Join the Burton Wire on Friday, March 27, 2015 at 3:30 p.m. for a Google Hangout with Lawrence Hill, the award-winning author of the novel “Someone Knows My Name.” Hill co-wrote the screen adaption of the novel, The Book of Negroes, which ran as a miniseries on BET during the month of February. Hill will be joined by actor/musician/artivist Antonio David Lyons and actor/musician Anthony Oseyemi, who played the characters of Happy Jack and Donte in the miniseries. The BW‘s Google Hangout producer Chetachi Egwu, Ph.D. and BW founder & editor-in-chief Nsenga Burton, Ph.D., both of whom are media scholars, will join in the discussion.
Starring Aunjanue Ellis as Aminata Diallo and Lyriq Bent as Chekura Tiano, The Book of Negroes tells the story of Aminata, an 11-year-old girl kidnapped from West Africa and her personal and spiritual journey as part of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which took her to South Carolina, Massachusetts, Canada and Sierra Leone.
“Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle—a string of slaves—Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes.”
A sweeping story that transports the reader from a tribal African village to a plantation in the southern United States, from the teeming Halifax docks to the manor houses of London, The Book of Negroes introduces one of the strongest female characters in recent Canadian fiction, one who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her colour and her sex.
Published around the world, under various titles (The Book of Negroes, Someone Knows My Name and Aminata), the novel won the overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen Award, CBC Radio’s Canada Reads and Radio Canada’s Le combat des livres. An illustrated edition of the novel, with paintings and historical documents, is available from HarperCollins Canada.” – LawrenceHill.com
Join us for a lively discussion about the novel and the miniseries. Check out the Google Hangout here.
