My mum's Wednesday TV schedule - Jan 2015

Wednesday is the day for Arrow.  My mum won't miss it even it is not a new episode.  From this January, my mum has a new favorite Wednesday TV show.  It is a miniseries from CBC.

8:00 pm Arrow CTV / CW

9:00 pm The Book of Negroes CBC

10:00 pm The National CBC

My mum watched the first episode of The Book of Negroes last Wednesday and she loved it very much.  Mum, isn't it not good to use this "N" word?

Instead of using her words, my mum showed me a web page from Wikipedia.  Oh, yeah, my mum is computer-literature.  Here is a quote from the site - The Book of Negroes. 

 "I (the writer - Lawrence Hill) used The Book of Negroes as the title for my novel, in Canada, because it derives from a historical document of the same name kept by British naval officers at the tail end of the American Revolutionary War. It documents the 3,000 blacks who had served the King in the war and were fleeing Manhattan for Canada in 1783. Unless you were in The Book of Negroes, you couldn't escape to Canada. My character, an African woman named Aminata Diallo whose story is based on this history, has to get into the book before she gets out. In my country (Canada), few people have complained to me about the title, and nobody continues to do so after I explain its historical origins. I think it's partly because the word 'Negro' resonates differently in Canada. If you use it in Toronto or Montreal, you are probably just indicating publicly that you are out of touch with how people speak these days. But if you use it in Brooklyn or Boston, you are asking to have your nose broken. When I began touring with the novel in some of the major US cities, literary African-Americans kept approaching me and telling me it was a good thing indeed that the title had changed, because they would never have touched the book with its Canadian title."

This award-winning Canadian novel "The Book of Negroes" was published as "Someone Knows My Name" in the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Uh huh, "The Book of Negroes" is an important official historical document.

Okay, here is the storyline.

Main female character Aminata was kidnapped in Africa and forced to be a slave in South Carolina at the age of 11.  Since she served the British during the American Revolutionary War, Aminata's name is entered in the historical document "Book of Negroes".  Then, she gained the permission to resettle in Nova Scotia, Canada.  But, later on, she relocated to Sierra Leone with other settlers from Nova Scotia.  When she realized that she should help to free her own African people, she went to England to help abolish the slave trade.

What a story!  This is part of Canadian history which we should all know.  Thank you Lawrence Hill for writing this fantastic story.  Thank you CBC for making this remarkable miniseries.

This is a 10 out of 10 must see TV show for 2015 Winter/Spring, according to my mum.


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