Saga in a Coffee Cup

In the devil that danced on the Water, a stirring memoir about her family, particularly her dissident father, in Sierra Leone, Aminatta Forna writes how she lived in a world of “parallel realities” as a child.

In the devil that danced on the Water (2004), a stirring memoir about her family, particularly her dissident father, in Sierra Leone, Aminatta Forna writes how she lived in a world of “parallel realities” as a child. When her father, Mohamad Forna, a minister, was arrested — he was later accused of treason and executed — Aminatta was only 10. Nobody bothered to explain what had happened. She grew up in boarding school in the UK, became a journalist and went back to Sierra Leone to unravel the past. Most of all, she wanted to find out the truth. “There were the official truths versus my private memories, the propaganda of history books against untold stories, there were judgements and then there were facts… their version, my version.”

Two years later, she is reclaiming Sierra Leone again, this time in fiction, her first, doing so without ever mentioning her country by name. “It began with a letter, as stories sometimes do.” Abie, who is married to a Scotsman and lives in the UK with two children, receives a letter from her cousin Alpha, who lives in a country “that seemed to have disappeared,” telling her in two short sentences: “The coffee plantation at Rofathane is yours. It is there.”

As she goes home to her four aunts — each one’s mother a wife of Abie’s rich grandfather — she wants to record their stories. Asana, widow, daughter of Ya Namina, “my grandfather’s senior wife”; Mary, spinster; Serah, divorcee; and Hawa, “whose face wore the same expression I remembered from my childhood — of disappointment already foretold.”

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As we hear their stories, spanning from 1926 to the present, we also get a glimpse of a society in transition and a country in turmoil, first stifling under colonial rule, then struggling under freedom, brushes with both Islam and Christianity, the severe civil war and a difficult democracy. What’s endearing is that this history lesson is camouflaged in beautiful prose.

Aunt Asana begins to tell her story, circa 1926, with “Hali! What story shall I tell? The story of how it really was, or the one you want to hear?” She will go back to the roots of the coffee plantation. “Rofathane, my father told me, had another meaning: oasis. Our new home was an oasis in the forest.” The oasis, of course, is soon overtaken by a drastic turn of events, not least the death of her twin brother Alusani.

Mariama, whom missionaries will rename Mary, recounts the harrowing tale of her mother, who is accused of not being a good Muslim, and forced to give up her ancestors’ stones. Daughter Mariama manages to retrieve some — “A dark rock the shape of a man’s cigar. A broken pebble, open like a split plum. A stone with a dimple that fitted my thumb” — but loses her mother forever.

By the time we hear Hawa’s account, and how she always found ways to make her own luck, and Serah’s, daughter of the tenth wife who tried to alter her destiny, we are immersed in Sierra Leone’s past. The story takes on a magical quality. Rofathane could well be a Macondo. “The scent of fruit, of damp earth, the ‘touk touk touk’ of a tinker bird, the women with their babies bound to their backs — there is nothing here that could not be a hundred years old.”

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If there is a quibble at all, it’s in Forna’s failure to build up a relationship between the half-sisters — we hardly get to know what they feel about each other, having lived in such crisis-filled times.