Aminatta Forna is an award-winning British-Sierra Leonean author who has published several books including The Hired Man and The Memory of Love. Her memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water, is an account of her investigation into her father’s execution in 1975. In this email interview, Poda-Poda Stories asked Aminatta Forna about understanding Sierra Leone through fiction and non-fiction.
Poda-Poda: It’s been over 20 years since the publication of The Devil that Danced on the Water. In what ways have you changed as a writer since the book first came out? Is your writing/creative process still the same?
AF: The 20th anniversary edition of The Devil that Danced on the Water came out in November 2023 and I reread the book for the first time in many years. I was still happy with what I had written, so I guess that answers the question. However, that book is a work of non-fiction. The story is fixed, it's really only the way a writer chooses to structure and narrate that can really change.
Fiction is a little more complicated. Over the years I've learned a lot as a writer of fiction and gained a great deal more experience. Unlike many young writers nowadays, the opportunity to study creative writing wasn't readily available when I began to write. I taught myself and learned at the coal face. There are some choices I made then that I would have the wisdom not to make now - for example, I would not have written Ancestor Stones in four first person narratives. That was overambitious at that stage in my career. If I'd had anyone around me to tell my why - as I do my students - I'd have changed to third person.
These days I give my finished work to other people to read, I have a chosen group of careful readers. Sometimes they are experts in the field, say, of psychiatry or wildlife biology, which is a theme of the work. Another reader runs a book club. Another is an actor and is always great on character and motive, can tell me if something feels out of place. Beyond that not much else has changed overall. I always do a huge amount of research and fact checking, whether a story is fiction or non-fiction. I enjoy it.
Poda-Poda: The Devil That Danced on the Water wasn’t just a story about your father, Dr. Mohamed Forna, but it was also about the political history of Sierra Leone at the time and events leading up to the tragic Civil War. What was it like to go through the investigative process of trying to find out what had happened, considering it was a personal story for you? Was it ever possible to have emotional distance when trying to piece together the story?
AF: It was important for me to create a certain amount of distance when I was researching the book, because otherwise I would not have managed to persuade people to talk to me, or indeed, keep going through some very difficult moments. I learned, as a reporter for BBC TV, to distance myself from the story and it came in useful. When I was interviewing people, for example, I took care to refer to my father as 'Dr. Forna,' and not 'my father.' I am of mixed heritage and many people in Sierra Leone take me as a foreigner. This could have been a disadvantage, but I used it to my advantage. The less certain people though they were confiding to his daughter, the better. At one point, I travelled into rebel territory, to the HQ of the RUF in Makeni. So, there were many reasons I needed to keep my head. I kept a tight check on my emotions throughout the research phase.
Writing the book required a different approach. There is a balance to be struck. Some of the emotion has to be allowed onto the page or the work becomes dry. So, it's important to let go a little. Too much and reading the book would become tiresome. Only when I had finished the book did I realise how emotionally draining it had been. Then I had to go on the road with it, touring the US, back to Sierra Leone to give talks, so many interviews. I'd say it took me two years to put it behind me.
Poda-Poda: How do you balance writing both fiction and non-fiction about Sierra Leone?
AF: “Nonfiction reveals the lies, but only metaphor can reveal the truth.” That's a pretty good rule of thumb for writing about Sierra Leone. Fiction describes a different kind of truth to non-fiction, an internal, existential truth. That's definitely a useful definition and one I would say lay behind the The Devil that Danced on the Water and subsequent novels. Now I'd add to that and say that I also think of non-fiction as a 'found story,' by which I mean that a story that already exist in all its parts. A recent essay collection, The Window Seat, contains the story of Bruno, the ape who lived at Tacugama Sanctuary and escaped. It seemed to me that all the narrative elements and emotional resonance were all there. I just had to capture it in writing.
Poda-Poda: Sierra Leone has gone through her share of suffering. There was so much trauma because of the war. Then came the Ebola epidemic in 2014, the 2017 mudslides etc. Those stories matter, because they significantly shaped the country. But how can we carry that trauma, but also transcend that trauma narrative, especially as Sierra Leonean artists?
AF: There is nothing inevitable about trauma. Suffering, yes. But trauma is different. Trauma is the wound that will not heal. Unfortunately, we too often use the words interchangeably. The late Dr Edward Nahim, who ran the mental health facility in Kissy for many years, was immensely helpful in guiding me towards understanding trauma and subsequently it was a central theme in my novels The Memory of Love and Happiness.
Additionally, I have published various essays on trauma, most recently in the Yale Review. Art soothes suffering and has the power to heal trauma. That's why art is so important. Anyone who is interested might read Boris Cyrulnik's Resilience. He was a Jewish survivor of Nazi occupied France, who lost his parents to the Holocaust. He became a psychiatrist and worked with many child death camp survivors as well as American prisoners of war in Vietnam. He writes about how, among the latter group, it was the poets rather than the athletes who survived the deprivations best, because they possessed a powerful inner life and imagination. This allowed them to transcend their circumstances, to refuse to be defined by them and to envision a future beyond the present in a way that gave them strength and ultimately saved their lives.
Poda-Poda: What do you love about Sierra Leone? What are some of your favorite memories?
AF: I love the dogs. I love the way people in Sierra Leone are so tolerant of the street dogs. Over the years since childhood, I have adopted many dogs, and my essay about Dr. Jalloh and the street dogs of Sierra Leone (which was first published in Granta and also appears in my anthology The Window Seat) won him and me many fans and readers the world over. How a society treats animals tells you a great deal about that society's humanity.
As Milan Kundera said: “True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test... consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”
I also love swimming off Lumley Beach on Sundays, where my father loved to take us kids in the 1970's. The beach then was pristine.
Poda-Poda: How did writing save your life?
AF: Writing is the way I work out what I think about the world. I've lived many lives through the characters I have created, and I understand what makes people human in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Even if I create a character I dislike, I still have to understand why they do the things they do.
Writing makes me happy. Once I began to write, I knew that I had found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Those days when I have no other pressing tasks except to write are days, I wake up filled with contentment.