My Country Sierra Leone is not just about the iconic images of inhumanity, of chopping hands, entombing wombs, of blood diamonds beamed in your homes in the 90, we were more than that before a ruthless war waged by a tiny minority soiled the image of our humanity; we were more than that during the war when nearly all of us showed high resilience in the face of immense evil; we are more than that today, a nation once more on the move, a country narrating itself, reclaiming its stories, reclaiming its language deluged by words of war, a nation resilient, humane, and growing.
There are various strands of our history weaving to form the country we now know. One strand arch back to the American war of independence that gave us the free slaves one of the events which led to the founding of the province of freedom now called Freetown the capital city of Sierra Leone. Abolitionist gave us the Maroons from west indies, the black poor from Britain and many emancipated African slaves from all over Africa.
We were a melting pot with a unique history of human compassion. We were resilient people whose doctors, lawyers, scholars spread knowledge and kindness all over Africa. The first western-style university south of the Sahara was built in Sierra Leone, the first Girls School in West Africa was established in Sierra Leone, the first Boys Grammar School was established in Sierra Leone making us an oasis of learning. American missionaries following the footstep of Sengbe Pieh known here as Joseph Cinque open schools and churches.
Then the inherent insanity of war was unleashed with all its might taking away so many things along its path; lives, limbs, properties, integrity, neighbourhoods and neighbourliness. It stripped the beacons of values and maimed the language rendering it inept in appropriating the enormity of war. It seemed the language the cultural gene of a people got corrupted and was paralyzed by the grotesque; the syntax, semantics, morphology and metaphors develop centuries ago, lack the capacity to accommodate the new ugliness. The numbing of the soul took its toll; the victims of our war were stunned, unable to speak the unspeakable. They hoisted a look of hollowness on their faces that told a tale of doom. We see relatives running into our hiding places, and we hear the horror in their beings even where they said not a word. It was telepathic conversation, and we comfort them telepathically, for, at that time, the spoken word might be too mean to do the work, it would have, as they say, added salt unto injury, it would have debased all of us in narratives of shame, covered us with the sooth of burnt moralities, the beast mark of the arson ravaging our land.
How do we use words to convey the experience without further denigrating our humanity? The words in vogue then were words of war, words on the ascending then were the words of men and the (few)women of war, the words the villains of our tragedy used, military jargons connoting evil. In the dazed recovery of speech, our people used such military jargon like attack, retreat, surrender, disarmed, to tell the tale of the war- a kind of twisted linguistic rendition of the Stockholm syndrome. A fluent nation with a rich oral literature stuttered. One of our Poets, the late Tatafway Tumoe, advised that in times of war, go for love. But even the language of love later became infested with war words though with extended meanings; words like attack now denote wooing, ambush meant outwitting a rival, bullets means gifts. Slowly, however, we freed the words from their violent etymologies, poets were pivotal to the reversal of meanings, this displacement of the jargons of war, this retelling of our stories in words that reclaim dignity.
As poets, we witness the hemorrhaging of a nation’s soul and identity just like the great American Poet Walt Whitman saw an epoch of American History when he wrote; “I am the man, I suffered, I was there”. Whitman had experienced some of the great, transformative periods in the US. He was a witness to the American civil war when the nation suffered a deep hemorrhaging of its soul, its identity. Most crucially, it was a defining moment for America to live up to its Independence credo that all men are created equally.
What his poetry did, in my view, was to epitomize that sense of resilience for which Americans are known: they survived that period and went on to survive other periods- the first and second world wars, the Vietnam War and different transformative periods of American History.
In times of carnage of an epic proportion such as the one we witnessed in Sierra Leone in 1991 -2002, the very notion of survival and existence might have made it almost impossible for people to believe that poets have a place in restoring their dignity; in helping to heal wounds. Yet, central to people’s idea of life, is that, the poet, in Sierra Leone, and elsewhere, could look at the eyes of those who had suffered, those who had ceased to believe in a compassionate God, and remind them that, yes, poetry can heal the wounds inflicted upon them.
Poetry, in much of West Africa, takes its wealth and beauty from the oral celebration, in our relations to each other; to our mystic world; of an African sense of aesthetics. Throughout our History, as we battled natural phenomena, as we celebrated our great inventions in art, technology like iron, we did so with poetry; that is, in a sense, we are more significant than the merely empirical. Our poetry was and is a statement about our resilience to problems and tragedies, domestically and externally inflicted! We are resilient people!
The war crushed our melting pot on the rocks of our resilience and fragment scattered all over the landscape, poet as the conscience of the nation played their part in collaboration with others in gathering and piecing together the broken pieces to make a country whole again. As the poet Mohamed Gibril Sesay suggests in his forward to his anthology of Sierra Leonean poems, we pillared the broken language with metaphor to tell the story of the deluge.
We manifest a compassionate presence through our poems. Through our poems, we enter people’s agony as we narrate the contours of our lives. But our poems are also outsourcing of our compassion; they are our vice-regents, acting on our behalf in the face of those who read them, inviting them into the realms of concerns for those caught up in the near-death experiences of the war. The war is over now, but the outsourced text of our compassion is still there with a life of its own.
It has been said that we are humans because we reflect, we think back on our actions and those of others. And you cannot reflect without entering the shoes of another. It could be re-entering your shoes, but you at a time one is not the same as you at time two. Very much like Thales the pre-Socratic philosopher saying you can’t step at the same river twice.
In remembering the past, we resurrect it and shore up our resilience; even the narrative of our remembering shows a coming to term with it. In most cases apart from being overwhelmed by the enormity and the crippling of the language capacity most victims think telling will dehumanize them, and there is some sought of dignity in being silent about the choices they were forced to make during the war: death or make love to your daughter; death or rape; your death and living young orphans in a cruel world or your mother’s death; death or amputation of arms; these were horrible choices, a dehumanization of choice; but is choice not also the beginning of freedom, the commencement of our humanity.
Why then must the sources of humanity be so poisoned, be so marked with the shroud of agony and shame? Chinua Achebe tells us that heroes and heroines are great, but it is the story that is greater, for it is the story that lasts; it is the narrative that carries the seeds of the human will to immortality. Poets are shapers of those stories, investing them with humanity in the way they tell them, that they become sources of healing. The telling heals; it avenges the ingrained tragedy of the initial hurt. It humanized the story.
If you go to Sierra Leone, a new genre of retelling the war funnily has emerged. In discussions I heard with fellow poets regarding this presentation, the Poet Gibril Sesay suggested that this genre is a sort of a pursuit of happiness. He has garnered many of these comedies of our tragedies, and I encourage him to publish them. We need to move forward with this genre; we need to tell it, not to trivialize experiences, but to stress the human will to happiness.
The shattering impact of the war in my psyche then reshaped my thinking and realigned my focus as a writer. No, I did not experience the war from the war front like Erich Maria Remarque whose experience in the trenches of the First World War gave us that great classic war novel; All Quiet On the Western Front. No, I did not experience the war like the great British poet, Wilfred Owen; whose poetry of the war that killed him still haunts us to this day. No, I did not participate in the war like the great Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo who died in Biafra in Nigeria in the 1960s.
I another eminent Sierra Leonean poets experienced the war on the run; metaphors scavenged as we sprinted from one hiding place to another with fellow compatriots. Our area of deployment was the trenches of human anxiety and fear. We saw humanity at its most vulnerable state, and we witnessed the insanity of war with all its lethal force. We saw wombs entombed and hopes hacked and left to dangle like limbs.
It is in the telling that the poetry of resilience left its mark in the renewal of a people’s lives; we witnessed a flourishing of poetry, theatre, comedy and many more in a retelling of the tale of the war. Poets so flooded our poetry evenings that it overwhelmed our capacity to host them. Later when the poet and writer Kirsten Rain and her team visited us, and they were using poetry as a tool to heal, we nodded our knowing it, our poetry evenings were healing places, and they were hallowed grounds of humanity, a pathway to remembering and forging a return to our commonality.
Ours was not a conventional war with battle lines, identifiable enemy, rules of battle. It was more than that, for it was a war meant to entomb wombs, maim spirits and hack hopes everywhere, anywhere and anytime. Every inch of the country could become a battlefield, and even the bodies of women could be made to a frontline. Hence the poem rape:
We turned the bodies of our women into battlegrounds
Firing at them with chakabulars* propped between our legs
Scaring their wombscape like Ruffian* killing fields
The sweats from the brow of their soul drowned their bodies
We were an invading army looting the obelisk of their Ethiopia
The embers of our loins scorched the sacredness of their being
And the fires of our lust consumed the oasis of their soul
Cheered by depravity anchored on the pendulum of our loins
We beat our chests on their breasts to test our manhood.
The vows to die for their honour faded in the cacophony of our moans
Echoes of the ecstasy of shame prowled in the cages of our emptiness
On the summit of their memories, we hoisted the flag of shame.
Fluttering and fanning the fires of hate, we stoke in their souls
For the army suckling succour from their breasts
While defiling the milk with the bile of our chakabulars
My mortality was accentuated; there were death and talk of death all around me. Then I began to question the essence of our existence, and I contemplated the day after my demise what will survive me that will be of worth. The edifice we built have been burnt down; our children killed all our attempts to immortalize ridiculed. What is beyond the reach of these angels of doom my mind goes to my poems if only they could survive; if only they could be read after I am gone I would have succeeded in reporting an aspect of the war to a generation yet unborn in a manner another genre cant. In the process of musing about our predicament and the futility of life the poem my will was born;
MY WILL
When I die bury
Me deep in the
Bowls of the earth
Place granite stones on my coffin
Erect your monuments of filth for an epitaph.
Or
Cremate my body, sprinkle
The ashes into the sea
Or
Grind the remains of
My mortal mould and
Feed your pigs and soil
Or
Hang my remains on
The cotton tree for
Vultures and flies to feed on
Or
Dissect me and preserve
My entrails and skeleton
In the laboratory
Mark them specimen A and B.
But when I die,
Don’t bury my poetry
In the prison of your
Shelves under your beds
In your cockroach
Infested boxes for mice
And cockroaches to dine
Don’t pluck the pages of
My poetry to wrap crumbs
Read my poetry
Sing my poetry
Act my poetry
The only legacy
I will leave
To the cruel world
It has the resilience to want to live even after the deluge. That is it, then, the wanting to continue through the narrative, through the word, the word is mightier than the event it talks about, the word is more resilient, and poetry gives these words a sort of ‘Higgs’ phenomena, for like the Higgs particle, or the ‘God Particle’ that offers some stability and form to material existence, making possible the existence of existence, poetry gives humanity to experiences, it is that which is stable in the retelling, it is that which gives form, insights, grace, compassion, unto the manifold happenings of the human journey.
The war looted our manhood; young boys were giving the weapon to kill their parents; men ask to partake in the gang rape of their wives; the ripple effect of both the violation of wives and rape of manhood is still felt. After the war I witnessed a domestic dispute: the husband in a show of strength about his manhood remarked about defending her wives honour to which the wife retorted “you said that the last time during the attack”. The husband went cold; a kind of death took place within him. The musing led to this poem;
HE DID NOT DIE THAT DAY
When the tale of the toll
Of the war was told
In the warmth of our room
My husband folded the sleeves of his Ronko
Sharpened his spear
Smeared mafoi on his body
Beat his chest
Spewed honey bees
The lion growled;
“I will die for your honour.”
When the renegade came
Violence galore;
Looting my honour
Raping my dignity
Entombing my womb
He did not die that day
His heart pounds
The stomach of beehive rumbles
His Ronko and spear
Behind the door
Next to the bottle of Mafoi
Remained untouched
He shrieks under the bed
As the renegades killed my honour
But he did not die that day
Yet he is dying every day
For not dying that day
The war is over; resources were brought from every corner of the world to rebuild a broken nation. As for the soul of the country or what remains of it, very little was invested; America was a major player in financing the establishment of the Special Court of Sierra Leone charged with the responsibility of trying those who bear the most significant responsibility in the war. The chief prosecutor David Crane stood up to give his opening statement; he started by cataloguing the inhumanity to a courtroom packed full with the world media. There was a deafening silence in summary of his blood cuddling opening statement he removed this book; Songs that Pour the Heart, our book containing poems of Members of our Falui Poetry Society and he read this poem written by Sydnella shooter a female teacher and a founding member of the society. Symbolically a poet became the first witness called in a trial meant to stop the circle of impunity. The sombre mood in the courtroom climaxed when these lines drip like the torrent of bullets;
MY ROOT IN FLAMES
Massive eruption everywhere
Consuming my town and bush
My cherished cradle my ancestral shrine
all ablaze
I turned around my eyes catch
But a mound of ash
The ash of my kin’s sweat
Blood can’t quench this fire
Weeping through my blood
There is no fame in these flames
But ash that brings pain
Ash with a stain
The ash of the slain
The ash that bleeds heart
Has nothing on the screen
But incinerating Sierra Leone
Vomiting and flaring up
Can we read the chronicle of ash
And ash in chronicles
When my foundation is razed
To cinders and ash
Ash weakening hearts
Ash withering glories
Ash that never buries
Atrocities eroding my root
That is resilience poetry acting as exhibit one and prosecution witness one in a trial to end the circle of impunity. Yes “I am the man, I suffered, I was there”.
This is what the resilience of poetry does; it sneaks into our conscience and feeds our policy; we might never know it did. The resistance continues, the retelling continues, we are investing in reclaiming the soul of our country, in becoming ministers of the retelling, in being the witnesses and the witnessed of the pursuit of happiness in a most beautiful country on the West Coast of Africa.