doing is describing what it might look like
from elsewhere, the view from elsewhere.Parssinen: When you have that question
you’ve been turning over in your mind, how
do you begin a new work? What’s the first
step?Forna: I’ll start with fiction because I think
The Devil That Danced on Water is self-evi-
dent; I mean, that was really about seeing the
story. I saw the story because we were that
far away from the events which had taken
place in the 1970s, and I had many pieces of
information, but what I didn’t have was this
perspective over the twenty-five interven-
ing years and the connection between the
events in my family and the war. That came
into relief for me personally. And then sud-
denly I saw the whole narrative. I saw how all
the elements fit together. Often with novels
it’s about collecting different parts; I get a
pebble, and then I find another pebble, and
then I find another pebble, and sometimes
they never amount to anything, and then
sometimes you see a pattern.
So, for example, with Ancestor Stones, it
was very much about hearing a voice. I don’t
mean that in a spooky way; no one was talk-
ing in my head at night. But it came out of
talking to the older members of my family
about Sierra Leone’s long-distant past, eighty
years before, and just thinking that I hadn’t
heard that voice in fiction, I really hadn’t
heard women of this kind tell stories of this
kind about what life was like in virtually
precolonial Sierra Leone—well, they weren’t
exactly precolonial, but colonial influence
was not felt where they were—so Ancestor
Stones came out of that, of wishing to give
voice to those kinds of stories and to those
kinds of people, inspired very much by lis-
tening to one of my elder aunts tell a story
from the past. The story is not part of Ances-
tor Stones, which is fabricated, but that voice
was hers. That was the voice I was trying to
evoke, older women who knew that world.
The Memory of Love was prompted by
the character of Elias Cole, and he was very
much inspired by talking to older Sierra
Leoneans who’d been around in the 1960sand ’70s when the country had first taken
the wrong turn on the path, finding them
not many years after the end of the war,
reconceiving their past in a way that would
be more palatable and exculpating them
from any kind of guilt or role in the things
that had happened. There was a particular
incident with somebody who then became
a good friend of mine. I was interviewing
her parents for The Devil That Danced on
the Water, they were academics, and I asked,
“What did you do when the first arrests took
place?” And their answers took me aback
because they were so evasive, and other
people at that point had been pretty frank
with me. But these people said, “Well, what
do you mean, what did we do?” So I said,
“Well, what was the reaction on campus?
Were there any protests, were any letters
written?” And they got quite defensive and
said, “I don’t know what you’re asking, I
don’t know what you’re asking.” I was pre-
pared to leave it, but the young woman who
I didn’t know was a human-rights lawyer,
suddenly banged the desk and said, “She’s
asking you what you did, she’s asking you
what you did.”
She got in touch with me a long time later
and said that she talked to her parents about
this later, and her father had said to her,
“Well, what could we do, I couldn’t do any-
thing, I had five children. I couldn’t.” And I
thought, “Well, gosh, my father’s answer was
completely the opposite. I had children so I
had to.” So I thought that was really inter-
esting: What is the story someone like that
tells themselves about it?... How does the
next generation feel about that? So I started
thinking, for all that I had a father who was
murdered, how much worse it would be to
have a father who had failed to act?Parssinen: There’s that great quote from
your second novel, The Memory of Love, thatsays, “It doesn’t take courage to survive, it
takes cowardice.”Forna: Yes. So that drove the idea, and the
other characters evolved over time. The
character of Adrian was prompted by an
encounter I had with an astonishingly igno-
rant British psychologist in Sierra Leone, a
very brief encounter, but it was seared on
my brain.Parssinen: But what’s remarkable about
Adrian is that even though he comes out of
this encounter you had with someone who
was completely ignorant, he’s not just a rube,
he’s not a stand-in for Western ignorance.Forna: No, he grows, he’s capable of change.
So these are my pebbles. I carried Elias Cole
around for a long time.Parssinen: A year? Two years?Forna: I came across that family when I was
doing The Devil That Danced on the Water,
and I guess the next few years I was encoun-
tering more and more people like that, as we
got further and further away from the war.
People began to realize that there was this
national conversation being had, this retro-
spective national conversation being had.
I found more people who were doing that,
beginning to rewrite their own narratives.Parssinen: When you talk about a retrospec-
tive national conversation, was that done in
any formal capacity?Forna: Well, no. In terms of a formal capac-
ity, in terms of a truth and reconciliation,
and special courts, both of which were very
problematic institutions, they did produce
this kind of ripple effect. But in newspapers
people were reprinting my father’s letter ofPHOTO: NINA SUBIN
I think what novelists do is bring into relief something
that’s been hiding in plain sight.WORLDLIT.ORG 25