by Sienna Brown
One of the pivotal pieces of information I found was the 1817 slave register. It not only gave me an incredible amount of information, but also a list of characters around whom I could build a narrative. But I was still left with the dilemma of developing an authentic voice for the novel.
How did nineteenth-century slaves speak? This was very important to me to find out, and I consulted books written in the period, trial transcripts and the Dictionary of Jamaican English by F. G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page, second edition, 1980 (which coincidentally my mum contributed to), to see if I could emulate the patois of the slaves. There are many challenges in this, least of all the fact that I was trying to commit to writing a language and grammar that is predominantly spoken, and at the same time trying to balance the needs of constructing a narrative against the needs of fealty to historical details. Ultimately, though, I realised that as the author, it was up to me to listen carefully to the voices my characters were speaking in, and convey them on the page. The end result was that while I borrow heavily from recorded conventions of Jamaican patois, I have also put my own twist on it, in order to allow William’s story, and that of his fellow slaves, to shine. Hopefully it satisfies the spirit of William, who lingers still.
Sienna Brown was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in Canada. But it wasn’t until a move to Sydney that she came across William Buchanan’s story and was struck with a sense of fate – this story of a lost man far from home resonated with her own feelings of displacement. A lifelong storyteller and daughter of Jamaican parents, Sienna was captivated by William’s story and the way it intersected with her own cultural background. She is a professional dancer, film editor and documentary director by trade, and worked at Sydney Living Museums, where she first came across William’s story. She is currently working on her second novel.
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First published by Vintage, an imprint of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2019
Copyright © Sienna Brown 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or its authorised licensees.
Cover image by Jill Battaglia/Arcangel
Cover design by Louisa Maggio © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd
ISBN 9780143787549
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