The St. Albert Readers’ Festival always lines up a riverboat full of some of this nation’s best and brightest authors for a series of presentations and chats from the stage.
But it usually starts in October. This year, STARFest is kicking off with an early bird special, thanks to a recognizable name whose new novel was just released yesterday.
STARFest director Heather Dolman was so keen to get Lawrence Hill on the festival slate that creating a fuzzy calendar was really no big deal.
“I have been interested in having Lawrence as part of our lineup since STARFest first began in 2011, so I am thrilled that he is coming this year and that we have the opportunity to be involved in the launch of his new novel, which we are all so keen to read. I am delighted that St. Albertans get the chance to be some of the first to hear Lawrence Hill talk about his much-awaited new book.”
Hill’s name now appears on 10 titles both in the fiction and non-fiction aisles. He has won awards and acclaim for his explorations of race and history through such writings as his article Is Africa’s Pain Black America’s Burden? that was published in The Walrus.
His third novel, The Book of Negroes, captured the public’s attention in some dramatic ways. Before it was turned into a CBC miniseries, the novel famously drew the ire of some readers who objected to the racial epithet in the title, despite its factual historical basis. That led him to write Dear Sir: I Intend to Burn Your Book in response to one person’s public act of protest against it.
A former Globe and Mail reporter, Hill is a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada this July.
The Illegal is Hill’s story of a refugee who has made his name as a marathon runner. Keita Ali must take on a new race as he tries to survive while fleeing from a government of oppression, repression and suppression. Zantoroland might be a fictional setting but the characters and the circumstances ring as true as real life, as stories of mass migrations of political fugitives are a regular fixture on the news.
Hill will open STARFest when he will be hosted by writer Diana Davidson this Friday at 7 p.m. on the Arden Theatre stage.
Tickets are $10 and are available online at www.STARFest.ca or at the customer service desk in the library.
The Gazette spoke with Hill last week and discussed the impact of his work and the power of storytelling.
Gazette: When you wrote The Book of Negroes, there was a bit of backlash about the use of the word ‘negroes,’ which took some of the attention away from the book itself. Can you talk about the need to tell stories that aren’t necessarily palatable or that remind us of painful histories?
Lawrence Hill: “There wasn’t any backlash in Canada. Canadians, on the whole, really welcomed the title and welcomed the chance it gave them to learn about a part of history that most of them hadn’t heard of before. The response that was negative was limited to two specific situations: one was that the American publisher required me to change the title. Finally, after years of having to have a changed title, they reverted to the original title when the miniseries came out.
The place where it was a hot button was in the Netherlands where a small group of Surinamese Dutch burned copies of the cover of the book because they were so offended … by the Dutch translation of the word ‘negro.’ Even there, it was a very incendiary – literally incendiary – response but it wasn’t a broad-based thing. It was a small group of very disgruntled people. Most of the Surinamese and black community actually welcomed the book and welcomed me to talk about it.
It wasn’t so much that I was trying to write about something that wasn’t palatable. I was just trying to write about something I found was A, fascinating and dramatic, and B, pretty well forgotten or swept under the rug or neglected. I don’t think that Canadians wilfully chose to not know this history. They just complacently forgot it and never bothered teaching it or learning about it. It just slipped out of our consciousness almost entirely.”
Gazette: How important is it to portray history in your work?
Hill: “I like the idea that The Book of Negroes – the possibility that it gave me – to popularize a part of history that was really unknown to most Canadians, and unknown to me before I began to research the book. Even though I had learned a lot about black history and my parents had written books about it, and I grew up learning about it as a child. I didn’t know the story of the Black Loyalists in any depth … so I was learning too.
It feels great to popularize history through fiction and art. It gives people a foothold often into who we are it seems less dry and more engaging to see a dramatic struggle. It gives a reader a chance to step into something that would otherwise seem dry and dusty and boring.”
Gazette: When I first opened up The Illegal, I didn’t think it was going to be dry and dusty. Considering the content and its relevance to world politics, do you consider this story as a kind of ‘future historical?’
Hill: “I wouldn’t use the word ‘historical’ in my vocabulary. It’s mildly futuristic because it’s set in 2018, just one step ahead of where we are. I wanted the reader to believe that the world had changed and to buy some of the problems that are happening that aren’t exactly what were happening when I first started writing. Paradoxically, some of those problems are happening right now before we even get to 2018.
The futuristic setting is to persuade readers that this is a dystopia. It’s a future gone awry. We in Freedom State [the fictional country in the book] have elected government that is incredibly hostile to refugees, which I don’t think is inconceivable.”
Gazette: Do you consider your work to be solid fiction but with the intent of making sure that readers keep their consciences on alert?
Hill: “Yes, for sure. Absolutely, it’s fiction 100 per cent. I’m hoping to provoke the reader and also encourage the reader, as I did with The Book of Negroes, to see beyond a word, which tends to mask a person’s humanity – like ‘refugee’ and actually imagine a person and the plight that they’re facing. If we can imagine what people’s lives really look like then we’re more likely to step in and do the right thing.
I’ve written to provoke and challenge, but most of all challenge the imagination of readers.”
