“They laughed, both knowing that part of the old ways remained, though they were fragile. At the end of their laughter, words were exchanged, briefly, leaving many things unsaid for another day that continued to be another and yet another…”

Book Review:

Review by Friederike Knabe  (FEB 12, 2014)

Mama Kadie cautiously enters the central path of her village, not sure what to expect, pondering on what has remained and who is still there or has come back like she does now. After the traumas, losses and devastation of the war she experiences profound emotions as she walks barefoot on the local soil, smells the scents of the land and watches and listens for every sound in the bushes. What will life have in store for her? The opening pages of Ishmael Beah’s debut novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, are achingly beautiful; his voice gentle and affecting, his deep emotional connection palpable with what he describes so colourfully. Having experienced international acclaim with his memoir,  A Long Way Gone, which recounts the story of a child soldier in Sierra Leone, with his new book he returns to his homeland, sharing with his readers the demanding and difficult path that the local people have to follow in their recovery from the brutal war and its many losses in life and livelihood.

There is hope – radiance – for a better future but there are also many sacrifices to make: forgiving is not forgetting; rebuilding on ruins, literally, on the bones of loved ones is probably one of the most haunting challenges. Transposing the facts and realities of the aftermath of the Sierra Leonean war into a fictional framework carries its own challenges. At the same time, it gives the author a greater freedom of expression for exploring the tragedies and recoveries. Benefiting from his mother tongue’s rich figurative language, Mende, Beah also conveys to us something of the soul of his home and way of thinking. In his language there is a deep connection between land, nature, cosmos and people that speaks through his wording and that also characterizes his in depth developed protagonists.

The first person Mama Kadie meets as she walks along the central paths of the village is Pa Moiwa, who resting on a log in the village square. Much time will be needed to absorb the enormity of what has happened, evidence of violence and death are visible everywhere. Pa Moiwa slowly turns around on hearing the voice of his old friend: his only question is “how she had brought her spirit into town and which route she had taken.” “… I walked the path, as that is the way in my heart.” There will be many days for them to carefully and gently peel away the layers that have hidden their experiences of the recent past. Every day more people arrive: returning displaced locals and desperate refugees from other parts of the country where survival is even more precarious.

Mama Kadie, Pa Moiwa and, later, Pa Kainesi play a central role in the community, respected by everybody as the “elders.”  Young and old sit together in the village centre after a day’s struggle to repair houses, fetch water and find food to cook; the elders are telling stories of the past with the children listening attentively: “It isn’t about knowing the most stories, child. It is about carrying the ones that are most important and passing them along [from one generation to the next]….” Meanwhile, the younger adults sit apart working on plans how to find work and supplies to care for their families, among them Bockarie and Benjamin, both teachers, who will do everything in their power to ensure a brighter future for their children and others in the community.

Among the returnees are several former child soldiers and lost orphans who prefer to stay at a distance from the villagers but form an important component in the rebuilding of the village as all are coping with the emotional scars of their and the villagers’ recent experiences. They form a small community of their own, led by the enigmatic “Colonel,” a shadowy silent figure, who, nonetheless, finds ways to express his growing allegiance to his protégés and the villagers in unexpected ways.

There is a moment of almost idyllic peace in the community, but as is often the case in real life… it is the calm ahead of the storm. And the storm comes in the form of huge trucks and machinery and shouting people who appear to come from another world… The small mining company that had operated in the area before the war has come back with ambitious new owners and investors, who, with little regard to the needs and traditions of the villages nearby, take over the precious farmland and water resources for an ever expanding open-pit mining operation. The company, endorsed by the provincial politicians, is dividing the community physically and emotionally. Their behaviour provokes not only the elders. They bring the worst of city life into this remote region of the country. On the other hand they become the only employer in the villages around. Conflicts are unavoidable and there can only be few winners.

Ishmael Beah’s novel is beautifully written, absorbing and engaging at many levels. His central characters stay in your mind long after you closed the book. He succeeds in telling a story that balances humanity and grace on the one hand with the harsh reality of life in a country that has come out of a brutal civil war and is faced with a devastated economy. Traditional ways of life are challenged and as readers we can only hope that the wisdom of the elders can continue in the mind of the younger generations and that they will learn from the many stories their culture and communities have to offer.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	Sarah Crichton Books; First Edition edition (January 7, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Friederike Knabe
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ishmael Beah
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna

Bibliography:

• Radiance of Tomorrow (January 2014)

Nonfiction:

• A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007)

“And when he wakes from dreaming of her, is it not the same for him? The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against every morning…Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn  (FEB 14, 2011)

Incalculable grief cleaves to profound love in this elaborate, helical tapestry of a besieged people in postwar Freetown, Sierra Leone. Interlacing two primary periods of violent upheaval, author Aminatta Forna renders a scarred nation of people with astonishing grace and poise–an unforgettable portrait of open wounds and closed mouths, of broken hearts and fractured spirits, woven into a stunning evocation of recurrence and redemption, loss and tender reconciliation. Forna mines a filament of hope from resigned fatalism, from the devastation of a civil war that claimed 50,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. Those that survived felt hollowed out, living with an uneasy peace.

Over 99% of people suffered from unrelieved post-traumatic stress disorder, and those that survived often hid shameful secrets of forced betrayal. Here you have children, now adults, trying to cope after their brutal coercion with rebel soldiers. They are living with the aftermath of “nothing left to lose.” If you can imagine an unspeakable atrocity, it was likely executed. Blood on the hands of the people who remain seep into the pores of the newly arrived.

Three principal characters form the locus of this story–a psychologist, a surgeon, and an academic. The story goes through seamless temporal shifts–from 1969, a period of unrest following a military coup–to 2001, following ten years of civil war begun in 1991.

Adrian Lockheart is a British psychologist on sabbatical from his failing marriage to accept a (second) post in Freetown. He is compassionate and dogged in his pursuit to treat the population of mentally disturbed and traumatized citizens, to help them find hope and resolve, yet he feels emotionally dislocated from his own family at home.

“The truth is that since arriving here his life has seemed more charged with meaning than it ever had in London. Here the boundaries are limitless, no horizon, no sky. He can feel his emotions, solid and weighty, like stones in the palm of his hands.”

Adrian treats tortured men and women in the fallout of war, finding a particularly poignant interest in Agnes, a woman who is suffering from a fugue disorder. He contends that the endless miles she compulsively roams on foot (and subsequently forgets) indicate a search for something meaningful from the ruins of war. He believes she is going toward somewhere, a place he determines to find out.

Adrian’s most prominent patient is the unreliable narrator, Elias Cole, an elderly, retired history professor dying of pulmonary disease. In this city of silence, Elias is compelled to tell his story, his confession, to Adrian. It begins in 1969, when Elias first laid eyes on Saffia Kamara, a charming and comely botanist married to the gregarious, fearless Julius, an academic at the university.

“People are wrong when they talk of love at first sight. It is neither love nor lust. No. As she walks away from you, what you feel is loss. A premonition of loss.”

Julius, Elias, and Saffia embark on a friendship that inextricably points to the destiny of the next generation. The military coups of the late 60’s followed Sierra Leon’s hard-won independence from the British colonial rule. Political unrest led to widespread paranoia, which in turn led to wobbly allegiances. Elias’s confession to Adrian is the rallying point, which heightens all the other narratives. Adrian’s probing of Elias reaches to encounters outside of the hospital, and will alter the course of his life, and too of the story.

Lastly, there is Kai Manseray, a talented, young orthopedic surgeon, a tireless and tormented man plagued by chronic insomnia and a suppressed and devastating history. Kai chose to stay and help the damaged and impoverished, rather than abscond two years ago with his best friend, Tejani. He is torn between his loyalties in Sierra Leone and his desire for a more elite station in the States. The woman he loved has gone, the city ravaged, the people embattled, but his little cousin, Abass, and the patients who need him keep him anchored. He has secrets that he won’t share with anyone, that threaten to undo him in the operating theater.

As the story highlights the contrast of their professions, Kai and Adrian form a tenuous bond of friendship. Kai’s achievements are measurable–stitching, sewing, patching, cutting, and saving lives. Adrian, however, can’t measure his patients’ success with an X-ray or point to approximated edges of a wound. Psychotherapy is a process of encounters, wending your way through the dark channels of a person’s interior and facilitating change through conversation. Kai and Adrian’s bond is ultimately the most hypnotic, with consequences encroaching on the dark side of hope.

Forna constructs a mesmerizing collision of forces and people that slowly propel the reader toward a towering climax. This story is for the committed reader, the patient literature lover who will undertake many hours of dedication for the inevitable reward. Think of a blank canvas, and every sentence as a mindful brushstroke, a bloom on the page. It takes a while for the picture to materialize. The writing is carefully crafted, and yet imperceptibly so, not in the least self-conscious. She is steadily augmenting, fuller and deeper, contrasting the light and the darkness, capturing nature and sound. Even her secondary and tertiary characters are wrought with polish and care.The story’s leisurely pace builds its emotional cathedral one stone at a time; at about the halfway point, it becomes riveting and impossible to turn away.

This is a personal and natal undertaking for Forna, whose father, Dr. Mohamed Forna, was a dissident in Sierra Leona and was killed on trumped up charges when she was only eleven-years-old. Her non-fiction book, The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest, is the story of her search for the truth of that harrowing time. She continues her exploration of healing and recovery in this deeply researched and ambitious novel.

There are coincidences in The Memory of Love that nevertheless do not disturb the beauty or the impact of the story. In lesser hands, this may have come across as artifice. However, Forna’s characters and themes are ultimately grounded, and the patterns that emerge from the disparate stories–the unguarded moments, the link of love that ties all the characters together–transcend her intention. The potency of storytelling and the refrain of love in the aftermath of tragedy is evident and sublime in her fluent prose.

“There exists, somewhere, a scale for love invented by one of his [Adrian’s] profession…And there are others still who say love is but a beautiful form of madness.”

The injured voices of her characters mesh into a voice of hope and holding on, to a startling story of redemption. At various intervals, the lyrics of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” drift onto the page. It sang, I sang.

“Well, they tell me there’s a pie up in the sky…The harder they come, the harder they fall.”

Love endures. One and all.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Atlantic Monthly Press (January 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Aminatta Forna
EXTRAS:	Diane Rehm show interview with Aminatta Forma
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: A River Called Time by Mia Couto

Bibliography:

• The Devil that Danced on the Water (2002)
• Ancestor Stones (2006)
• The Memory of Love (2010; January 2011 in US) Commonwealth Prize

Nonfiction:

• The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest (2002)