sierra leone
the memory of love
by aminatta forna
Aminatta Forna, author of THE MEMORY OF LOVE, was born in Scotland to a Sierra Leonean father and a Scottish mother. Her family moved to Sierra Leone when Forna was only 6-months old and where they lived for much of her childhood. Her father was a physician, but became involved in politics to counter what he felt was a corrupt and violent government, a position which lead to him being hanged on charges of treason when Forna was only 11-years-old. THE MEMORY OF LOVE is set in contemporary Sierra Leone where a devastating civil war has left an entire populace with shared trauma and secrets.
I recently finished this amazing book and I carried it with me for days afterwards. Like when you return from vacation and you miss your holiday, and the people you met there—as if the place you’ve visited it is your real home and the place you live every day is someplace unknown that you must readjust to. The characters that Aminatta Forna has created in THE MEMORY OF LOVE, are so real—flawed and human—and the setting is so well described, that it becomes believable and familiar.
The book is essentially about friendship and betrayal. It weaves through time—from the political unrest of the 1960’s through the war in the 1990s, up until the early 2000’s—gathering threads that are known and unknown, and slowly stitching them together until the full tapestry of past trauma, present experience, and future hope is revealed.
The story opens in a hospital room, where an aging and unwell Elias Cole begins to tell the story of his life to Adrian Lockheart, a young, British psychologist, who has left his wife and daughter at home in England and come to work in Sierra Leone where he feels he can make a difference, and in doing so advance his fairly mediocre career. The story Elias tells Adrian goes back to the 1960s, when Elias was a young university lecturer who met and fell in love with Saffia, the wife of a colleague, Julius, a charismatic, well-liked, anti-government activist. Using what he learns in the course of this friendship, Elias with a quiet and unexpected ambition, pursues what he wants for himself. His retelling of his life is a kind of confession to Adrian as he seeks the peace he feels he needs before he dies.
These two characters’ lives are slowly revealed to be linked in multiple ways as we see life in post-war Sierra Leone through the perspective of multiple characters. We meet a young surgeon, Kai, who befriends Adrian and suffers from debilitating insomnia for reasons he will not address. Adrian’s patient Agnes, a middle-aged woman adrift from her mind and her life, meanders in and out of the story until her trauma is revealed not to Adrian, but to Kai, through seemingly unrelated connections. Mamakay, a young Sierra Leonian woman who has dropped out of university half-way through her degree, holds Adrian to account for his foreignness, challenging his do-good intentions as a benign colonialism of a different sort.
The book is long, and detailed, and thoroughly researched, and each story is told with precise detail and clear characterization. It is an ambitious book, and entirely successful in achieving its ambitions. Reading through this challenge, there have been books along the way that I’ve declared to be my favorite. Aminatta Forna’s THE MEMORY OF LOVE, is the latest.
