Love Stories

In the year 2000, two years before the end of the war, I went home to Sierra Leone. When the war was finally over I returned twice a year, and it was during those trips that I began to teach creative writing to anybody who was interested. The British Council lent me a space in their building and Rajiv Bendre, the energetic head of the Council set about attracting potential participants. We advertised the event in the British Council, at the university and through the auspices of PEN.

The Sierra Leone branch of PEN was run by a fellow called Mike Butscher. Mike had kept going throughout the war with nothing more than a leaking office and a handful of leaflets. Peace did not bring prosperity, but it did bring the writer Caryl Phillips on pilgrimage to a country which had in various ways inspired his work. Caryl had been impressed by Mike’s tenacity and spirit. He returned home, wrote about him and mobilised the support of PEN to provide Mike with new offices, some computers and supplies. He readily agreed to help us.
 

The seminars were oversubscribed. The lucky ones were those who had arrived early. There were fifteen of us. Two were pupils from the Annie Walsh School. One was called Redempta, I remember her because I would later borrow the name for a character in a novel. They were Junior PEN members. There was a government clerk in his seventies; there were several students from Fourah Bay College. There were two Mohammeds, one was a sociologist and part-time poet, the other ran a small press and his part-time job was as star of a television soap opera. His presence caused the Annie Walsh girls to go mute with embarrassment. There was Mike Butscher himself. We had one thing in common - our passion for writing.
 

And yet the writing struggled to emerge. The style of the early efforts was turgid, declamatory or else written in a curiously anachronistic style. Some writers produced fables, the kind of which I last encountered in my school reader. Only one of the Mohammeds produced something that was individual and original.
 

I was baffled. But then when I asked which books they were all reading the problem became evident. I’d been a fool. War had stemmed the flow of books into the country, there were no new texts, the few bookshops that once existed were gone. People in Sierra Leone had read nothing new for years. And so I laid my hands on what I could - and we read.
 

We went to Egypt with The English Patient, saw China through the eyes of Jung Chang, her mother and grandmother. We learned the art of mandolin playing with Captain Corelli. We rode the rodeo with Annie Proulx and dreamed of the Arctic with Barry Lopez. And when we had finished reading, we wrote.
 

I had expected people to write about the country’s recent past. Caryl Phillips had asked Mike Butscher why Diaspora Sierra Leonian writers had tackled the war, but not the writers living in Sierra Leone. He thought the years of repression had robbed them of their nerve. Mike Butscher replied that writers who had lived through the war were still too traumatised by their experiences. So Redempta wrote about a story of a girl, who was lost and then found. Someone else wrote about a happy prostitute, the best whore in the world. One of the Mohammed’s wrote of a man’s love for his ebullient and irrepressible wife.
 

That was nearly ten years ago. Today one of those writers is on a fellowship in Northern Europe and was highly commended for the Caine Prize. One Mohammed finished a novel, the other Mohammed produced a graphic modern history of Sierra Leone inspired by Spiegelman’s Maus. It has been distributed to every school in Sierra Leone. Redempta graduated and still writes. In Freetown there is a thriving and growing community of writers and poets. Two writers have been offered places on Caine Prize workshops. And this year, for the first time, a Sierra Leonian author won the Caine Prize.
 

So Mike was right. The day did come when they would write about what had happened, would become the voices of conscience, the voices of a voiceless nation. But back then, for one moment in time, writing represented a something else -- an opportunity to escape the horror. They did not want to write about war; instead they wanted to write about love.

Copyright Aminatta Forna

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