Ishmael Beah on Storytelling and Activism

Ishmael Beah is a Sierra Leonean novelist and human rights activist. His memoir, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, details his journey from a child soldier during Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war, to a new life in the United States. He has gone on to publish two more books, Radiance of Tomorrow, and Little Family. Beah’s stories always bring into focus the realities of people considered to be on the margins and give readers a deeper understanding of the complexities of everyday lives. In this conversation with Poda-Poda Stories (via skype), he shares why it is important to write such stories, and why we need more Sierra Leonean storytellers on the global literary scene. 

Poda-Poda: Thank you Ishmael Beah for being a part of this. If you could just start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your background.

IB: I am Ishmael Beah. I am a Sierra Leonean. I am a New York Times and international Bestselling Author. I’ve written three books to date. The first one was out in 2007, called A Long Way Gone; Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, that recounted my experiences of the war in Sierra Leone. I then continued with a novel called Radiance of Tomorrow that looked at how people return to places that have been devastated by war. And the latest book is also novel called Little Family, that is set in an unnamed African country, but Sierra Leone is the main inspiration behind it, and it came out at the end of April this year (2020) in the midst of all this crisis. I am also a UNICEF Goodwill ambassador, specifically for children affected by war globally. Lastly and most importantly, I am a husband and father of three wonderful children, which of everything that I have achieved, my remarkable family is the one thing that I am the proudest of.

Poda-Poda: Amazing! Tell us about your new book, Little Family. Why did you decide to write this story?

IB: Little Family is about five young people, who have decided to ostracize themselves from society, and live at the margins, to seek freedom, and define what that means to them, in their own way. Over the years, I have lived in Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal and back home again in Sierra Leone, and I was observing how young people are struggling to define themselves.

There are local traditions, systems and values that have collapsed, but then there’s also an importation of new values and ideas from foreigners coming in. So young people find themselves in between, trying to decide what they want to embrace. Do they want to be more traditional or do they want to be more modern, and what that reality means? So, it was really about trying to answer that question that I then created Little Family. I wanted to see whether this is possible, and if it’s not, what is the burden of history?  What is the burden of the place you live in and how do you unshackle yourself from it, and be free in your own way?

Poda-Poda: In this book you’re talking about a group of homeless children. They are the heroes of this story. You really illustrate the humanity of people we often consider to be on the margins of society. These are young people we see and encounter every day, but we don’t really have a window into their lives, and in this book, they have created a space for themselves. I was wondering whether this was a metaphor for building a new future for ourselves, especially as young people in Sierra Leone?

IB:  Absolutely! This was a metaphor, but this was also based on certain observations of reality. I think whenever you decide to ostracize yourself from society, or you don’t like what’s going on, you build your own little family. You build your own group of people who are like-minded, who think the same way, because if you express your feelings and your thoughts to other people who don’t understand, you feel judgement. As human beings, this is how we are. When we live in an environment without a supportive mechanism, we recreate a space that allows that for us. I also wanted to show that people who are at the margins of society are intelligent, but we don’t often think of them that way.

For example, if you encounter a guy who’s selling tissue paper on the street. Every morning, this guy goes to the big store to buy tissue paper, so he can sell it to you and for your convenience of not leaving your car and going to the store. So, this guy is an economist, he understands the market space. But we do not give credit to the intelligence of what it means to survive. When you are surviving, you are an astute observer of a society that’s thriving, because you see the cracks in it, and it’s through those cracks that you survive. So, you’re more aware of it, than the person who is supposedly better off than you.

I wanted to show that intelligence is also not based on education. Education is just so that you can join the workforce. Intelligence is something that you actually have.  So, I wanted to show that there’s brilliance on this continent. Every child that you meet that is fifteen, or sixteen years old, already has a PhD in economics, psychology, and sociology, just to survive daily. I wanted to celebrate that.

Poda-Poda: It’s good to highlight that people on the margins are very intelligent and street smart. It’s also good to show the darker sides as well. You’ve highlighted sexual assault and gender-based violence in your past books, and recently Sierra Leone has been rocked by news of rape and gender-based violence cases. I was wondering what your take was on that, because the people in Little Family are also at the receiving end of the darker sides of our society which include rape and sexual violence, but it’s not always that their stories are brought to the fore. What is your commentary on that?

IB: It’s been very difficult for me to think about this, because I am aware that Sierra Leone has had cases of rampant sexual assault, particularly towards very young girls. The last time I was in Sierra Leone, I was out in Makeni, and there were so many cases where even teachers were abusing their students in schools. Through UNICEF I was dealing with a lot of these cases. I also have two girls, one is six and the other is four, and I think of them when I hear these stories. In my work, I’ve tried to show how, in Sierra Leone , there has been a behaviour that has been accepted, especially from the male point of view, to sexualize and disrespect women and girls, even when they are as young as three years old.  For example, you’ll go to parties and the music is playing, and someone will say “ ay bo, call da pikin leh e kam shake am for we” . This is where it begins. What we don’t realise is that we are doing certain things that are leading to this. While we need to educate young boys to respect young women, there are even older women who also perpetuate these attitudes and beliefs. I have witnessed a grandmother, a mother or an aunt tell a girl “tell da you man de leh e sen for me ya”. So there are so many things that we need to work on. And it really needs to come from respecting women, understanding that women are not products to be married off, or to have as girlfriends, but that also they are intelligent members of society that contribute to it. They’ve done it in history, and they will continue to do so.   

When I write, for example in Little Family, the main character is Khoudiemata, who decided that she is going to be as free as possible, that nobody is going to make her what she doesn’t want to become. So, it’s also good for young women and men to read literature and see stories of women that are not highlighted enough. This( sexual violence) is a very serious issue that needs to be taken up by the entire country, and we need to be honest about what’s going on.

Poda-Poda: And that’s also the power of literature, it gives us the chance to be open and honest about things that are often considered a taboo. Going back to the theme of storytelling and narratives, in your books you’ve highlighted not just your own experiences, but the experiences of many young people in Sierra Leone.  In our attempt to share those stories with a wider audience, how do we stay true to our experiences?  

IB: Well I started writing particularly out of that frustration. I started writing because there were a lot of people writing about Sierra Leone that were not Sierra Leoneans. They visited for maybe one or two weeks and then wrote books about Sierra Leone, that didn’t quite paint the full picture. People come to our country and then all of a sudden are seen as the ‘experts’ of our lives, and they shape the way the world conceives who we are. So, my writing really came out of that frustration.

My writing has been to undo some of those things and put the narrative in our hands. We should tell our own stories, our incapabilities and shortcomings. We should be in charge of telling those stories, because when we tell our own stories, we give ourselves agency, we show how multifaceted we are.  This is very important, because it not only shapes how people view us, but also how we think of ourselves. So, I’ve been a big champion of that.  In all the books that I’ve written, none of them are set in the US, all of them are set in Sierra Leone and similar countries. And this is very deliberate. Not that I don’t have stories to tell about the US, but there are other books that tell those stories.

 I want Sierra Leone to have a stronghold in literature. I want other young people to see that’s possible to put that intelligence on paper and keep record of our experiences.  When you write, you always have to write about things that are bigger than yourself. And I think that is why my work has been so successful, because when people read it, they know I’m writing about something that’s bigger than me.  And for young writers in Sierra Leone, this is what I would say to them:  Don’t write because you want to be this “superstar” on your own. Write because you want to see the beauty and complexities of the society we live in, and how people can see themselves in literature.  For example, when I write, I use our names for my characters: Khoudiemata, Mohamed, Salamatu, these are names that are not usually in literature, and I want them to be in literature. And when a girl named Salamatu reads a novel, she’ll say “oh, there’s someone like me”.

Poda-Poda: There have been protests in the United States that have reverberated around the world. The Black Lives Matter protests is fast becoming a global movement. As a black writer living in the US, do you feel a sense of duty to tell the stories of the different layers of blackness, and make those different connections?

IB: Absolutely. Racism is not just an American thing, it’s a global thing. People dislike you because of how you look, because of your blackness. And when it comes to that, it does not matter whether you’re from Sierra Leone, or wherever else. One of the earliest police shootings of black people in New York, was Amadou Diallo, who was from Guinea. And when the police shot him, nobody asked where he was from. He was black, and that is the first thing they saw. So, this idea of blackness is a global thing. Because of how black people have been portrayed through time, through the Point of View ( POV)  of white people, we are not portrayed as people who have intelligence, as people who can succeed .

For me as a writer, there’s a burden and a desire to undo that and to show people the multiple experiences of blackness. Going back to my work, my stories usually don’t have any white people in it and if they do, they are not shown as “white saviours” because we save ourselves. So, I want to show that we can exists without the POV of white people. We don’t need them to live or imagine, we’ve always lived and imagined as people.

Poda-Poda: Speaking of blackness and visibility, and looking inwards, how can we make those connections as Sierra Leonean creatives at home and in the diaspora, while decentring the white gaze and focusing on ourselves?

IB: That is what I’ve been doing over the years. Every time I put something out, I try to collaborate with other black writers, so that we can have more of us telling more of our stories. Clearly, I am one person, so my work will always be from my own point of view. So, I’ve been trying to encourage young writers back home to also put their work out there.

One of the things that I did in my new book is that I wanted the characters to have a visual representation. I asked my publisher to look for an African black woman creator (illustration and drawing) to draw the characters in Little Family. And luckily, they found Ngadi Smart, a Sierra Leonean illustrator. And she drew these amazing photos of the characters. So now the publishers know that there is this Sierra Leonean illustrator who we can hire for my next projects.  For me, each time I do a project, I throw a hook out there to bring somebody to the forefront. And it’s very important to do that so that people can see the breadth of our intelligence on the continent.

Poda-Poda: We definitely need more of us telling out stories. What advice would you give to aspiring writers from Sierra Leone?

IB: Read a lot! Read a lot of what other people are writing. If you can, find a mentor and a circle of people who can review your work for you. Write your own truth, write your own stories. Don’t let anybody tell you that you cannot do it. Because I also know that we come from a culture where, there’s very little encouragement in the creative space. People will try to push you down or say that you are not good enough.  When I first expressed that I wanted to write, I had some of my friends in Sierra Leone who tried to discourage me. But I thought to myself “why not?”. So, find people who are going to encourage you for your craft and not people who are going to push you down. You have to surround yourself with people who can empower you. Your platform (Poda-Poda) is a remarkable one, and there are people creating these sorts of mediums, for people to showcase their work. So, write, read, and find spaces that will support you.

Poda-Poda: A question I always ask writers is, how has writing saved your life?

IB: It saved my life in many ways. How I started writing was that I came to the US in 1998, and I was adopted into a white Jewish family. And I had left the war in Sierra Leone, and I had nothing. All I had was my Sierra Leone passport. And it was very difficult to get into school, because I didn’t have a report card or any school records. And even though I could stand in front of people and speak English to them very well, it wasn’t sufficient for them, because they still needed proof that I had been in school before. So, I started writing to show that parts of me had existed before people met me in the US. And I remember my first essay was titled “Why I do not have a report card”, because most people kept asking me. This essay was a window for me to explain that when you’re running for your life, you don’t’ think of your report card !

So, writing for was a way to show who I was before people in the US met me, and to correct whatever perception they had of other people from my country. Writing has saved my life by allowing me to show people that I am as human, as intelligent, and as complicated as they are and that people from my country are not one-dimensional. For example, when we had Ebola, there were so many western journalists writing a lot of nonsense about Sierra Leone, I had to jump in, and I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post. So, writing has always been a way to reassert our humanity in other people’s mindsets.

Poda-Poda: What is the one thing you miss about Sierra Leone?

IB: Oh, I miss everything. There’s something about Sierra Leone that you cannot find anywhere else, at least for me. Everybody is a natural comedian and natural storyteller, and every encounter is always interesting, especially for me as a writer.  There’s so much passion in everything. Even in our difficulties, we have passion and humor. I miss that. I miss that people have discussions about the most meaningless things. I miss the food. I miss our mannerisms, how laidback people are. I miss speaking Krio. I miss speaking Mende. Our languages are constantly evolving and there’s so much musicality in them. I can go on and on. I miss everything.  

Find our more about Ishmael Beah’s work on ishmaelbeah.com .

Questions and Interview by Ngozi Cole.

Siana Bangura on Identity and Creative Collaboration

Siana Bangura is a writer, producer, performer, and community organiser hailing from South East London, now living, working, and creating between London and the West Midlands. Siana is originally from Sierra Leone and moved to London with her mother when she was two years old. Her creative work focuses on the intersection of race, class and gender, and the hybridity of identity. Siana is the founder and former editor of Black British Feminist platform, No Fly on the WALL; she is the author of poetry collection, ‘Elephant’; and the producer of ‘1500 & Counting’, a documentary film investigating deaths in custody and police brutality in the UK. 

Poda-Poda Stories spoke with Siana about her creative journey and embracing her Sierra Leonean heritage.

Poda-Poda: Tell us about yourself, your background and your work.

Siana: I’m originally from Freetown Sierra Leone, but I grew up in Southeast London and I now live and work between London and the West Midlands.  I am a writer and a producer primarily, but these are umbrella terms for a number of things. I also have a journalistic background and social commentary is very key to my work as a producer. I’ve been producing theatre since 2014 and I was catapulted into the world of film in 2015 after the death of Sheku Bayoh in Scotland and feeling the need to document his story.  I'm a community organiser and I campaign  on issues focusing on the intersection between race, class and gender in the UK and in the diaspora. I also cast a lens on other issues such as the arms trade , gentrification and climate justice – I’m always connecting the dots. Obviously, we're in this moment of Black Lives Matter, so I’m doing a lot of work organising around that.

I am the  author of ‘Elephant’ , a poetry collection published in 2016 , which is very much a meditation on Black British womanhood and girlhood, a reflection on being an immigrant as well as reflections on my relationship to Sierra Leone and to South London .

My most recent offering is a play called ‘Layila!’ the story of Aminata.

Whatever form my work takes, it’s really all about making sure that I'm centring voices and stories of those on the margins. So for me, I’m all about decentring whiteness and decentring white men because they are the centre of everything and they shouldn’t be.

One project that I ran for a number of years was a platform called No Fly on the WALL and that was created for Black British women and Black women living in the UK, which I founded in  2013. It was my first online platform, which then turned into an offline community. That was in the early days of Black Twitter - we met in person and had these really powerful community conversations, community circles and sista circles at a place called Common House. A lot of the people who were part of that community have gone on to do some amazing and impressive things. Some folks have stayed connected, launched projects together, and some have even gotten married!

Poda-Poda: Your book of poetry, ‘Elephant’, is described as a collection about womanhood, Black Feminism, racism, and identity to gentrification, changing urban landscapes, and love inhibited by patriarchal norms. How have your experiences as a black British shaped your writing and creative process? Would you describe it as a love letter to yourself as a black woman?

 Siana: Definitely. Yeah, I think the way I like to describe it is as a meditation. I am reflecting on all these aspects of womanhood, of Black womanhood and that includes girlhood too. The way I put the work together is very intentional. The beginning includes meditations on migrating from Freetown, Sierra Leone to London with my mum as well as memoirs of growing up in southeast London and going to school in Elephant and Castle. The collection is semi-autobiographical, so there is truth as well as creative license of course.

Even the title ‘Elephant’ is meaningful to me. I am paying homage to the fact I'm from in and around the Elephant and Castle area, where I went to school and school shaped so much of my life, especially my experiences of coming of age. I went to an all-girls school and my blackness was questioned constantly. It was an ongoing battle and challenge to grapple with.

I’m also really fascinated by elephants as an animal. There’s a number of reasons why. I've done a TED Talk about why I love them and it includes the fact that elephants are known to be strongly altruistic creatures. They move through the world emotionally very similarly to human beings. They mourn in similar ways as we do and there are these myths that elephants have a long memory – whether this is true or not, I like the idea of it. Another key theme in my collection is memory.

I often use elephants as a metaphor in my work for remembering. The title poem in my collection  ends with the lines, ‘This is what it's like to be an elephant I guess/ To live forever / And to always remember’. My book is very much part of a canon of work by people who have migrated and who have to accept that they are a hybrid of cultures and experiences. That means if I'm in Sierra Leone, I'm considered a JC (just arrived person) and they’ll be laughing at my Krio. But then I also understand that in this country, I am a fusion of things - British is just about as good as it gets for you here if you are not white. I recall only one time in my life where I've ever called myself English, and the way I was looked at, I knew I could never do that again. I'm not English. The hybridity of identity is another thing that I meditate on often, including in my writing.  

Poda-Poda:  You’re involved in so many different things, what is your creative process?

 Siana: That’s a good question, and I think it really depends.  There’s organised chaos to some of it but I have an abundance of notebooks and I always start with an idea when it comes to writing.

So with my play, ‘Layila!’, it was on my mind to write it for five years, but then the time came last year where I was able to finally actually write it and then this year I  turned it into an audio play whilst in lockdown. I was an artist in residence at a theatre in Birmingham, UK, and I wrote the play as part of that process. Then in June and November 2019 we put it on stage and the next step was for me to bring it to London, but then the coronavirus outbreak happened. We don't know when theatres are going to be back on their feet . I was very disappointed. But I turned those feelings of disappointment around. Two weeks before Sierra Leonean Independence Day this year, I woke up and I was like, ‘you know what? If people can't go to the theatre, I am going to bring the theatre to the people’ and so I did. In two weeks, I pulled together a team and we turned my play into an audio project – it was an intense two-week period and I really enjoyed working with the people involved.

For Elephant, I used to do a lot of touring as a poet, particularly during Black History Month and there was an incident where I was attacked by a racist on a train in Liverpool, UK - I shared the incident online and it went viral. The irony of that moment is that I was trying to get to a performance that night to share some poems that were going be in my book. This racist was trying to silence me , and I said to myself “nah, the world needs to hear what I have to say”. So that just accelerated my process of getting it published.

I have many processes rather than just one when I create work. I often imagine the finished piece and work backwards – the title might come to me first or a key word or phrase or line. Sometimes it’s an image. It really just depends!

Poda-Poda: We recently interviewed the author Namina Forna, and she talked about how certain memories from her childhood in Sierra Leone played out in her book, The Gilded Ones. I’ve been really interested in how writers in the diaspora reproduce memories from their Sierra Leonean background in their work. What was that like for you, especially in the play ‘Layilla!’?

 Siana: I am Sierra Leonean, and my mum has always equipped me with the knowledge of where I'm from. But when you are in the diaspora, there are a lot of  negative connotations around being African, West African especially. When you’re Sierra Leonean, you're either invisibilised within the African diaspora or you are hyper-visible in the form of stereotypes. When I was younger, it felt like nobody had heard of my country. I often get told that I ‘look like’ I’m from South Africa or somewhere in southern Africa. So, there's that invisibility. And then also if there is any visibility, we already know what it is for: Blood Diamonds and Ebola. But there is far more to Sierra Leone than that!

Despite the constant negativity out there, luckily I’ve always had my mum to remind me of the importance of Sierra Leone to British history and actually, the history of the freedom of Black people. In 2016 I was really proud to watch British Historian David Olusoga’s ‘Black and British: A forgotten history’ series, which had a lot in there about Sierra Leone – on primetime TV! I was deeply moved by it.

My quest to contribute to a shift in the narrative around Sierra Leone led me to found a collective in 2015 called The Salone Collective to bring together young Sierra Leonean Creatives. I didn’t understand why we weren’t working together and also why, you may not even realise that someone you have known for ages is actually Sierra Leonean! In 2016, we held an event called ‘Freetown Sounds’, which was a beautiful sharing of our culture. Some of the collective’s members included griot, rapper and storyteller Alim Kamara, singer-songwriter Asabi Hawah, poet Saraiya Bah, and photographer Adama Jalloh, to name just a few.

Then after the mudslides tragedy in August 2017, Abu Yillah and I co-founded the Sierra Leone Arts & Culture festival (#SLACFest) as part of wider collective efforts to raise funds in response to that tragedy. Then from there the festival has continued and has grown under the Young Salone brand and the collective involved in that are doing amazing things and bringing together young Sierra Leoneans at home and in the diaspora.

I’m really glad to see the landscape changing finally .

Reflecting on my recent work, when I was writing ‘Layila!’, I also started to think about grief and loss and identity and how our mothers and grandmothers are the keepers of culture. That is very true in my case. The protagonist is a very much modelled on a younger version of myself and the character Grandma, is modelled a little bit on my maternal grandma.

Creativity is a type of alchemy, you know? You’re kind of just bringing these different elements together to create something powerful.

Poda-Poda: There have been protests globally around racial injustice, white supremacy, and racial discrimination, against black people. How can black artists, writers, creatives, continue to amplify black voices globally, using art and creativity?

 Siana: We're already doing it. It's a fact that Black people are the culture.

And what we're seeing now in this moment of Black lives matter is that people love our culture but don’t care about Black lives – and haven’t for hundreds of years. Well, if you love our culture, you need to pull up and also be here for our struggles. No more looking away. Valuing Black lives includes not just treating us as a commodity – people to keep taking from.

Black artists need to just carry on supporting each other and making sure we’re amplifying the voices back home: looking to the continent, looking  to the Caribbean , and  highlighting artists and writers and creators who live in those places as well. We need to connect the dots. That’s what Young Salone is doing - making sure they're connecting people in Sierra Leone with folks outside of Sierra Leone and championing our culture and our language too.

In fact, right now my favourite song is ‘Move Right’, by Big Zuu and Drizilik – what a fire link up! Hearing that song being played on the radio, hearing sweet sweet Krio in the airwaves in the UK, means so much to me. It makes me feel so proud.

Whenever we are in positions of power and influence, we need to ensure we are bringing other Black folk along with us – never accept that there is only ever room for one of us. It’s a damn lie. There is always strength in numbers.

 Poda-Poda: I saw something online that said something like we've spent so much time saying we need to make ourselves visible , but we are already visible to each other. So I think it's time that we just start focusing on our own spaces…

Siana:  Yes. We need to not be scared of each other because we are talking about our communities here. We were taught there is only space for one of us, so you need to fight for that space. We must resist that narrative of unnecessary competition and scarcity.

 Poda-Poda: There’s often this idea, that the struggles of black people in the diaspora against racism, aren’t necessarily an ‘African’ problem. As a daughter of the soil (from Sierra Leone) and a black British creative, how do you think we can transcend those lines?

Burna Boy’s mum, Bose Ogulu once said ‘Every Black person should please remember that you were Africans before you were anything else’.

She is right, never forget that even though many have been displaced, we’re all still originally from the continent. I think it's just that understanding that our roots are the same and it's really important that we care about each other. If all Back people are not free, you are not free. It's simple as that. Quoting MLK, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. The struggles of all sorts of minoritised groups, are important, and are connected.

Poda-Poda: How has writing saved your life?

Siana:  Wow! [Pauses]

I agree writing has definitely saved my life many times over. It's such a powerful question. If you write, you have a voice. So writing has given me a voice. I'm an extrovert, but I also have my introverted ways, especially when I was younger. Writing has always been a key mode of expression for me. Writing is how I make sense of the world and how I archive my experiences of it. It's given me a sense of power in myself and my ability to document my life and the lives of others in this time. I take the duty of a writer and a creative very seriously.

Writing has given me the space to explore all these types of stories and to make sense of the world in a way that I couldn't do otherwise.

Find out more about Siana’s work at sianabangura.com

Questions and Interview by Ngozi Cole.

A Writer's Insight: Pede Hollist Talks To Poda-Poda Stories

Pede Hollist is a Sierra Leonean writer and a professor of English at the University of Tampa, Florida. His short story, “Foreign Aid,” was shortlisted for the 2013 Caine Prize, arguably Africa’s most prestigious literary award. His first novel, So the Path Does Not Die (Jacarandabooksartsmusic, U.K.), won the 2014 African Literature Association’s Book of the Year Award: Creative Writing, and his short stories have been published in several platforms. Pede Hollist shared his journey with Poda-Poda Stories in this interview.

Poda- Poda:  Please tell us a bit about yourself (background, your work as a writer, academic, etc.)

Pede: My name is Arthur Onipede Hollist, but I write as Pede Hollist. I was born in Freetown, Sierra Leone. I am currently a professor of English at the University of Tampa, where I teach academic and creative writing as well as African Literature.

Poda-Poda: You have rich collection of work (including a short story that was shortlisted for the Caine Prize). Tell us how you started out as a writer.  

Pede: I stumbled into writing fiction in my late forties. Apparently, I often told amusing tales to my department colleagues. One of them encouraged me to convert them into written stories. I did, and Path, my first novel, was the result. I would not encourage beginning writers to skip the apprenticeship of short fiction and nonfiction narratives because writing a book is a mammoth task. Still, determination can overcome most challenges. Before writing, I mostly read. By the end of primary school, I had read all of the 20-book children’s classics my parents bought for my siblings and me. After I completed them, I started reading the entries of the adjacent encyclopedias. No, I did not read all of them! Instead, I played cricket, football, and ran track. Diverse interests and activities enrich one’s outlook and provide a deep fund of experiences to tap into when writing. In secondary school in the UK and Sierra Leone, I read the novels of Richard Gordon, P. G. Wodehouse, and James Hadley Chase. Of course, as a college student and now as a professor, I read a broad range of literary texts. Reading enabled me to become a writer.

Poda-Poda: Tell us a bit about your writing process.

Pede: I am always looking for ideas and incidents to turn into stories. I take notes , do research, and free-write if an angle or insight on a subject grabs me. My phone is full of catchy phrases, quotations, and well-written sentences. I read books in print and e-formats, listen to audiobooks, and attend author readings. I daily listen to the news, to people telling stories, and to stand-up comedians. I learn from them the importance of set ups, timing, pacing, and punch lines. These elements help me to create engaging, suspenseful writing. Of course, having an idea does not mean you have a story. I spend hours, sometimes days, months, and even years shaping ideas to make them fit with others for a story. For example, an idea for a recent short story titled “Where One Thing Stands” came to me in 2009 when I visited northern Ghana. There, I learned about a longstanding land dispute between the Namogligo and Tindongo peoples. It had resulted in periodic, deadly engagements between the two groups. I wanted to write about this conflict, but I did not feel the subject would make an interesting short story. The idea floated in my head until 2016 when I met a person who self-described as gender neutral and was searching for acceptance from family and friends. After some research, I combined this individual’s desire with the dispute between the warring ethnic groups into a story about difference, conflict, and coexistence. Of course, this process works best when you have time. Often though, you have to shoehorn your ideas into a story because you have a deadline to meet. I can do that too. So the takeaway is, be adaptable.

Poda-Poda: Your novel, So The Path Does Not Die, focuses on home and exile and belonging to a place. It also touches on certain "sensitive topics." How important do you think it is to address what would be considered sensitive topics in literature (e.g, FGM, ethnic discrimination, war trauma, etc.) through literature?

Pede: Very important, but I don’t think that should be the goal of writing literature. People don’t read novels and poems because they want to learn about sensitive topics. They read because they want to be immersed in an aesthetic experience. Hopefully, careful handling by authors of the subjects mentioned in your question exposes readers to insights without putting them under pressure to take positions and make judgments. My goal in telling stories, sometimes with a smile and at other times a snarl, is to show that issues are more complex than we imagine.

With that goal, I stay alert to places where I may be engaging in agenda-writing. To ensure I accurately and ethically represent groups of people and thoughtfully deal with sensitive subjects, I do my research. For example, before and during the writing of Path, I read Michael Jackson’s Allegories of the Wilderness, other ethnographic studies of the Kuranko, and interviewed several of its members. To get a comprehensive understanding of circumcision, I read many articles, especially those of Fuambai Sia Ahmadu, a robust defender of the practice, interviewed, and surveyed many people. Over time, I was able to inhabit the different perspectives before reproducing them through character and dialogue. Yet at a literary event in Kenya, one audience member told me that my story did not advocate for stopping FGC and noted that was an attitude those of us who lived in the west could afford to adopt. So, regardless of your efforts, readers engage your work with biases and agendas, and insensitivities arise where you might have intended none.

Poda-Poda: Your short story Foreign Aid was shortlisted for the Caine Prize. Please share the process of how it happened.

Pede: Like many other Africans, I have listened to the arguments about the pitfalls of foreign aid. Many Africans returning to their birth lands from the diaspora have functioned as donors and bearers “of aid.” I am one among many. In the native land, we consciously or unconsciously play up our “overseas-ness” and benevolence, sometimes to show off, but often in response to an overwhelming presence of material poverty and need. However, we quickly realize that our assistance is inadequate or misused. Take the laptop gifted to a nephew, niece, or friend, sometimes with much fanfare. Not long after, we learn the device is no longer working. It fell and the screen broke, got soaked by torrential rain, was fried by power surges, or ravaged by viruses (including older strains of the Coronavirus). These things happened to it serially. For each, you send replacement parts and money for repairs. Then it got stolen! Talks about a new waterproof, fire-resistant model with the latest antivirus and updates are underway. But donor fatigue is setting in. Oh, did I say I wrote the story because I wanted to laugh at myself, other donors and recipients who have been through this aid experience ? If readers recognize the parallels between personal and international assistance, and that tangled motives, interests, and personalities underline and undermine giving, that’s a good outcome.

Poda-Poda: How can more Sierra Leonean writers bring or highlight their work on international platforms?

Pede: They must present well-edited works to the curators of international platforms. Because all writers suffer from word blindness, hand over your manuscript to skilled editors or experienced writers. They will point out inconsistencies with the subject matter, plot, and characterization. They will identify opportunities to improve craft elements, grammar errors, typos, and format issues, especially those pesky ones that pop up in editing.

Join Facebook communities of writers, editors, and publishers and develop relationships. Subscribe to platforms that publish contemporary African writing. Submit your work to them. My favorite is Afreada. It presents a range of exciting, relatable, and easy-to-read stories. It even tells you how long it would take to read each story, typically from three to eight minutes. Read those stories and the responses to them to get a sense of the themes, issues, and styles that are current and appealing. Imitate them for sure, but to catch attention, you have to break away from popular trends and do something different.

Regularly visit the websites of your favorite authors and follow them on Twitter and Instagram. To keep current with what’s happening in the field, subscribe to James Murua's Literature Blog. It has a country section and a comprehensive list of competitions and publishers. Submit your work to as many sites as possible, making sure you respect those that do not accept simultaneous submissions. I recently learned of Rigorous, “a journal written and edited by people of color.”  However, be prepared that you are not going to be placed or listed more times than you are. Stiffen yourself for the rejections. Brush them off and keep writing, revising, and submitting.

Poda-Poda: How can Sierra Leonean creatives (both at home and in the diaspora) collaborate to bring our rich literature to international platforms, or should we focus on building a strong literary scene in Sierra Leone first?

Pede: Yes, focus on strengthening the workshops, competitions, artists’ organizations, and festivals already in place and collaborating to extend them throughout the country. Showcasing the country’s rich literature is the product of good writing. Nigerians, Kenyans, and South Africans dominate the African literary scene because they have more established creative writing cultures-frequent workshops and author readings, more secondary school and college elective courses, competitions, publishers, and websites.

During my 2017-2018 Fulbright year in Sierra Leone, I conducted workshops at Modern High School, Harford Girls School (the one on Circular Road, Freetown), and at a community program named Bright Light Youth Empowerment. The students in these sessions were enthusiastic and had stories to tell. Their curiosity, interests, and talents have to be sustained and developed. We need more competitions such as those offered by Aminatta Forna and Nadia Maddy, book festivals, and reading clubs.

To that end, I am going to be starting my literary blog. It will be another space for Sierra Leoneans to display their work. If we build such sites with quality material, the international audience will come to read our rich literature. Then we should host in-country writers’ retreats. I would love to be part of a two-week residency somewhere in the hills of Kambia. That’s a project to collaborate on.

Poda-Poda: What advice would you give to young creative writers living in Sierra Leone? 

Pede: Study Sierra Leone’s cultures, arts, and histories. Pay close attention to the trends today, especially among your peers. Write about them, not to teach, preach, and engage in social criticism, but to immerse your readers in the worlds or subcultures you create. Write in Mende, Temne, Krio and other local languages, or lightly incorporate indigenous vocabulary, expressions such as fiam and kitikata and intensifiers like o and ya into your English-language pieces. Incorporate oral storytelling stylistics like repetition, parallelism, piling and association into your writing. Play and experiment.

Read beyond the contemporary African, British, and American texts that are taught in schools and colleges. Africa’s Sunjata and Mwindo epics, India’s The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, Japan’s The Tale of the Genji and The Tale of the Heike, and China’s The Book of Songs are a few examples of the breadth of world literature that could help your writing.

Become a voracious consumer of non-literary material. Knowing about economics, accounting, anatomy, cosplay, gender issues, psychology, and a thousand and one other topics can be surprisingly helpful when you are writing. Look on Youtube and Google videos that teach about writing.

Don’t make excuses about not having the time to write.Write, every day, until you have a completed draft. Then revise until you believe it is the next great work the world has been waiting for. Finally, send it to skilled readers who will tell you the work can’t possibly go out into the world as currently dressed-- you know, like your parents said to you when you wore that gaudy shirt or revealing dress. The experienced readers will have suggestions and comments that will make your great work better. Still, don’t change your narrative because someone thinks you should. Weigh suggestions, use and adopt what feels right, and set aside what doesn’t. You will get rejection letters (many of them) and fail to place in competitions. Don’t give up. Keep writing. Success is around the corner. 

Namina Forna on Writing and Creating New Worlds

Women bleeding gold, outcast warriors shifting power, and a fierce sixteen-year-old heroine: this is the world that screenwriter and novelist Namina Forna has created in her Young Adult (YA) fantasy trilogy The Gilded Ones. Namina Forna was born in Sierra Leone and moved to the US when she was a child. Her memories of stories in Sierra Leone have richly influenced how she creates epic fantasy worlds, and we are proud to call her one of our own! Poda-Poda Stories reached out to Namina, and she shared some amazing gems with us. Dive into her journey as a writer, the need for representation, and how writers can navigate the publishing industry. 

Poda Poda: Please tell us a bit about yourself: your work as a screenwriter and a novelist etc. Was writing something you always wanted to do and were you encouraged to pursue it?  

Namina: I’m a fantasy author and screenwriter in Los Angeles, working on books and movies and TV shows. Honestly, I was always meant to be a writer. Even though I only officially decided on it when I was in my late teens, I showed all the signs. I was one of those kids who always had their nose in a book, and I basically lived at the library growing up. I also watched way more TV than was advisable, so there’s also that.

My family, of course, wasn’t very happy with it. They had all these grand ideas that I was going to be a lawyer, maybe do international diplomacy, but it wasn’t for me. I’m quiet and shy by nature, so I don’t have the temperament for it. I hope I’ve made up for their disappointment somewhat. 

Poda Poda: You are from Sierra Leone, and moved to the US when you were a child. What was that transition like for you and how has it informed your journey as a writer?

Namina: It was a very rough transition. I moved to Lawrenceville, Ga, in the fall, and of course, I hated it. I wondered why the grass was always so yellow, and why it was always so cold. Fitting in at school was difficult. People have this image of what “Africa” is like, so when I told the kids at school that I grew up in a nice house and not a hut, and that I had lots of clothes instead of walking around naked (like they repeatedly asked me), my teachers told my mom that I was a habitual liar, and that I needed to be checked for mental issues. 

It’s definitely informed my journey as writer. My biggest writing goal as of the moment is to change the opinion people have of Africa—not just foreigners, but natives ourselves. I think that one of the most horrendous things colonization did was rob us of our imagination, and by extension, pride in ourselves. Even though we have a glorious history and a beautiful culture, we can’t see it because it’s been overwritten by colonial powers. So we have to overwrite them back, one story at a time. 

I write so that Sierra Leoneans, so that Africans and other black and brown people can see themselves as heroes and fight against the mental oppression that is the result of all our years of colonization, etc. That way, the next time some white teacher calls an African kid a liar to their face for saying they didn’t walk around naked and have lions in their back yard, they can point to my book or movie and tell that teacher to go shove it where the sun don’t shine.

Poda Poda: We are so excited about your book The Gilded Ones. The main character Deka, resurrects every time she's killed (if I'm correct?), and that is very symbolic. What aspects of your background as a Sierra Leonean woman,  either influenced or informed writing it? Additional fun question, would you describe it as a Feminist book?

Namina: Yes, Deka resurrects when you kill her, and she bleeds gold as well, which is also symbolic. The gold is meant to talk about how women’s bodies are seen as objects, either for sexuality or labor. So often, we’re reduced to the terms of our usefulness in these aspects. This definitely came from my anger growing up as a girl in Sierra Leone.

I think when you grow up as a woman in Sierra Leone, or in any other patriarchal society (which is basically everywhere), you grow up angry and confused. Because your body and your person  are not respected or valued, especially in comparison to men. And if it’s not the little things like the automatic expectation that you cook and clean and serve everyone, it’s the assault, the rapes, the trauma that follows. 

I grew up during the civil war, and I’m so lucky that I never really experienced much of it. But so many of my cousins were taken, disappeared to the bush to become sex slaves, etc. You hear the stories, you see the trauma. All I can do is bear witness. 

So, am I a feminist? Yes, definitely. I know a lot of people see the word and their eyes immediately glaze over. To them, feminism means women coming for men’s rights, which is obviously not the truth. “When you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” as the saying goes. For me, feminism means having an equal chance. Am I ever going to be an NBA player? No, but neither is the vast majority of the male population. We’d still all like an equal chance to shoot that shot, though.

Poda Poda; I love Fantasy! I am a huge fan, and what I like about what you've done is representation, the ability for a Sierra Leonean to pick it up the book  and  go " hey, I know the word alaki, etc ". Were those things intentional? Did you want it to also be a story about representation?

Namina: Yes, very much so. My work is always inspired Sierra Leone and the youth of the nation, because they’re where the future lies. Whenever I write, I always extend this invitation to them: this work is for you. Know that I’m here, creating things for you, and even though it’s going onto the world stage, it came from Sierra Leone first. As for the word, alaki, it’s an in-joke for our country. We all know alaki means useless. So I took the word, and I took it one step further. I hope that if The Gilded Ones becomes an international thing, Sierra Leoneans will stop and laugh, because now we have the entire world saying alaki. The thought always brings me joy.

Poda Poda: There are young Sierra Leoneans writing at home and in the diaspora , and many of them want to get published internationally . We interviewed the author Nadia Maddy recently and she shared that Sierra Leonean writers have to go past the gatekeepers of publishing and find ways to get their work out there. What advice would you give to writers, especially writers in Sierra Leone, about the publishing industry, managing rejection, and just forging ahead, given that Sierra Leone is a difficult landscape for creatives ?

Namina: The first thing I will say is work on the craft: learn from the masters, read everything you can get your hands on, find incisive critique partners that will help you take your work to the next level.  Also, make sure you have the correct word count. Don’t write 100,000 words if you’re working on a middle grade comedy, for example.

Once you have that down, get on Twitter. Twitter is where authors and agents hang out, and you can join a global community once you’re plugged in.

To get your work to the gatekeepers, there’s three main avenues: literary magazines, querying, and twitter competitions. Agents read literary magazines, and if you publish your short stories there, you could get that special email. There’s also querying, which is when you write a cold email to an agent, asking them to represent you.

Some advice on querying: Make sure that the agent you’re emailing likes the kind of work you do. For example, if you’re writing gothic horror, don’t send it to someone who likes middle grade fantasy, they’ll never talk to you again. You can use resources like the official manuscript wishlist, https://www.manuscriptwishlist.com, where you basically just plug in what genre you’re writing, and can see all the agents that accept what you write. You can also go to websites like Query Shark and pitch wars to find out more. 

Speaking of Pitch Wars, twitter pitch competitions are amazing for helping black writers get their work to agents. I got my big break through #DVPit. That and Pitch Wars and #PitMad get a ton of black authors agented, so check them out. Also, you make a lot of friends doing those competitions, and those friends eventually become authors. 

Poda Poda: What's your writing process like? 

Namina: Typically, I get my ideas from dreams. Once I wake up, I immediately write the idea down, then I talk it over with friends, agents, etc., to make sure it’s original and marketable. Not every idea is, and you have to know which ones to toss away and which ones to keep. When I came up with The Gilded Ones, for instance, it wasn’t marketable, but I knew it was an original idea, so I kept it, and waited until the time was right.

 Once I’ve ensured an idea is good, I begin my research, which takes about a year. I do this passively, while I’m working on other projects. At the end of the research process, I finesse my story and write down an outline. From there, I go to pages. I try to write ten pages every morning before breakfast. If everything is good, and my schedule is okay, I usually finish a book or a new work every three, four months or so.

Poda Poda: Finally, any last word for  Poda-Poda Stories and your Sierra Leonean fanbase ( we boku! )

Namina: Fambul-dem, I’d just love to see you guys when I come back to Sierra Leone. If COVID gets better, I’ll definitely be at Ma Dengn this year. And if not, I’ll return to Sierra Leone at the earliest opportunity. Until then, stay safe, everyone.

Visit Namina Forna’s website at naminaforna.com.