Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book

An Anatomy of a Book Burning

Lawrence Hill

• Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780888647085
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

"Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book." Last June, I received an astonishing email from a man in The Netherlands who began with "Dear Sir Lawrence Hill" but who went on to say that he did not accept the title The Book of Negroes and would therefore burn my novel in a public park in Amsterdam. The astonishing array of events that led him to live up to his promise-while Dutch TV cameras rolled-made me think more broadly about all the different ways that books have elicited paranoid and violent responses over the years. The 17th century Italian scientist Galileo was jailed for the rest of his life and saw his writings banned because he dared to suggest that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Perhaps it is tempting to assume that it was only in other lands and centuries that arguments were shut down, books banned, and authors imprisoned or executed for publishing their ideas. But the fear of ideas, and of the free expression of imagination and argument, continues to define modern approaches to literature. In recent years, I have seen Three Wishes by the award-winning Canadian author Deborah Ellis pulled from school shelves because it allowed Israeli and Palestinian children to speak about what it was like to live in a war zone, and the American writer Joyce Carol Oates' novel Foxfire yanked from study in an Ontario school because it contained profanities. Who is leading the charge to ban, censor, or control the distribution of books? Is it working? What price do we pay for these efforts? And where do we go from here?

Dear Sir, I Intend to

Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book

An Anatomy of a Book Burning

IN JUNE 2011, less than a month after launching the Dutch edition of my novel, The Book of Negroes, in The Netherlands, I received the most surprising email of my life. It is worth quoting verbatim:

Dear Sir Lawrence Hill,

We, descendants of enslaved in the former Dutch colony Suriname, want let you know that we do not accept a book with the title “The book of Negroes.”

We struggle for a long time to let the word “nigger” disappears from Dutch language and now you set up your book of Negroes! A real shame!

That’s why we make the decision to burn this book on the 22nd of June 2011.

Maybe you do not know, but June is the month before the 1st of July, the day that we remember the abolition from the Dutch, who put our ancestors in slavery.

Sincerely,

ROY GROENBERG,

Chairman Foundation Honor and Restore Victims of Slavery in Suriname

Attached to the email was a handwritten poster saying, in Dutch, “Summons to Afro-Surinamese-Dutch people to come to Bookburning in Oosterpark near the monument.”

I wrote a reply that, in retrospect, seems outrageously Canadian in its politeness and tact. Here’s what I said:

Dear Mr. Groenberg,

I am very sorry to hear of your plans to burn my book.

Are you aware of the historical origins of the title? It is a historical novel. “The Book of Negroes” is the name of a British military ledger, that documented the exodus of 3,000 African Americans from New York City to Nova Scotia, Canada at the end of the American Revolutionary War. It is a very important genealogical document, as it provides a great deal of biographical information about the Blacks who migrated from the USA to Canada in 1783. The original copy of this document is kept in the National Archives in the UK. The document is central to my novel. My main character must have her name entered into “The Book of Negroes” before she, like 3,000 other Blacks fleeing American slavery, is allowed to sail to Canada.

The use of the title, “The Book of Negroes” (or “Het Negerboek” in Dutch) has offered me the opportunity to explain this history, which is fascinating, important and troubling, to many thousands of readers in Canada, the UK, The Netherlands and elsewhere. I have found that when given the opportunity to see what I am doing in this book and with this title, readers understand that the title is not intended to be offensive, but that it is used historically, to shed light on a forgotten document and on a forgotten migration (that of thousands of Blacks from the USA to Canada in 1783).

Did you know that I gave a talk recently about this book, its historical origins, and the title, to the Surinamese group NiNsee in Amsterdam last month?

Before you proceed with your plans to burn my novel, would you like to have a conversation about this?

Thank you,

LAWRENCE HILL

As you may imagine, the conversation never took place. Mr. Groenberg went on to burn not the real book, but copies of the cover of my novel for Dutch TV cameras in the popular Oosterpark in Amsterdam, next to a monument commemorating the victims of Dutch slavery. I am not certain about the motivation for his actions. Perhaps his actions were inspired by a previous incident of book destruction in Amsterdam. I don’t know why Mr. Groenberg pulled back. Maybe the burning of the covers sufficed for the photographers. From a comfortable chair on this side of the ocean, I suppose that some might find the entire episode laughable. It really shook me up. Obviously, I felt deeply troubled that a work to which I had given five years of passion and attention and integrity should attract such a hateful act. To me, the entire point of the novel was to offer dignity, depth and dimensionality to a person whose very humanity would have been assaulted as a slave. From my perspective, Mr. Groenberg and I should have been on the same side of issues having to do with the treatment and depiction of people in the African Diaspora. My publisher felt ashamed to see the book assailed in this manner and defended the book vigorously. She received a death threat and decided not to attend the book cover burning to see it for herself.

It wasn’t the first time the title of my novel has encountered difficulties. Several months after it appeared in Canada under the title The Book of Negroes, my American publisher informed me right before going to the printer that it was changing the name of the novel. Why? Because US bookstores were refusing to place advance orders for my novel because the word “Negroes” was in the title. I was on book tour in Germany at the time that I received this last-minute email from my editor in Manhattan, and the most I could negotiate was that I would be the one to come up with a new title for the American edition. I had about 72 hours to conjure up a new title, and found it with the assistance of my then ten-year-old stepdaughter Eve Freedman—more on her later—in a little hotel in the town of Greifswald in the former East Germany on the Baltic Sea. In the United States, and later in Australia and New Zealand, my novel was published under the title Someone Knows My Name.

It was a frustrating exercise. I didn’t like having the title changed on me, but as time went on I came to appreciate that the word “Negroes” has become offensive in American culture—particularly in Black urban culture, where its meaning has evolved over time.

My father proudly called himself a Negro for most of his life. Indeed, when he was named Chair of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1973, the Globe and Mail ran a headline that said “Commission appoints Negro Chair.” It was meant to be a polite headline, at the time. But that was 1973 and times have changed. These days, on the streets of urban America, calling a person a “Negro” implies that he or she is an inauthentic Black person with no self-pride and no self-respect. While I have been on book tours in the United States, over and over again African Americans have come up to me and said, “It’s a good thing you changed the title of your book, because I would never have bought your book or come hear you speak if you had called it The Book of Negroes down here.”

So, in joining J.K. Rowling and Alice Munro as just some of the many British and Canadian writers whose titles have been altered to suit the whims of American publishers, I eventually came to appreciate that there was a deep, simmering anger ove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Liminaire
• Introduction
• Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book
• Notes
• About the Author
• Henry Kriesel Lecture Series