Kruse's Keys: Read "The Memory of Love" to Learn About Love, Courage and Enduring (Sierra Leone)

Sierra Leone “Horseshoes and Hand Grenades" History:

The first European influence in this West African nation came from the Portuguese in the 1400s. Prior to that Muslim traders spread Islam throughout the area. Formal efforts at colonization didn’t begin until the late 18th century, however, as successive series of freed slaves arrived--first from England, then from America via Nova Scotia (the Freetown settlement), and finally from Jamaica (the “Maroons”). At this point, the British government took over and spent the better part of the 19th century “freeing” “recaptured” slaves from across the Atlantic in Sierra Leone (that’s a lot of air quotes n’est-ce pas). These 50,000 former slaves bore a mixture of cultures and languages and England worked to homogenize them and was generally successful in this effort after a generation (i.e., this Creole group came to represent a West African elite group). Fast forward to 1961 when the people of Sierra Leone gain independence from Great Britain in a bloodless (compared to other colonies) transition. The next 30 years saw a number of coups and political transitions, to include an extended period under the one-party rule of Siaka Stevens and his APC party.

Then came a decade-long civil war (1991-2002) that, among other things, popularized the term “blood diamond.” as Liberian president cum warlord cum murderous lunatic Charles Taylor outfitted the Sierra Leone Revolutionary United Front (RUF) with weapons in exchange for the diamonds. The war would claim some 50,000 lives and was characterized by widespread sexual violence to include a particularly high occurrence of multiple perpetrator rape (some sources claim as many as a quarter million women were victims of sexual violence). The cessation of violence came only after the arrival British forces to backup a lethargic U.N. force. Since then, successive cycles of corrupt and ineffective governance has stymied the country’s development.

The Story

“We all were happy here once” reminisces Kai, the local Freetown surgeon, after the death of his last link to the time before. In “The Memory of Love”, with beautiful, striking prose author Aminattah Forna reveals the soul of a nation where nearly everyone is stricken with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the time after. And while PTSD may be the official western diagnosis, as one local notes: “You call it a disorder, my friend. We call it life.” The life that the reader discovers is one of contradictions as buddinglove constantly collides with the memory of pain. On one hand, Forna expertly frames the bittersweet nature of love as character Elias Cole remarks: “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.” On the other hand, Cole’s daughter Mamakay shares with her British lover Adrian why she and her friend slipped on jeans when they rebels broached the city: ‘Have you ever tried to get a pair of tight jeans off in a hurry? It was the only thing we could think of to do. To stop them raping us. Well, to make it harder.’

This painful history of sexual violence plays a prominent role as British tourist-psychologist Adrian tries to unpack a the mystery of one wondering, perhaps-possessed patient, a budding friendship with Kai, and the story of a dying man named Elias Cole. In this journey Forna examines what it means to love and to survive in Sierra Leone. And the author does not give in to easy storylines about the courage of the war’s survivors as Mamakay notes: “Courage is not what it took to survive. Quite the opposite! You had to be a coward to survive. To make sure you never raised your head above the parapet, never questioned, never said anything that might get you into trouble.” So how does a society, how does a nation go on with this twisted corporate history of incestuous betrayal and violence? How do a people wake up each day? It is Kai who reveals Forna’s central thesis: “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 until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.” It is the memory of Sierra Leone’s before, that is what gives people their strength to slowly put their lives together again. Ultimately, Forna rejects any pitying outsider’s assessment of her nation: “People think war is the worst this country has ever seen: they have no idea what peace is like. The courage it takes simply to endure.”

*One of my Reading Around the Continent books--the full list is here.
See our 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 Reading Lists.

Key Quotes:

• 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. (27)
• 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 until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love. (3023)
• There was nowhere in the world where doctors weren’t cherished. 1550
• There was the Forty Day ceremony. Do you know the forty days mark the end of a wife’s period of mourning? Among her own people Saffia would be considered ready for remarriage. Life here is too short to mourn for very long. 4345
• Mamakay turns to look at him. ‘Have you ever tried to get a pair of tight jeans off in a hurry? It was the only thing we could think of to do. To stop them raping us. Well, to make it harder.’ 4563
• People think war is the worst this country has ever seen: they have no idea what peace is like. The courage it takes simply to endure.4613
• Sometimes I think this country is like a garden. Only it is a garden where somebody has pulled out all the flowers and trees and the birds and insects have all left, everything of beauty. Instead the weeds and poisonous plants have taken over.’ Adrian is silent for a moment. 5,699
• She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back. 6,196

Key Takeaways:

• On silence in Sierra Leone: If Adrian falls silent, so too do they, waiting patiently and without embarrassment. Here the silences have a different quality, are entirely devoid of expectation. 
• On conversation: Conversation here can be challenging, language is a blunter instrument, each word a heavy black strike with a single meaning. To say exactly what you mean, to ask precisely the right question, this is what has to be done. For the bluntness of the language doesn’t mean people speak their minds. Rather, they use the spaces to escape into. (778)
• How the Civil War marked the life of everyone, indeed life itself: ‘I was doorman here,’ he adds. ‘Before.’ He says it as others do, in a way that conveys a sense of timelessness. Before. There was before. And there is now. And in between a dreamless void. 1854
• On the brutality of the war: ‘It was rage. It wasn’t a war, what happened here, in the end. It was fury. Having nothing left to lose.’
• On the "thin men": Afterwards the thin men were unleashed upon the town. This was the advance party. Now the war is over she knows their name. G5. Some called it the Sensitisation Unit...Adecali had belonged to the rebel Sensitisation Unit. The Unit’s task was to enter a town marked for invasion ahead of the fighting contingent of the rebel army and by their methods to ensure the villagers’ future capitulation. As a strategy it worked. It saved on casualties – among the rebel forces, that is. It saved on ammunition. The Unit’s planning was meticulous, the process merciless, the outcome effective. Adecali’s job, his particular job, was to burn families alive in their houses.
• On life after war: The conclusion they reached was that ninety-nine per cent of the population was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.’ 5192 Attila and waves a hand at the view. ‘You call it a disorder, my friend. We call it life.’ 5199
• On survival: And Kai has never once treated a would-be suicide. War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly. 5542
• More on survival: Courage is not what it took to survive. Quite the opposite! You had to be a coward to survive. To make sure you never raised your head above the parapet, never questioned, never said anything that might get you into trouble.’ 5,691 You’ve never lived in a place like this. Here enemies are a luxury only the poor can afford. 6,614
• On Rape as a Weapon of Trauma:  October 1999. So many children born in a single month. In Kai’s view Mary’s capacity to forgive seems, quite simply, immeasurable. Mary’s parents had taken her son away to raise in the village. Who knows how many children born in the same month in the same year are being raised all over the country like that? Children like Mary’s son who have one thing in common. They were all born nine months after the rebel army invaded the city. 5,953
• On Love and Death: For death takes everything, leaves behind no possibilities, save one – which is to remember. Adrian cannot believe with what intensity one can continue to love a person who is dead. Only fools, he believes, think that love is for the living alone. 7,116

Key References (For Further Study):
The Sad Truth About the Fight Against Blood Diamonds
Rebellion and Agrarian Tensions in Sierra Leone (July 2011)
Guardian Review of "Memory of Love" (2010)
http://www.aminattaforna.com/
NYT Book Review (2011)
Colonial Sierra Leone: The agonizing experience of a West African state under British colonial domination
Diane Rehm Interview with Forna

The melody stayed with me for years. This is how it is when you glimpse a woman for the first time, a woman you know you could love. 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. (27)

He thinks how quiet affluence is: people living in private spaces, arguments in the shape of silences and closed doors. Compares it to the rowdy unselfconsciousness of poverty. The swooping laughter of children, though, is the same anywhere in the world. (319)

He has yet to become used to it, the silences between people. In Britain people came, or were sent, to see him. He learned to examine their silence, to see if it was tinted with shame, or pain, or guilt, coloured with reluctance or tainted with anger. He himself used silence as a lure, pitting his own silence against theirs, until they were compelled to fill the void. Here those tricks have no place, even with those whom he calls his patients. If Adrian falls silent, so too do they, waiting patiently and without embarrassment. Here the silences have a different quality, are entirely devoid of expectation. (482)

Is that where it began? In the garden before the splendour of the Harmattan lilies? Or afterwards, as I watched the two of them dance together? Or weeks before at the faculty wives’ dinner? It’s difficult to say. Beginnings are so hard to trace. Perhaps we three would each put the beginning in a different place, like blindfolded players trying to pin the tail on a donkey. Three different beginnings. Three different endings, one for each of us. (644)

Conversation here can be challenging, language is a blunter instrument, each word a heavy black strike with a single meaning. To say exactly what you mean, to ask precisely the right question, this is what has to be done. For the bluntness of the language doesn’t mean people speak their minds. Rather, they use the spaces to escape into. 778

He had an appetite for history and frequently borrowed books. One or two he returned with phrases underscored and comments pencilled into the margin. Not for my benefit, or the benefit of any future reader, but as a record of his own thoughts. 892

‘Their gift didn’t lie in superior fighting skills. Those they subjugated were mostly farmers, not warriors. Their gift, their trick,’ and here his voice grew louder until he shouted out, ‘their brilliance, was to leave an administrator in every town and village they passed through. Somebody to keep the local rulers in check, and to make sure the right taxes were paid at the right time. All without the benefit of a filing system. 1184

The boy, feverishly beautiful with cheekbones cut across his face and huge, heavy-lidded eyes, stares into the middle distance, dreamy and preoccupied. He looks otherworldly. It strikes Kai how death, so often ugly, can sometimes arrive in the guise of such beauty. 1501

There was nowhere in the world where doctors weren’t cherished. 1550

I’d whispered the words, idly, to certain women. Always in the moments before the act of love itself. But I knew, if I had not known before, that the affection I had felt for those creatures was like comparing the pleasure of a summer’s day to the terror of a storm. 1594

I sat still, gazing at the surface of my desk. I felt a flicker of something burning in my bowels. Not dislike, it was impossible to dislike a man like Julius. Not dislike, then. A small flicker of hate. 1640

The man nods. To Adrian’s relief he speaks English. ‘I was doorman here,’ he adds. ‘Before.’ He says it as others do, in a way that conveys a sense of timelessness. Before. There was before. And there is now. And in between a dreamless void. 1854

Fugue, they call it in his profession, a condition in which the body and the disturbed spirit are joined in shadowy wanderings. 1891

The war was medieval neither in concept nor in tactics, whatever the view from elsewhere, only in the hardware. From the outset the patients came in two classes. There were the soldiers and foreign peacekeepers, victims mostly of gunshot wounds, sometimes grenade and mortar wounds. In the second class were the peasants, the ones who somehow made it from their villages and were admitted with a C scrawled heavily on their charts. Unarmed and poor, the waste of a bullet wasn’t so much resented as simply unnecessary. They were the victims of attacks using machetes and cutlasses. C. The doctor’s own shorthand adapted to the circumstances. C. Cleaved. 1976 Later a team of surgeons including Kai practised the Krukenberg intervention, unused since the First World War, fashioning out of the muscles and two bones of the wrist a pair of blunted pincers: a hand. 1984

A spate of fugues followed the publication of Les Aliens Voyageurs, Adrian reads. Most accounts related to missing servicemen between the First and Second World Wars. The men eventually turned up hundreds of miles from home. All claimed to suffer memory loss, not to know who they were, or how they had ended up in the place in which they were found. Some were using other names and pursuing new occupations. All appeared to inhabit a state of obscured consciousness from which they eventually emerged with no memory of the weeks, months or even years they had spent away. These were not isolated incidents in the lives of these men, but a constant, a pattern of behaviour, of journey, of wanderings, of compulsive travelling. The suspicion, on the part of the psychiatrists treating the servicemen, was of malingering. The men were shot as deserters. The European fuguers one hundred years ago were all men. Here they are women. 2109

was a trick of the mind, the Scotsman explained to Kai: the nerves continued to transmit signals between the brain and the ghost limb. The pain is real, yes, but it is a memory of pain. 3022

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 until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love. 3023

‘This urge to order memories arrives with the age. A final sifting and sorting and cataloguing. To leave things in order before we go.’ 4016

‘What would you say it was?’ asks Adrian carefully. ‘It was rage. It wasn’t a war, what happened here, in the end. It was fury. Having nothing left to lose.’ She leans back and looks around the room. 4138

Through Mamakay the landscape of the city has altered for Adrian. For the first time since he arrived, the city bears a past, exists in another dimension other than the present. 4164

A year passed. For me, a year of waiting. There was the Forty Day ceremony. Do you know the forty days mark the end of a wife’s period of mourning? Among her own people Saffia would be considered ready for remarriage. Life here is too short to mourn for very long. 4345

One word. Yet so much more. She had said yes. Agreed her life was not over. I looked at her. I was consumed by a feeling of inexpressible joy. Only later did I recognise it for what it was. Hope. For in that instant the beauty and pain of the past, the unbearable present and the possible future all ran together. 4401

‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘He was all right before. He will be again. A lot of people here believe in dreams. So do you, don’t you? Psychologists?’ 4548

Mamakay turns to look at him. ‘Have you ever tried to get a pair of tight jeans off in a hurry? It was the only thing we could think of to do. To stop them raping us. Well, to make it harder.’ 4563

And Kai recognises the expression of the mothers. It is submission, submission in the face of the inevitable. People think war is the worst this country has ever seen: they have no idea what peace is like. The courage it takes simply to endure.4613

Kai thinks of the day and the journey he now has before him. He does not lack the courage for it. No. Rather it was the courage to stay that had failed him. 4695

Imagine then, how it feels to find yourself in a love triangle with a ghost. Your rival, complacent in death, can never misstep or disappoint. Julius had left Saffia, yet in dying he had at the same time atoned for all his sins, 4730

So, as many women do, she swallowed the bitterness of her regret and submitted. The stillness was what was left. 4809

Perhaps even to talk of an infant’s love is a foolishness, for doesn’t a child love selfishly, like a puppy, whoever will take care of them? But for once in my life I never had to ask what somebody saw in me, or question why she might wish to spend her time with me, wonder at her motives. She was my daughter. I, her father. The first love I had ever been able to take for granted. 4813

Agnes’s husband’s death was the first of many. Afterwards the thin men were unleashed upon the town. This was the advance party. Now the war is over she knows their name. G5. Some called it the Sensitisation Unit. 5060

‘What did you see?’ asks Kai, speaking for the first time. She swallows and her voice drops almost to a whisper. ‘I saw JaJa.’ 5106

translating for him a phrase he’d heard and not understood. ‘It means, “I fall down, I get up again.” When somebody asks how you are, perhaps you can’t honestly answer that you are fine. That’s what it is saying.’ 5146

The conclusion they reached was that ninety-nine per cent of the population was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.’ 5192

Attila and waves a hand at the view. ‘You call it a disorder, my friend. We call it life.’ 5199

Attila’s warning to Adrian. I fall down, I get up. Westerners Adrian has met despise the fatalism. But perhaps it is the way people have found to survive. 5209

their reluctance to talk about anything that had happened to them. He put it down to trauma. Since then he has grown to understand it was also 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. 5,239 they elect muteness, the only way of complying and resisting at the same time. 5,235

Fugue. Characterised by sudden, unexpected travel away from home. Irresistible wandering, often coupled with subsequent amnesia. A rarely diagnosed dissociative condition in which the mind creates an alternative state. This state may be considered a place of safety, a refuge. 5,301

And afterwards, if you had asked any of the survivors how they had managed it, they would not have been able to tell you. It was as if those days in the forest, the escape to the city, had passed in a trance. The mind creates an alternative state. 5,309

An injury on such a scale would be hard to self-inflict. And Kai has never once treated a would-be suicide. War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly. 5,542

He’d imagined his life differently, both of them had, he and Tejani. War had frustrated all his hopes, shut out the light. Everything had ceased. The foreigners fled, the embassies shut down, no flights landed or took off from the airport for years. The country was a plague ship set adrift. 5,552

They all lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth. And one thing Adrian’s two decades of study and practice have taught him is to discover the purpose served by the lie. 5,627

It’s official. But you see, that’s where you’re wrong, Adrian. Courage is not what it took to survive. Quite the opposite! You had to be a coward to survive. To make sure you never raised your head above the parapet, never questioned, never said anything that might get you into trouble.’ 5,691 Mamakay continues. ‘Sometimes I think this country is like a garden. Only it is a garden where somebody has pulled out all the flowers and trees and the birds and insects have all left, everything of beauty. Instead the weeds and poisonous plants have taken over.’ Adrian is silent for a moment. 5,699

does Kai realise exactly what Abass had said. ‘Going away, too’, without even knowing it. Abass had said ‘going away, too’. 5,812

October 1999. So many children born in a single month. In Kai’s view Mary’s capacity to forgive seems, quite simply, immeasurable. Mary’s parents had taken her son away to raise in the village. Who knows how many children born in the same month in the same year are being raised all over the country like that? Children like Mary’s son who have one thing in common. They were all born nine months after the rebel army invaded the city. 5,953

The thing to remember, he tells himself, the thing to hold on to is this: that since he decided to leave he has been sleeping at night. 5,975

Adecali had belonged to the rebel Sensitisation Unit. The Unit’s task was to enter a town marked for invasion ahead of the fighting contingent of the rebel army and by their methods to ensure the villagers’ future capitulation. As a strategy it worked. It saved on casualties – among the rebel forces, that is. It saved on ammunition. The Unit’s planning was meticulous, the process merciless, the outcome effective. Adecali’s job, his particular job, was to burn families alive in their houses. 6,048

She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back. 6,196

You’ve never lived in a place like this. Here enemies are a luxury only the poor can afford. 6,614

A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission. 6,699

The fragmentation of the conscience. Adecali, tortured by those acts he had committed. Elias Cole unperturbed by the many he had not. Adecali was made to feel shame, was held culpable. Cole was venerated. Yet where does the greater evil lie, if evil is what you call it? Somewhere in the place he calls a soul, Elias Cole knows. Adrian has been his last attempt at absolution, his last attempt to convince himself of his own cleanliness. 6,705

‘She survived everything else, survived the war. She was never afraid, you know. I never saw her afraid in all that time. There were times I was afraid, Jesus, yes – but not her. Even when they brought her here tonight. Fear equals defeat in her vocabulary. Fear of what, it doesn’t matter. The trick is – you didn’t give in.’ He changes tense as he speaks of Mamakay, from present to past, to present. ‘Like death was a big dog or something. You should never show it you are afraid. I told her that once. She liked it. Death the dog. Or perhaps it was fate. Yes, fate – you must never show fate you’re afraid.’ 6,865

‘We all were happy here once.’ 6,916

What people want is hope and last night Adrian learned what it is like to lose it. 6,931

Unlike those earlier occasions – mourning a lost affection of his youth – this time there is to be no imagining her altered features, her new occupations, no unknown rival or replacement upon whom to project a wild jealousy. For death takes everything, leaves behind no possibilities, save one – which is to remember. Adrian cannot believe with what intensity one can continue to love a person who is dead. Only fools, he believes, think that love is for the living alone. 7,116

Adrian’s reference to ‘the fragmentation of conscience’ is drawn from the work of M. Scott Peck, People of the Lie. ‘The plain fact of the matter is that any group will remain potentially conscienceless and evil until such a time as each and every individual holds himself or herself directly responsible for the behaviour of the whole group – the organism – of which he or she is part. We have not yet begun to arrive at that point.’ 7,234