The Oppression of Outcasts in The Illegal by Lawrence Hill (Book Analysis)

📌Category: Books
📌Words: 460
📌Pages: 2
📌Published: 01 February 2022

In Canadian history, there is an evident pattern of oppression due to not fitting into society's norms. To be more precise, those who look, think, or feel differently from the majority of people are perceived by humanity as inferior. Consider how the Indigenous peoples were treated in Canada; this resulted in wars, assimilation, oppression, and segregation. We see this pattern once again in the history of Africtown, and similarly in The Illegal. Lawrence Hill uses this authentic history of Canada to provide readers with an insightful representation of how oppression affects the supposed outcasts of society. He demonstrates this through ableism, racial oppression, and religious persecution. The novel The Illegal by Lawrence Hill illustrates the effect of oppression on those with disabilities, different religions, and races.

Oppression, although can be caused by a variety of systemic issues, results in discrimination, castes, inferiority, and stereotypes. Viola, Keita, and those of Faloo decent face oppression as a result of their divergence, and evident differences. 

To be given a crack at serious news stories, Viola Hill had to be perfect on the job. Always on time. Always ready. Invincible. Got the flu? Don’t tell anybody. Having a day when all she could think about was that she wished her mom were still alive? Swallow that emotion. Having a rare burst of phantom pain, like a knife ripping through her thighs? How bloody fair was that, to feel ten-out-of-ten agony in a part of her body that she no longer events owned? Even phantom pain she had to mask. She has learned not to scream when they came out of nowhere. She could not have people think she’d keel over and die. They would never promote her. (Hill 113)

Viola feels like she must obscure and mask her emotional and physical pain to drive against the oppression, and ableism facing the disabled community. She feels as though if she didn’t conform with her believed superior white colleges, she wouldn’t be granted the same opportunities and respect. This is due to the popular stigma, and stereotypes around what disabled people can achieve. “We have a report that you were acting irrationally and had an unwelcomed visitor. He checked his notes. A black man, possibly from Africtown” (Hill 247). Jimmy, Ivernia Beech’s son, assumed that just because Keita was black, that he was a threat, and had to have been from Africtown. This assumption, based on stereotypes, is oppressing people of colour in a form of controlling them, their identity, and individuality, conforming them into an inferior caste.

Randall took control of the television and radio stations and announced that he was naming himself President for Life, declaring that the Kano people were the rightful majority in Zantorland and would no longer submit to the Faloo minority. In the city, rampaging began. Masked men attacked Faloo shopkeepers, breaking bones, warning them to close their businesses and stealing whatever they could carry suits, ties, coffeepots, radios, lamps, laptops. Faloo people barricaded themselves in their homes behind locked doors” (Hill 21-22).

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