I love memoirs. In the right hands, a memoir of an ordinary middle-class existence can be poignant, because each of our lives contain interesting details, and memoirists can describe them better than most.
I came across Aminatta Forna’s 2002 memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, after finishing her novel, The Hired Man, which is now one of my favorite books. After reading Forna’s short bio in the back of the book, I wondered how she wrote so powerfully about the Balkans when she did not have a history there, and after some quick searching, came across a 2015 piece in The Guardian about her.
I’m giving more description to this journey than I usually would because Forna’s fascinating history, the child of a Scottish mother and a father from Sierra Leone, featured only in the briefest of ways in both of the novels I’d read. In Happiness, which I listened to as an audiobook and reviewed for Sound Commentary, an African character speaks about the ways in which trauma victims rebound from their experiences; in The Hired Man, which takes place in the Balkans, an endless civil war challenges the characters’ willingness to tolerate, without complaint, the disappearances of their neighbors. Clearly Forna’s own history influenced these events and the responses of her characters, but I needed to know how.
Aminatta Forna’s father, Mohamed Sorie Forna, was a British-trained doctor who returned to Sierra Leone in the late 1960s with his new family – a wife and three young children – at a time when it appeared that independence from colonial rule could bring democracy and stability to the country. Dr. Forna made it to the head of that promising movement, winning a local election under a newly formed party and becoming Minister of Finance. The ideas his daughter describes – ferreting out corruption, refusing foreign loans that were tied to exploitative practices, stabilizing the country’s economy – are so hopeful and could have made such a difference if they had been implemented. Instead, the new Prime Minister, Siaka Stevens, was a leader in the old manner who was perfectly happy to exploit and ruin his people if it meant more loot. When Dr. Forna and others protested his amassing of power, and reintroduction of corrupt practices, Stevens had them imprisoned on false charges and eventually hung for treason in a sham trial.
His daughter was only ten when her father was murdered by the state. As a journalist living in London, Aminatta Forna decided to piece together the truth of his death, a long journey that required digging into stories that many of the participants would rather keep buried, especially those who helped Stevens kill her father through bogus testimony (much of which was given after torture).
But Forna’s own childhood experiences are mixed into these tumultuous times, including the breakup of her parents’ marriage, confusing trips back and forth between Sierra Leone and the UK, including the racism she encountered as a biracial child, and the imprisonment, trial, and execution of her father, which she understood so little of at the time. Her memories of Sierra Leone as she knew it then, coupled with her experiences returning, after twenty-five years away, to a Sierra Leone that has known the most brutal of civil wars, are told so well, combining her talent for language as a novelist and her concern for the truth acquired as a journalist.
The Devil That Danced on the Water challenged me, forcing me to look at the injustice, the curves and twists of fate that led Sierra Leone down its present path, even though I wanted to look away.
February 23, 2020