I don’t know much about Sierra Leone, or of West Africa really. I do know that Sierra Leone is different from the rest of West Africa in how it was formed – it was created for north American slaves who chose to return to Africa. It was initially seen as a beacon of hope for a new life, but like many of its neighbours, in the 1990’s it went through a brutal and horrific civil war.
For my book on Sierra Leone I read Aminatta Forna’s intense The Memory of Love. Set in the aftermath of the civil war of the 90’s its about a Sierra Leonean doctor, a university professor, and a British psychologist, Adrian, who comes to work in the capital with hopes of helping.
Adrian befriends the doctor Kai who tells him honestly that he’s not needed nor necessarily wanted here. People don’t really know what psychologists do and there’s the perhaps usual thoughts about Westerners in general – that they are in Africa for selfish, and not always good, reasons. Adrian is determined though to stick it out. He is perhaps a little naive in the extent that he will be able to help and is initially a bit lost in working out what he can do. But Adrian begins to settle in, finds a few clients, and starts working with a mental institution. But he has not lived the civil war.
“Your wife didn’t want you to come here”
“Not as such”
Kai considers Adrian’s reply for a moment. “That means no.”
“I didn’t really give her the opportunity to object, if I am honest”
“OK”
“I needed something else. I could look up and see my future rolling into the distance. I knew exactly what was going to happen every day. I used to wonder, too, whether if I disappeared it would make any real difference to any of my clients’ lives, I mean in reality as opposed to the short-term inconvenience. Probably it was a dangerous thing to do.” He laughs. ‘But you know what I mean.”
Kai does not know what he means. Still he chooses not to say. This is the way Europeans talk, as though everybody shared their experiences. Adrian’s tone suggested that the desire for something was all it took. They all live with endless possibilities, leave their homes for the sake of something new. But the dream is woven from the fabric of freedom. For the desire to exist it requires the element of possibility and that for Kai has never existed, until now, with the arrival of Tejani’s letters.”
He knows intellectually what people must have gone through and becomes fascinated with a certain case of a woman who goes missing for days, sometimes weeks, forgetting everything about herself – a kind of amnesia – then to return home again. She’s well known at the mental institution – they house here sometimes during her wandering episodes.
And then there’s the university professor who unlike everyone else, wants to talk about the past.
Adrian comes to realise that its not just his clients, but the whole population is suffering from post traumatic stress after the brutality of the war.
“Have you never noticed? how nobody ever talks about anything? What happened here. The war. Before the war. It’s like a secret.
“Adrian remembers his early patients, or would-be patients, their reluctance to talk about anything that happened to them. He puts it down to trauma. Since then he has grow to understand it was also a part of a way of being that existed here. He had realised it gradually, perhaps fully only at this moment. It was almost as though they were afraid of becoming implicated in the circumstance of their own lives. The same is true of most of the men at the mental hospital. Questions discomfort them. Remembering, talking. Mamakay is right, it’s as though the entire nation are sworn to some terrible secret. So they elect muteness, the only way of complying and resisting at the same time.”
There are multiple stories which weave through the book but its essentially about how people survived and how they continue to survive long after the war is over. There’s one bit in the book where someone acknowledges that its not the brave and the outspoken who have survived the war – its those that were able to do what they could to survive, or avoid its brutality. And there was some despicable brutality – child soldiers, child commanders who make people do the most awful things. It did make me feel immensely fortunate that I haven’t had to ensure something so violent and awful. It also made me wonder what type of person I would be if I did find myself in that environment. Would I stand my ground? Would I be loyal to the people I know or stand up for those I don’t? Would I do anything it takes to survive? I would hope so, but these may not be all possible together – would I be able to live with myself afterwards if I did survive??
I feel like I can’t do justice to describing or review this book. It’s pretty obvious I’m not the best book reviewer full stop. So I’ll post a link here to a good review written by another author who’s book I’ve recently read that will feature in my Ethiopia post: NY Times Review
A Journey Through the 55 countries of Africa through Books 