Are We Listening?

Hardy and I have been watching The Book of Negroes, a six-part  TV miniseries . Based on a novel by Lawrence Hill, ( 2007) it depicts the harrowing journey of Aminata Diallo from Niger, West Africa to South Carolina in the United States, and her return home after being forced into slavery as an eleven-year-old child.  I read it in 2009, and in light of what is happening around us, this is a good time for me to read it again.

Lawrence Hill uses Aminata's voice to emphasize the importance of story-telling. In the novel, Aminata says:
"I saw things that the people of London would never believe. They cannot know what we endured if we never find anyone to listen. In telling my story, I remember all those who never made it through the musket balls and the sharks and the nightmares, all those who never found a group of listeners, and all those who never touched a quill and an ink pot."

Slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833 and in the Americas in 1865, but racism continued to flourish. Although Lawrence Hill's novel was published in 2007 and won acclaims and awards worldwide, it did not seem to change the plight of people of color much. They are still being discriminated against, even by those who are supposed to set things right, our law enforcement officers.

As a young child, African civil and human rights activist Ella Baker (1903-1986) listened to her grandmother's horror stories of life as a slave. She wrote: "In order to see where we are going, we must not only remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been".

If story-telling brings to our memory those who endured and causes us to think about the events that happened in their lives, we can begin to understand and thus change can occur. But why does it happen so slowly, and why do we continue to repeat the same mistakes? Probably we aren't listening.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I am writing the story of my childhood for my grandchildren and sending it to them a couple of pages at a time. One grandchild reminds me when I haven't sent anything for a while, so someone is reading and that makes it worth my while.

Last week our extended Winnipeg family of ten was together at a cottage near Lac du Bonnet, about 90 minutes northeast of Winnipeg. Unfortunately, our Ontario family with half of our eight grandchildren could not join us because of the coronavirus pandemic. There was a glimmer of hope early on, but Manitobans wisely decided it was not yet time to open the borders. We are still hoping that we can see them in October. We have stories to tell each other!