Ottawa Citizen

Hill’s refugee tale of two worlds is timely

- PETER ROBB

In Freedom State, refugees are illegals. There is no safe place for people without papers. Those who need asylum from persecutio­n and perhaps death are denied and deported.

In nearby Zantorolan­d, the dissident and the different are on the run from a brutal dictatorsh­ip. Their destinatio­n: Freedom State.

This is the boiled essence of Lawrence Hill’s new book, which is satire, and allegory, set in a near future in fictional countries. It seems ripped from today’s headlines. Instead, this book formally began five years ago.

Hill says he is “terribly slow, cards on the table. I did have two other (non-fiction) books that I wrote in that period plus the miniseries (for The Book of Negroes), so I was busy with other projects.” And, he admits, “I do like to have more than one thing to do that are quite different.”

To be more accurate, he moves through non-fiction quickly helped by his reporter’s training. But it is his fiction that needs time to percolate.

“The bigger challenge for me is to invent and populate a world. It takes me years to fully invent it richly, and I can’t seem to go any faster.”

Hill says he intended to centre the novel on a character named YoYo, who was a minor character in two other novels. He had always wanted to feature him in a book. But YoYo dies early on, killed by the Zantorolan­d regime. His son Keita, a talented marathon runner, is the real centre of the story. After his father is murdered, Keita retrieves the body from a public fountain. And then he runs, knowing that he will be next.

He flees to Freedom State with nothing to his name except his running shoes and his body. The young man also needs to help his only sister, who has been kidnapped by the Zantorolan­d regime, which is demanding a ransom.

If the formal beginning of The Illegal is five years ago, another starting point was the 1980s, in West Berlin, where Hill’s sister was living.

“She was this young African-Canadian girl, and she was trying to find her African roots in the Afro-German community in Berlin. There were hundreds there in the 1980s,” Hill says.

His sister married a Sudanese man who had been a political cartoonist and who fell out of favour. All he could do in West Berlin was draw caricature­s of tourists.

“I got to know him pretty well, and it was fascinatin­g to watch all the ways people use to survive when they are living under the radar,” Hill says.

Today, refugees drown in leaky boats, suffocate in food trucks or sit stuck in a Hungarian train station with no place to go and no help available.

“This really underscore­s to me as a human being the depth of their discomfort and their despair.

“I am very interested in issues of people being displaced, whether voluntary or involuntar­y.”

Race is part of this context, although Hill stresses that in The Illegal it’s not so much about race as it is about social status, legal/illegal. Race does move with these kinds of problems, “unfortunat­ely,” he says.

He comes by his interests honestly. His father was Daniel G. Hill, the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. His mother Donna was a civil rights activist. His brother is singer-songwriter Dan Hill. His U.S.-born parents — one black, the other white — moved to Canada after they married.

The movement of people travels thematical­ly through three of his novels from, Any Known Blood, to The Book of Negroes, to The Illegal.

Why set The Illegal in the future in two fictional countries?

"Part of it was because of the weight and the struggles of The Book of Negroes; I wanted to write in a different way. I didn’t want to feel beholden to a specific geo-political reality. I didn’t want a reader to say ‘This isn’t Canada; it doesn’t work.’ I wanted to be able to pick and choose from the very worst of public policies.

“Fast-forward a bit, and imagine a country electing a government like the Front National in France. It’s a bit more believable to have a dystopia if it’s a year or two ahead of time.

“I made up the countries because I felt it would loosen up my imaginatio­n and allow my writing to be more playful and to allow me to draw from what’s going on around the world. I wanted to create a world that seemed to be a political nightmare with a really evil government coming to power.”

Despite the fact that this is a harsh, cruel and corrupt world, many of Hill’s characters are optimistic, despite their suffering. They are self-sufficient, ambitious and thinking of a possible future. His main character, the runner Keita, tries to be sunny despite his pain.

"I’ve met a lot of people in hard times, working as a volunteer in West Africa or Swaziland. They don’t wear their pain on their sleeves. You don’t do that.

“I’m not a gloomy guy.” After all, he says, why deny hope to someone who has been through so much?

His most complex, and therefore interestin­g, character is Lula, a madam who runs a brothel in what is known as AfricTown in Freedom State’s capital. It is where the stateless hide and the poor live.

She is capable of murder, and she is equally capable of offering shelter to a young man on the run.

Hill has created complex characters like this before. In The Book of Negroes, the Jewish slave-owner Solomon Lindo does some terrible things to Aminata, and yet he understand­s the horror of slavery and he does set her free in the end.

“Characters I find most interestin­g are both hero and villain. That is what makes Lula so frightenin­g to me. It is much more interestin­g to write about a person like that than to write about a straight-up evil character.”

Hill’s book is also full of insights into marathon running. He was a keen runner as a youth and young man, and he ran especially hard from age 12 to 25 when he was competing.

“I love running. I was never really good, but I certainly ran hard enough to know what it feels like to be in great pain in a long, hard race. Enduring pain is what marathonin­g is all about.” And what life in Freedom State is all about, too. The marathon becomes a powerful metaphor.

Hill’s character Keita is not running for Olympic glory.

“He’s running to hide; he’s running to flee, to earn cash to stay afloat.”

Hill has not let the celebrity that comes from the success of The Book of Negroes keep him from his desk. He splits his writing time in his daughter’s old bedroom in his Hamilton home. He has a summer home in Newfoundla­nd where he writes, as well. He shares these places with his wife Miranda Hill, a talented writer in her own right.

In addition to the new novel, Hill has been named the 2015 winner of the Governor General’s History Award for Popular Media. Also called the Pierre Berton Award, it’s given to those who popularize Canadian history in media. Hill has been recognized for his work in bringing Canadian history to a wider audience throughout his career.

This fall, Hill will embark on a densely packed three-month book tour, including a stop in Ottawa in November at Octopus Books, and then he’ll tour no more. He said he wants to avoid the trap that snared him after the publicatio­n of The Book of Negroes, which saw him travelling for years.

“I told my publisher I won’t be doing anything in 2016 except writing a new book.” The novel will be an account of the building of the Alaska Highway during the Second World War. The constructi­on crew included about 3,000 African-American soldiers from the U.S. South who were subject to segregatio­n. He says he’s been collecting informatio­n and thinking about it for five years, too.

“I’m ready to start” writing about a story that most Canadians would not know, he says.

"Sure, I’m political. I care about politics, both big P and small p. Sometimes it enters my work openly, and other times more subtly. I care about the world, and my politics enter my fiction.

“I’m trying to write good stories. I’m trying to get people to imagine what the life of an undocument­ed refugee might be like, and of course I hope that it could lead people to demand of their government to have more humane refugee policies.”

I’m trying to get people to imagine what the life of an undocument­ed refugee might be like, and of course, I hope that it could lead people to demand of their government to have more humane refugee policies. — Lawrence Hill

 ??  ?? Lawrence Hill will visit Ottawa this fall to promote The Illegal. Then he plans to stop travelling so he can write.
Lawrence Hill will visit Ottawa this fall to promote The Illegal. Then he plans to stop travelling so he can write.
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