The Radiance of Tomorrow…aaaannnd Cannonball!

It is the end, or maybe the beginning, of another story. Every story begins and ends with a woman, a mother, a grandmother, a girl, a child. Every story is a birth…

To round out my ten African books of the year, I picked up this novel by Ishmael Beah, known for his previous non-fiction, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of A Boy Soldier.  After reading this, I definitely want to pick that one up, too.  This is fiction, but it’s obviously based on truth.

Imperi is a small village in Sierra Leone.  After the brutal civil war ends, the elders begin returning to their village and cleaning up the bones in the street and the charred  houses.  Gradually, former residents and orphans come to Imperi and a little community grows.   The elders tell the old stories again and teach the young people how to listen to the earth, horrific wounds begin to heal, and people start learning and remembering how to live in a time of peace.

But this happiness is short-lived: a foreign company establishes a mine nearby, polluting Imperi’s water, taking no responsibility for accidents that kill Imperi’s children, and bribing officials and elders to sweep their negligence and corruption under the rug: profit is king, and the “law” is a joke.  The villagers fight back in creative and admirable ways, but they find no support in the local corrupt politicians, policemen, and regional chiefs who are easily bought.  While the story has many wonderful characters, the plot generally follows two schoolteachers, Benjamin and Bockarie, who teach their students despite the corruption that withholds 2/3 of their pay.  Eventually they start working at the mine–they don’t want to, but they need to feed their families.  Toward the end, they journey to the capital, Freetown, to try their luck in the big city.

Two things really struck me about this book.  The first is what Beah says in the preface, that he tried to keep the spirit of his native language in the English novel:

Mende, is very expressive, very figurative, and when I write, I always struggle to find the English equivalent of things that I really want to say in Mende. For example, in Mende, you wouldn’t say “night came suddenly”; you would say “the sky rolled over and changed its sides.”

The result is a story full of imagery unlike any novel I’ve read–the facts of the story are told in an almost clipped manner by an objective narrator, and sometimes that’s jarring (“So-and-so had his arm amputated by a boy soldier during the war.”–yikes!)  But the mood feels like you’re sitting at your grandma’s knee as she recounts stories from her youth.  There’s a plot arc, I guess, but that’s not the point, you know?

The second thing that struck me is how well Beah captures the feeling of desperation and poverty–specifically the kind that is due to deep, systemic corruption.  At one point, Bockarie is considering applying to the mine for a job.  This doesn’t sit right with him because the white men who run the mine have done terrible things to their community, polluting their water and raping their women.  But he needs to feed his family.  He needs a job, and the government literally isn’t paying him to be a schoolteacher.  He goes to one of the elders and asks what he should do: should he apply for a job at the mine?  Is that the right thing to do?  The elder thinks, sighs, and says: “Yes and no are the same these days in this land of ours.”  Yes, the company is terrible, unethical, and corrupt.  No, you shouldn’t work there.  Yes, your family is hungry.  No, you don’t have any other options.  How can it be unethical when it’s your only choice?  What a succinct, heartbreaking summary of corruption, desperation, and loss!

It’s a brutal but hopeful book.  Terrible, violent things happen, and the land is lawless and unjust, but people work hard, take care of their families, love each other, and wait to see what kind of goodness tomorrow might bring.  As one of Imperi’s elders, Mama Kadie, says:   “We must live in radiance of tomorrow, as our ancestors have suggested in their tales.  For what is yet to come tomorrow has possibilities, and we must think of it, the simplest glimpse of that possibility of goodness. That will be our strength. That has always been our strength.”