Reading into it

MLIS student Melanie Parlette and Student Academic Success Services' Patricia DeMéo want you to read The Book of Negroes (Nick Pearce photo)

The only thing better than reading a great book is talking about it.

In that spirit, Student Servies has organized Dal Reads!, a sort of all-school book club that is encouraging students, but especially incoming first years, to read Lawrence Hill’s award-winning Canadian novel The Book of Negroes.

Though a fictional tale, Hill’s novel was inspired by a real document called “The Book of Negroes,” a handwritten ledger around 150 pages long which documents all of the Black Loyalists who were allowed passage to Canada on British ships following the end of the American Revolutionary War. The British proclaimed that they would make any slave who would fight with them free at the end of the war. In this way, 3,000 slaves found their ‘freedom’. The novel tells the story of Aminata, a young enslaved West African girl sold into slavery and taken to America. It follows the journey that, after many trials and tribulations, leads her to Nova Scotia and – eventually – back to Africa.

An inspirational tale touting the strength of the human spirit, it is no wonder that The Book of Negroes has received many awards. In 2007, it won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, in 2008 the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and in 2009 beat out a myriad of other Canadian novels to take first place in CBC’s Canada Reads! competition.

It’s in the spirit of that competition that Bonnie Neuman, vice-president of Student Services, and Patricia DeMéo, director of Student Academic Success Services, launched the Dal Reads! initiative. 

The idea is to get people around the university talking about the book, especially incoming freshmen. Any first years who read the book will have the opportunity during Welcome Week to sign up for discussions with other students led by faculty with a special interest in the book. The groups will be small and organized on a first-come, first-serve basis, so they will include a mix of different students from different departments who might not otherwise get to meet. The organizers have booked cozy, intimate venues for the discussions, so participating students will have a chance to get comfortable and take some downtime during the often overwhelming first few days in their new home.

Ms. DeMéo is very enthusiastic about the project. Besides exposing the Dalhousie community to a great book, Dal Reads! will give new students a chance to get to know each other and Dal faculty in a quieter and more scholastic environment. She hopes that this will help get shyer, more intellectually-inclined students to come out of their shells a little. As well, she said, the program will “increase the academic portion of orientation, and increase awareness of this significant part of our province’s cultural heritage.”

Aside from Orientation Week, the initiative to read the book is the beginning of many upcoming celebrations – this October marks the 20th anniversary of the Black Student Advising Centre at Dal. Professors are also being encouraged to integrate the book into their curriculum, and all of Dal is encouraged to use the book to get chatting.

With help from Melanie Parlette, an MLIS student who is organizing a blog and discussion about the novel, organizers are hoping that Dal Reads! Lawrence Hill’s book. The Book of Negroes should be available in libraries and in bookstores everywhere, so get reading!

For more information on Dal Reads!, you can read Ms. Parlette’s blog at http://blogs.dal.ca/dalreads And for more information on the original Book of Negroes, you can go to the source itself: http://www.gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/africanns/book.asp