Someone Knows My Name

“Never have I met a person doing terrible things who would meet my own eyes peacefully. To gaze into another person’s face is to do two things: to recognize their humanity, and to assert your own.” 

When being moved by slave traders, Aminata notices that those in charge do not look into the eyes of the captives. By refusing to do so, slavers refuse to acknowledge the humanity of slaves and make no effort to assert their own. Disregarding the slaves’ humanity makes the act of slavery all the easier, but is also diminishes the slavers’ humanity in the eyes of the captives.

“One day, our captors stopped at a fork in the path and saluted a new breed of man. Skin speckled, like that of a washed pig. Shrunken lips, blackened teeth. But big, tall, and standing like a chief, chest out. So this was a toubab!” 

This vivid description of white men holds a distinct irony. White men commonly refer to the savagery and barbarism of Africans to justify the act of slavery. Yet in her first encounter with white men, Aminata sees only animalistic characteristics, comparing their skin to that of a pig.

“I imagined the biggest lion of my land—as big as the lion mountain on shore, but living and breathing and hungry. It seemed as if we were being taken straight into its anus. The lion had already rampaged through the villages and swallowed all the people live, and was now keeping them stacked and barely breathing in the faint light of its belly.” 

When she is led into the slave ship’s hold, a young Aminata imagines the slave ship to be a gigantic lion. In this metaphor, the lion, or slavery, swallows the people of her homeland and holds them in the lowest, darkest part of the belly—the anus. The metaphor describes the darkness and stench in the hold. The captives are tightly packed like half-digested food deep in its belly, unable to escape.

“Someone knows my name. Seeing you makes me want to live.” 

Defining the story’s core theme and the novel’s title, Chekura’s statement depicts the captives’ struggle to hold on to identity. The grim conditions the captives endure in the slave ship nearly strip each person of their humanity, rendering them bodies without souls. The simple act of one person acknowledging another by name gives the captives motive to survive, and evidence that their souls do still exist.

“The abolitionists may well call me their equal, but their lips do not yet say my name and their ears do not yet hear my story. Not the way I want to tell it. But I have long loved the written word, and come to see it in the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.” 

In another lion metaphor, an elderly Aminata imagines her story as a sleeping lion lying in wait. Though the abolitionists claim to be helping her, they do not know who she really is, what really happened to her, or the truth of slavery simply because they refuse to acknowledge it. Aminata understands the power of her own words and how writing her experience can give her name and story the recognition that the abolitionists can’t give. The restful beast will awaken once written to defend her name and story to the world.

“Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons.” 

Aminata depicts just how deeply Africans are buried in slavery by comparing it to the way peanuts are buried in candy and indigo is buried in glass. Slavery is such a deep part of the English way of life that their only acknowledgement of the African existence is in seeing them as slaves.

“I belong to nobody, and I am not an African. I am a Bamana. And a Fula. I am from Bayo near Segu. I am not what you say. I am not an African.” 

Aminata refuses to be called an African, a term she never heard until she reached the Americas. The oversimplified categorization of all people from Africa speaks to the white man’s limited understanding of African humanity. The variety of African cultures, nations, and tribes is completely disregarded to better serve the narrative of the savage, uncultured African and to justify slavery.

“How did it come to be that he owned me, and all the others? I wondered if he owned me at all times, or only when I was working for him. Did he own me when I slept? When I dreamed?”

The nuances of slavery, such as when a person is owned, make no sense to Aminata. She ponders the absurdity of a person being owned by another, particularly in the things that make up unique individuals. This includes dreams, both the ones that occur when asleep and the ones a person has of the future.

“We held each other longer each time he came to visit. Something stirred down in my belly and between my legs. But I didn’t trust those feelings. I wanted to hold on to his voice and the sounds of my village in them.” 

Aminata experiences feelings of desire associated with womanhood when she is first reunited with Chekura on Appleby’s farm. Although this marks that she has grown into a woman, her desire for anything that feels like her homeland surpasses other natural desires. She clings to Chekura as a means of clinging to her identity.

“That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn’t matter; in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.” 

When she is first brought to Charles Town, Aminata sees a slave auction similar to the one she was sold at. Her inability to do anything for the slaves or herself causes her to realize the nature of slavery. For Aminata, slavery is the erasure of any past identity, the prevention of the formation any present identity, and the inability to decide one’s own future.

“In one corner of the map, I saw a sketch of an African child lying beside a lion under a tree. I had never seen such a ridiculous thing. No child would be foolish enough to sleep with a lion. […] This ‘Mapp of Africa’ was not my homeland. It was a white man’s fantasy.” 

To find a way back to her homeland, Aminata studies maps of Africa and is greatly disappointed. Rather than the detail expected of a map, she only finds pictures of Africans with wild animals. The map shows nothing of Africa except what the white men fantasize it to be, building on the white man’s disinterest in truly understanding Africa and the narrative of the savage African.

“I had now written my name on a public document, and I was a person, with just as much right to life and liberty as the man who claimed to own me.” 

Before arriving in New York, Aminata must keep her literacy a secret. However, the act of writing her name on a register at the Fraunces Tavern makes her feel free, demonstrating the underlying theme of the power of language. The repeated symbol of the link between names and identity is evident as Aminata’s identity is reinforced when she writes her name on a public document.

“‘Freedom? For the slaves’ ‘Niggers, nothing. I’m talking about us. Rebels. Patriots. We shall be free of the British and their taxes. Never again shall we be slaves. Are you with the rebels or the Tories?’ ‘Does it matter?’” 

The irony of the American War of Independence is clear when contrasted with the slavery that binds Negroes. Rebels believe they are enslaved but fail to acknowledge the immorality of literal slavery when fighting for freedom. To Aminata, it doesn’t matter whom she sides with, as slaves will remain in their chains either way.

“Nearly twenty years had passed since I was seized in the woods outside Bayo, but here I was, all alone and surrounded by the trees of another continent—and I was free again.” 

Aminata’s story comes full circle when she escapes from Lindo and arrives in the woods of Manhattan. As the climactic moment of the story, Aminata takes back her freedom in the woods, just as she was free in the woods outside Bayo before being snatched away.

“I liked writing names in the Book of Negroes, recording how people obtained their freedom, how old they were and where they had been born. […] I loved the way people followed the movement of my hand as I wrote down their names and the way they made me read them aloud once I was done.” 

The “Book of Negroes” highlights the theme of the power of language, where the ability to read and write gives Aminata the power to help the Negroes attain freedom. The illiterate Negroes are entranced by her ability to write, by the words serving as a testament to their stories. This make Aminata realize that others also have experiences as unique as her own, highlighting the truth that every person has a story.

“My children were like phantom limbs, lost but still attached to me, gone but still painful.” 

Aminata compares her lost children to phantom limbs. In this metaphor she expresses the similarity between losing a limb and the constant pain of having lost both her children. Her children are part of her existence just as limbs are a part of the body, and nothing can erase that pain.

“You have the face of someone born in this land, but you come with the toubabu. You are a toubab with a black face.” 

Despite considering Africa to be her homeland her entire life, the Temne people of Sierra Leone consider Aminata to be just as much an outsider as the toubab, which frustrates her. Aminata must come to terms with who she really is; the fact that she spent most of her life with the toubabu complicates the identity she has clung to her entire life.

“I tried to tell myself I was powerless to free them, but in truth, the mere sight of them made me feel complicit and guilty. The only moral course of action was to lay down my life to stop the theft of men. But how exactly could I lay down my life, and what, in the end, would stop it at all?” 

When Aminata returns to Bance Island, the sight of shackled captives grunting and moaning disturbs her. Her inability to act makes her feel as if she is allowing it to happen, and the only thing she can do is lay down her life. She understands just how impossible it is for her to stop slave trade on her own.

“There is no profit in benevolence […] None. The colony in Freetown is child’s play, financed by the deep pockets of rich abolitionists who don’t know a thing about Africa.” 

Armstrong, the head slaver of Bance Island, argues with Aminata about the morality of slavery. He reasons that benevolence doesn’t do anything for the economy, and that Freetown proves this. The colony of free blacks is unable to produce a single export or be self-sufficient, and it is funded by rich abolitionists who ignore the grim fact that slavery is necessary to maintain the production of exports. The bitter facts complicate the narrative of slavery; the vicious cycle can never be defined within the simple terms of the oppressor and the oppressed.

“Who was to blame for all this evil, and who had started it? If I ever got home to Bayo again, would people in the village still be at risk of being valued, and stolen?” 

When Aminata witnesses slave traders negotiating the prices of slaves in exchange for imported goods, she remembers the many times she was sold and revalued throughout her life. The vicious cycle of trade has a long list of perpetrators, making it difficult to pinpoint the true origin of slavery’s evil and whether the risk of enslavement will ever truly disappear for Africans.

“I realized that I wasn’t concerned any longer with the things I wanted to do, but rather, with the place I wanted to be. All I really wanted was to return to the place where my life began.” 

During her journey toward Bayo, Aminata realizes that she never considered what she would do there. Her focus has always been on her place of origin, on the life that was snatched away from her, as if returning to her birthplace would erase all the tragedy that befell her.

“I would sooner swallow poison than live twenty years as the property of another man—African or toubab. Bayo, I could live without. But for freedom, I would die.” 

The prospect of being enslaved again makes Aminata abandon her lifelong dream of returning to Bayo. Experiencing both slavery and freedom has realigned Aminata’s priorities—she can happily forget the home that most likely no longer exists for the sake of the very real freedom she now has.

“I wondered what the people of my homeland would ask if they knew I had met with the toubabu faama—the grand chief of England. Never in a million years would they believe that he suffered from an illness in his head and had chosen an African queen.” 

In an ironic juxtaposition, the reader is forced to imagine the monarchs of England alongside African slaves. The king is just as mad as many captives become through slavery, and the queen has physical characteristics similar to African women. This forced comparison reiterates the truth of humanity—the monarchs of the greatest slaving nation on Earth are not much different from the Africans they allow to be bought and sold.