and there's no
relevance in the dramatizing as I do of slavery to modern society.
But it is a challenge to reach out to students and to make them