Title:
Hinterland

Author: Dawn Forrester Price

Reviewed by: Andrene Bonner

“The guaranteeing of man’s basic freedoms and rights requires courage and eternal vigilance: courage to speak and act – and if necessary, to suffer and die — for truth and justice.”

— Emperor Haile Selassie,
The First of Ethiopia.

Hinterland, the sequel to
Run To Freedom: An 18th Century Jamaican Adventure Story, focuses on the young hero Kofi’s sister, Prudence. The first chapter gives the reader a window into her daily life, her stolen education, and her training as a nurse on the plantation. Our first view of Prudence in the new world, mountainous Maroon country, is her palpable relief that she successfully protected her book on the run from the plantation. She is an avid reader, a rarity in those times because of prohibitions, but readers learn right away that Prudence is reading
Aesop’s Fables, which is certainly not top of the canon for African cosmology. The Maroons let her know soon enough that Aesop’s fables are not proper education. Not lost on the reader is the idea that the Maroons were literate in their respective African societies and had acquired literacy in this story world.

Although Prudence is a runaway, they regard her as an outcast. Maroon society is not exempt from its share of xenophobia. She struggles with false beliefs about freedom and as the story unwinds, life compels her to cross the Rubicon from slave to citizen. Prudence must unlearn the limited scope of her former existence. She has to develop self-reliance and embrace the knowledge of her true self in the strict Maroon society. Her Hinterland is not only external but internal.

Prudence’s growing humility and resilience reveals her unique potential to Queen Mother, Yaahyah, who now grooms her for leadership in Bushcraft healing and the position of traditional griot. In today’s language, one would say she pursued a Double Major in Maroon Education.

In Hinterland, Forrester Price evokes the Divine Feminine, the inimitable spirit of the goddess to protect, nurture, teach, and heal. Her divine archetypes are decidedly African. It’s not a surprise to the modern reader, as we now know that most enslaved Africans arrived in the Caribbean with belief systems and cultural experiences that included female deities and rulers. Scholars of African cosmology have translated ancient sacred Yoruba text which depict numerous female deities and orishas within the pantheon of Gods. Some female gods are ranked higher than orishas. According to Nwando Achebe in her book Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa, the Tarakiri Ezon people in the Niger Delta have a female creator god named Ayebau.

Women also held high station in culture and politics. Throughout history, the African woman has played a significant role in defining an African Cosmology. Mothering moves from the family compound to the national sphere. She becomes a warrior and financier. Her soft skills run the gamut from mediation to strategy. Not only does she record the word, but she also interprets the word for her people. The Akan of West Africa and the Tuareg of North and West Africa are notable matrilineal cultures in the world. Forrester Price demonstrates that the matriarchy in these African societies is now co-opted into the Jamaican reality.

Structurally,
Run to Freedom is a framed narrative of stories within stories, told in different enslaved voices in their quest for freedom. This technique anchors the narrative in its social, cultural, historical, and emotional context to strengthen and illuminate resistance. For example, when Prudence is conscripted to deliver a cypher to YaahYah through the underground, she identifies the sender as Cripple John. YaahYah corrects Prudence by telling her that the name is a pejorative for this man, who is, in fact, her brother. She tells the heroic story of how her brother, pursued and recaptured, survived the massa’s torture. The moment with Prudence functions as quiet resistance, a ceremonial reclaiming of Cripple John’s true name: Nana Kweisi Kopon. As modern philosopher Paulo Freire argues, “Freedom … must be pursued constantly and responsibly.”

Sometimes, the framed narrative serves as a history lesson. In an effort to educate Prudence about the important roles women played in Africa, an elder sends her to griot storytelling in the village square. Born into slavery, Prudence is a product of the early Caribbean. She doesn’t speak any of the mother tongues. The male griot’s performance of the “story of Queen Amina of the Hausa people” left Prudence bewildered. The narrator tells us “He sang in the Maroon Talk that she was still trying to learn.” However, she showed studiousness and asked Chika to translate so she could learn. This may well be another indication of the emergence of a Caribbean cosmology/culture — which is the intersection between African traditions and, unfortunately, those traditions of the massa.

Other themes besides the development of Caribbean cosmology, displacement, confinement, and the search for freedom permeate the novels. Loss of innocence, family ties, healing, and renewal are intricately woven to tell a rich story of the human spirit, the capacity to endure, overcome, and take agency.

Conservationists and environmentalists will applaud Forrester Price for planting trees in every chapter. By the end of these two books, she has planted an entire forest of diverse genus. Thematically, trees are a constant reminder that human beings are resilient. As readers of Caribbean history, we are also aware that trees simultaneously provided natural fortification and concealment in war, weapons, food, and shelter for the Maroons during their many battles with the British.

This series is an opportunity to teach students about the environment, how they can become responsible citizens in preserving trees, especially in the wake of global warming. Ironically, the beauty and biodiversity of the Cockpit Country, where the enslaved found freedom in this work, is now in danger of losing its luster and value to foreign mining companies. This is clearly economic and environmental injustice, and subjugation being imposed on a post-slavery—free society.

Allyship is another important theme in Hinterland. One wonderful gem in this instalment is the inclusion of relatable Taino characters, Anacaona, and her brother Amanek. Their strong support and friendship with Prudence and the other mountain children help them strategise to fight oppression. Archaeologists have found artifacts, evidence of Taino life in pre-Columbian Jamaica. As far as the history books go, disease and poor treatment completely decimated the Tainos. Anacaona and Amanek’s presence compel the reader to reimagine the Jamaican past. Today, Tainos are very much alive in Jamaica and are committed to the preservation of their heritage. Equally significant is a young character, Miguel, of Spanish heritage, who is involved in the underground movement.

If you enjoy the mystery and adventure of young protagonists in the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, themes of friendship, loyalty and betrayal in historical fiction like Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, family saga of Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage The Bones, and the real-life story of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, you will find the Run To Freedom series as exciting, character centred with deep emotions driving the plot. This time, you are in the tropics with African, Taino, and mulatto children, who reject confinement. The Run To Freedom series is an important work of literary merit that belongs in every school library and/or curriculum.

Andrene Bonner is a US-based Jamaican educator, playwright, and award-winning author of a literacy fiction series, four non-fiction books about student resilience, full-length cultural dramas on African American and Caribbean history, and a book of poetry. Bonner has lectured on Race, Class, Culture and Resistance, Parent-Student-Teacher Partnership, Linguistic Variations: What Makes Our Students Linguistically Diverse and How Do We Teach Them English, and Re-Imagining Literacy in Physical Education. She is the founder of Literacy Gateway Institute (LGI), where she develops curricula and wellness tools. She created the LGI Co-Teaching Model and runs a Parent Co-Teaching Bootcamp for individuals and groups. She is an alumna of the Lincoln Center Education Learning Labs for Artists and Educators, a member of the International Women’s Writing Guild (IWWG), and serves on the governing board of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (ACWWS).