So it is a great pleasure to to welcome you to our reading series on he is going to introduce it in a moment.
So it's my turn to ask you something I and is professor in English and World Literature here in the English faculty at Oxford.
And she's also a fellow at Boston College.
And she has is working on a fantastic project at the moment about the clinic, the city and the poor, if you like.
The global poor described it very badly, but it's just to give a kind of a sense of the handle that brings these to these two.
Fantastic. So let's give them both.
Thank you so much. It's it's an honour and a pleasure to introduce one of the greatest novelists of our time.
I've been out there for now.
I just read out her multiple award winning works, which are the devil that danced on the Water 2002 and Cirencester Stone's 2006, The Memory of Love,
which she will dwell on,
which was a finalist for the Orange Prise and the Impact Award and won the Commonwealth writers prise the Heidman 2013 The Angel of Mexico City.
This is an e-book she wrote in 2014 for a charity called Worldreader,
and she says 40000 little ones have read this book and a new book coming out next year,
early next year called Happiness, which you'll be very interested to know,
sees the return of the repressed in the form of Atila, you know, from from our novels.
It is back in that in that book. When Fona won the prestigious Wyndham Campbell PRISE in 2014, the citation said,
Aminata Fona writes through and beyond personal experience to speak to the wider world in subtly
constructed narratives that reveal the ongoing aftershocks of living through violence and war.
So we know that memory of love references the carnage of the 1990s civil war in Sierra Leone.
Heidman tells of the aftermath of ethnic cleansing following the Break-Up of the former Yugoslavia.
Ancestor Stones archives support voices and spaces in a decolonising nation.
Somebody must stand guard over the past, says Douro Kalac,
the custodian of a Croatian town called Ghost, with all its echoes of guest, host and ghost.
Sometimes the best way to stand guard over the past, the best way to remember is a world forgetting for now seems to suggest.
Faced with the resounding silence of his patients in the memory of love,
the British psychologist Adrian Lockhart has to learn not to file it away under
the rubric of psychological avoidance in the style of the PTSD diagnosis,
he must learn to read faltering, ambiguous and euphemistic speech, as well as silence as strategies of containment.
In a melancholy space Faunas Heidman reminded me of James Katzir style.
As benumbed and bleak as ancestor, Stones is sumptuous.
The Quest for Truth,
and I'm quoting Forner here from Heidman The desire to examine every inch of our surroundings in a way that went beyond childish curiosity.
So this quest for truth is pitiless. As any reader of the rats in winter seen in the Heidman will testify.
And ancestor stones, phone calls it the African way of seeing the I think what she says, but equally applied to inhabitants of Croatia.
It is a way of seeing patterns and logic and signs and I quote here, invisible, yet visible, apparent to those who belong.
So how politics of third spaces, neither sleep nor wakefulness, neither passed nor the present had no heart,
neither real nor unreal finds trenchant expression in the fugue state and dissociative episodes
she describes in the memory of love or the aesthetics of the liminal state of Rothera,
through which some of her female protagonists, an ancestor stones, survive their short and brutish lives.
I will wrap this up. Two observations that seem to sort of, in a way, not quite be captured in the many reviews her books gets.
One is the more unspeakable the reality, the more forensic and meticulous the process gets.
She's a method writer for Nalan to shoot as part of her research for Heidman and for The Memory of Love.
She spent time at a hospital in Sierra Leone watching amputations.
The book reviews also don't pick up on the preternatural sensitivity to the non-human world,
which is shooting in more ways than one dear elephants and chicken, fish, cockerill, coffee beans and stone.
So you're very welcome. I mean, I want to thank you very much, and I would like to request you to read from your book,
after which I will ask a couple of questions and then open the floor.
Thank you. Thank you very much for being here, especially today of all days.
I thought, what which way will it go where people have had enough of it?
And then I'll decide to come to something else? Or will you be rushing to the polling stations to get your cast, your vote?
I hope you have all voted.
All of those of you who are old enough to vote anyway, so, um, let me read a little bit from the memory of love from an early passage.
You've read the book? I think so. Most of you, if not all of you. So you know a little bit about it.
I saw a woman once, the loss of whom I mourned even before I had spoken a single word to her 20th of January 1969,
the Faculty Wives Dinner, we the bachelors gathered together at the bottom of the lawn, a patch of untended weeds.
On the other side of the grass was the reception line. I was listening, or at least making the appearance of it to my companion,
complain about the reallocation of space in the faculty building he had lost out, which was a shame, no doubt.
I looked away towards the arriving guests.
She wore a blue gown, and as she descended the stone steps to the lawn, her fingers lightly at the fabric which clung to her in the heat.
I watched her and I felt a surge of feeling that then nameless emotion.
The first conscious thought I had came moments later, and it struck me like a blow,
the man coming down the stairs, a pace behind her, was her husband.
Within a few yards of the receiving line. I saw him move away, not her husband.
Relief, a cold breath down my spine. And then I saw her reach out her hand and touch him lightly on the sleeve.
And with that light touch made with just the ends of her fingers, she may as well have had the strength of ten men so quickly.
Did he yield and alter his course back towards the long line of people?
I saw how he submitted his will to hers.
I saw her smile and upward kurbanov, her lips faint and sweet.
A smile, he returned gracious in defeat. Seconds have passed since I first laid eyes on her, and I'd already lost her twice.
I excuse myself, placed my glass on the tray of a passing waiter,
moved across the lawn and stood at the end of the receiving line next to the last man.
A fellow I recognised vaguely from the faculty hierarchy, I nodded and he nodded back, barely registering me,
having lapsed long before into the sort of stupor such social obligations are inclined to induce.
I shook one or two hands, muttered greetings. Nobody knew or cared.
Their minds were already turned to thoughts of alcohol and food. And then there she was standing before me, her hand held out, smiling.
I took her hand. I spoke my name. So her smile, a poor man's version of the smile she'd given to her husband.
She moved on and hovered a few yards away while I shook her husband's hand.
Together, they walked across the lawn, his hand once more at her elbow.
My eyes followed them, I realised I had no idea of her name, which had been obliterated in the moment of our meeting by the drumming in my ears.
Thank you very much. This is an extraordinary and it kind of really works very well for my very first question,
which is, as you know, I mean, after this the series that Erica, Erica has so beautifully choreographed is really about readers and readership
and the way in which an author reaches out to their different reading publics.
So my question is for a book like Memory of Love, which has a tremendous appeal to the specialist reader,
you know, especially with its its critique of mental health paradigms, its critique of, you know,
what Nicholas Rose calls the diagnostic creep of neuro anthropology is the romance plot is the story of desire,
the way in which you also use plot, characterisation and language to draw the non-specialist reader in?
Hmm. Well, nothing works like a love story, as you said, even though this, of course, is a love story with less love in it than many have.
But I think when you construct a book, a writer, you construct an overarching arc book is narrative.
And we use narrative in every walk of life, don't we? We use it especially I always think when we're trying to teach children.
We were taught we were taught by stories. So and any psychologist will tell you and anthropologists will tell you the origin of stories is millennia
old and that every culture there's not a single culture in the world where stories aren't told.
So you have to take it. You have to take an arc. And there are two arcs to a book.
One is the action. One is what actually happens in the book.
Right, how you move your characters around and where they actually end up.
And the second arc is the emotional arc of the book.
Right. So books don't always end.
In a dramatic way, sometimes they come to a halt, the action comes to a halt, but what has ended is, is the emotional arc of the book.
So what you do is you create the factual arc and then that also is mirrored in the emotional arc.
And then what happens then as you have other little smaller arcs, which are themes and subplots.
So something Atila and the whole question of PTSD, for example, is clearly a subplot.
It's not the main plot, but here is somewhere where Adrian goes and begins to learn about.
The subject was of his interest and also really begin to learn about the country he is in, which he has, before he went there, failed to do.
I don't know if any of you but ancestor stones.
But Adrian Adrian, actually, he's a character I took from ancestor stones at the point when I decided that at that Elias,
who was really where this whole book began, how did people account for themselves after a war?
I really thought actually he needs to be accounting to somebody,
somebody through whom the reader can see this country and can see and can decide what I believe the story really is.
So what I did is this. He's an outsider.
Now, that's, of course, very useful for readers, for outsiders. But it also means he doesn't know what's happened in this country.
So he's ignorant of the whole truth. He only knows the big picture, but he's ignorant of the details.
And if you come from a tiny country like Sierra Leone where something has happened, there are undercurrents all around.
We know a great deal about who did what.
And the same is true in Croatia. But to the outside, all of this is smoothed over.
No one is talking about the elephant in the room or in fact, the herd standing there.
And that's how societies cope in a civil war. You are left with what happened and you were left with the people who did these things.
So it was important that ageing was an outsider.
Not that not necessarily that he came from a Western country, but that was also another plot part, but that he didn't know crucially.
And what I do is I make my readers walk their walk with Adrian. Right.
You see it through his eyes. And then I create my other characters.
Kai, who came in somewhat later. You know, the book has an elliptical shape, so it starts with Elias and Adrian and then ends up with Kai.
I wanted somebody from within the country to look back at Adrian so that we reverse the gaze.
I reverse the gaze. So many novels, the gaze is one way and historically the canon is usually the gate has only been from one party,
from the person who occupies the centre to the other. But this time actually the centre shifts.
Chi becomes the centre and he looks at Adrien who becomes the other.
So I allow my readers from wherever they are to try to look at this whole story in the round from different perspectives.
Thank you so much. And it's very, very interesting that you brought up Adrian, because I wanted to ask you about Agnes.
You know, it's kind of the conceptual stumbling block of Adrian Adrian's.
Well, he hopes that by and atomising Agnes's fugue state, as he calls it, he will make his name.
You know, I sort of agree derision. Called him a kind of humanitarian conquistadores.
Yeah. Carpetbag. And I kind of wanted to kind of, you know, kind of ask you about that, that,
you know, and this is related not just to the epistemological quest of Adrian,
the British psychologist who starts out uncomprehending and then in the narrative arc, gain some embodied and embedded knowledge of the place.
You know, he falls in love with a local woman, so on and so forth,
but also about the desirous arc of your narrative when you are describing your narrative
in terms of sort of the the dramatic arc and the sort of emotional plot you are,
you are talking about a sort of somewhat and driven plot that you are moving somewhere.
But again, this is a place where you don't move, you stumble. It's about silence.
It's about withholding. And I wanted to ask you really about when a novel is directly opening up that
sort of parallel of the parallax space between talking cure and its own work,
what is the role of someone like someone like Agnes? Because you can't really talk your way out of it.
Agnes is the sort of holder of the silence of the novel that what I had really observed in Sierra Leone and in all situations
where a major incident has occurred or incidents have occurred is that mostly people choose not to talk about it.
And they do so well, actually, let them take a step backwards because the book is so much about silence.
And when I thought about Adrian, I was ancestor stones.
He was actually inspired by a British psychologist I had met who so didn't understand the country that he was very newly arrived.
And he said to me, well, you know, things would be a lot better here. People didn't give away their children.
And I said, who gives away their children? I see people give away their children and I sort of earth you talking about.
And I read to say, my goodness, he's talking about the system of wardship. Whereby.
From some parts of the family, particularly, very often poorer relations will go and live with a wealthier relation will be sent to school.
I have a ward. She comes and spends the holidays with me, but I'm there and I pray for her to go to school.
And she has it been periods moved into my family house to either for her education or because her her she is a single mother.
Her mother's needs some space. But the idea that we gave our children away is quite extraordinary.
And I also couldn't understand why he couldn't see the parallel.
And if you've been any Victorian literature, you know that the system of wardship existed in Britain as well.
It's not new to to this country. And so I was struck both by the condemnatory tone he used,
but also how culturally tone deaf he was to this country and and lacking in any kind of humility.
So I did base Adriaan on him. And I have a friend who's a psychologist and he's also mixed.
He's Dutch and Sierra Leonean. I said to him, just talk to him one day.
And I said, you know, I've got this idea about the translation of psychotherapy to this country.
And I said, I know that I think it would work.
What I was thinking was this. There's three kinds of silence in Sierra Leone.
And probably in many cases, the same would be true, the first sinensis is that the people are actually quite culturally comfortable in silence.
So when my aunties come travel down six hours from up country to visit me when I'm there,
they stay for a whole day, whole afternoon sitting on the veranda and they will be there.
And there is and as there exists in Europe, this conversation is not a skill, you know.
In Europe, what you find is if people if a room goes silent, someone feels the need to fill the space.
Right. If you're talking to somebody else and one of those moments occur, people actually say somebody walked over my grave or something.
But it's a skill that small talk this this does that.
You know, we go to cocktail parties, we learn children and talk to hold up their part of the conversation.
What actually and say that I must be completely comfortable in silence if my six
aunties are sitting on the veranda and the conversation love conversation logs,
you know, they'll sit there quite happily drinking that tea and then they'll just begin again.
So how are you right now?
I was one second one, of course, is the silence of oppression.
The country had been under 25 years of dictatorship, so people had learnt silence to speak was dangerous.
And the third silence is the silence of trauma. People who have been traumatised do not wish to revisit their experiences typically.
So when I asked my friend, the psychologist, how is this? How would it play out?
He said, Well, you're related. You're quite right. If the psychotherapist and psychotherapist do silent all the time to draw people out,
he said if they go silent, so will the patient just wait politely.
And then there's also a completely different doctor patient relationship where,
you know, the patient is waiting for the doctor to tell them what to do next.
He said he had great doubts about it. So I really thought about that silence and how it could play out in the book.
And how AIG was going to figure out which silence it is he is listening to isn't quite what we're not hearing.
But the other thing is that there was food in particular when I wrote Ancestor
Stones and I spent a lot of time in the villages with our village in particular,
where people were willing to help because I was a to answer all my questions,
I noticed how very often people, women in particular, simply stepped out of their lives.
Right. They would just go walkabout. I go for a few days or few weeks.
They would just go. And I saw it as a stress relief. It must in some way be a way that they coped with stress and nobody found it extraordinary.
And so I had a character and an ancestor stones, the mother of one of the main characters who does that?
She actually she does lose her mind, but she had her initial coping mechanism is to step out of it.
And then I happened to be reading dozens of books on psychology and I came across this.
Condition called Fugue and Fugue happens to be in the last 20 years, being heavily discredited as something that doesn't exist.
And if you read the book, you know, because Adrian explores it and that is all accurate.
Psychology came out of the wars and it was at some points dismissed that these men, these soldiers who were who were going walkabout,
who were leaving in a dissociative dissociative state and claiming not to know where they were or
who they were were actually just shirkers who didn't want to be in the military and do their duty.
And then there were other psychologists who fought very hard to say, actually, it does exist and it really is a state it as a dissociative state.
So I thought what? Actually, I believe the latter, because I've seen something very like that in Sierra Leone.
And so I constructed the character of Agnes in order to embody that very, very deep silence at the centre of that of the culture.
And, you know, novels grow as you write them.
I mean, I wish I know if I could speak as elegantly about a proposed novel as I can about what I've written,
it all gets worked out on the page and in my head. And of course, it took three years.
But, you know, the more that I thought about Agnes, the more I created that character,
the more I saw that she did embody this state and that she could be the vehicle through which Ajayan finally
opens his eyes and begins to look at the country and stop expecting the country to explain itself to him,
but start to actually imagine I mean, I think she's a very powerful in a way where a lot spokesperson is not the right word,
but a symbol of the elected ness of your novel.
You know that they like the different kinds of elected witnesses that the novel engages in, saying that even when you engage with even when you.
Narrate an impossible or an enduring situation.
You don't have to resolve it, you know, that's a very, very exhausting sort of energy insight to come out of that book,
which I think kind of likens it with the with the more complicated temporality of psychoanalysis.
Well, I think, you know, I think that those of us who have grown up mainly in the West are very used to the idea that things have a solution.
That's going to be an answer. I mean, even if I was a journalist for 10 years, every time we did a story,
somebody wanted either the answer or somebody to blame, I had to have some sort of conclusion.
Now, in a country where there's been particularly a civil conflict where you're living with,
you know, you're still together, sometimes there isn't a solution, right?
You can't back off half the country. Sometimes that isn't a solution.
Sometimes people adapt to live with what they have. They must adapt to live with what they have.
And that is what Agnes has done. She's had to adapt to live with what she has, as has everybody, as has a guy who is suffering.
He's he has a he is a better coping strategy and more resilience than Agnes and Agnes.
His story is so particularly awful. But everybody in that country is figuring out how to move on and how to get forward, go forward.
And that's what Agnes is doing and that's what she is doing. And that's what everybody is doing in their own way.
My last question has to do with with with kind of, you know, in a way that the narrative function that a character like Agnes serves,
which is to be discussed, be this sort of custodian of silence, be the symbol of elected muteness.
A lot of I want to say simple reviewers have compared your style, said you have a masculine style.
And I was kind of saying to mean before we came here that she actually writes and answers the Stones,
that this withholding, this guarding of stories is a woman's work, to quote her exact words.
It's women's work discarding of stories. So I want to kind of, you know,
open up the floor with that question that do you what is the role of gender in the way in which your style and substance sort of come together?
And I have no idea. I mean, I have no idea.
I find the obsession with gender just so frustrating. I you know.
The thing is, I mean, first of all, I don't really buy huge differences in gender.
I think actually people are not that different from each other. That is my particular position.
And I think that there are what are you for me, the most about being a woman?
That the condition that I think about most is one of the experience of being a woman as
opposed to something that is embedded in me from birth so women have so much less freedom.
For example, I've often when people have said to me, you know, you write these male characters, how come you have so many characters, male characters?
I have quipped that, well, I don't have to worry about how to get them home safely at the end of the chapter that, you know,
men have a freedom in the world which women don't have and women have got very conditioned to it, very used to it.
And we look out for each other, but we actually forget to what extent it drives our choices, our patterns of thinking.
The way in which we view the world is very different from the way in which men view the world, because on the whole,
those men don't most men don't have to take into account personal safety at every single moment of every single day.
So when I when I write a man, I just think, well, what would it be like if I didn't have to think about that?
How would it be if I could just do this or just do that? So and I think the same thing in cultural terms.
I think how how our patterns of thinking influenced by where you find yourself,
where you find yourself in a family, in a society and in a geographical setting.
So when I created the character of draconic who is a hunter in Croatia,
he is very much his character was very much informed by the landscape he finds himself in, by the place he finds himself in.
So I really try and think of it like that. When people say my style of writing is masculine, I think they probably mean I don't write domestic novels.
I think that might be one thing. They mean I don't write domestic novels. I pick large canvases.
So it's not you know, it's a sort of backhanded compliment. And the second thing is, of course, I'm writing in the male voice a lot.
So I listen, you know, and I inhabit the male world and I write in the first person a great deal,
or if I don't write in the first person, I write in a very close third person.
So it may be I'm going to take the compliment that I've created male voices that sound credible to male reviewers.
But I don't think that in essence, books are either masculine or feminine writers.
Imagine that's exactly what we do. That is the whole purpose of being a writer is to imagine what it's like to be somebody else.
And if I didn't want to do that, I would stick to non-fiction and you would all read non-fiction.
So I think that's a very interesting point to entry point for other questions from the floor.
Mind you, I was very pleased to hear that Atila is going to be making a comeback.
Year a character that I was probably most interested in.
So I wondered if you could just talk a little bit about what it was about this figure of Atila that made you want to bring him back.
I know that. I hear that Adrian is also a revenant from another.
If you could maybe talk a little bit more about how characters work across your books in your is not a deliberate thing.
But when you create a character as a writer, even if it's a character that has a very small part in your mind,
you know the whole backstory, but you know how they got to where they are.
It doesn't it doesn't come into the book. But you know it all. And Atila.
Actually, I'm sort of more or less forgotten about him until I was at a discussion like this,
so we really love me for it also to speak to people who've read the book,
because then we begin, you know, that's the first time we understand what our readers are making of it and not making of it.
And somebody it was in bars and the book was the Big Bath Festival read.
And so I was sitting with an audience of hundreds of people, over 400 people, all of whom read the book.
And one person put up their hand and they asked a question about it and they said, you know, that awful man.
But I mean, first of all, I didn't think he was awful anyway.
I thought he was just blunt and straight talking.
But the other thing I said, would you don't know what's happened to him? Thought you have no idea.
And, you know, I really started thinking about it and he won't go away.
And I do describe my characters.
They're very real to me. The characters are very real. And I.
I often say that they travel with me in the car, the back of the car chattering away,
I do a lot of my writing in my head and my husband really hates me to drive.
It's done for a perfectly good driver, but he just really likes to drive.
They find you drive because I sit in the passenger seat writing books in my head
and they are they're these characters and I'm thinking about them all the time. And they follow me around and some of them just don't like you.
Making stuff like hocus is a bit more intellectual, but, you know, some of them don't let you go.
And, you know, the more I thought about that, the way that that person had read it, then I wrote a short story.
What I do sometimes I write short, I try characters out, I give them a little walk, and I try to tell them that in a short story,
which I wrote for the BBC, and it was shortlisted for a national short story book award.
And I thought, I like him and he's working. And then I wrote another short story which had Otterloo in it as well.
And I thought he's working even better now, really beginning to understand this man.
And then I decided that I a the idea just grew and grew until I came out in the book called Happiness,
which happily I have just handed in two weeks ago.
I handed in the final edits and it will come out in March next year.
And he is the main character.
And this time I reversed the flow so that Atila comes to Britain to have a look at, yeah, we are all doing on the mental health front.
So I said I know I was fine with that, but yeah,
I tried them out and I work with them a bit and see whether I think I can live with this person just three years.
And I really felt that I could live with terror for three years.
I really like the dryness and the way that he saw the world and that kind of the way he just says it, you know what as see as he sees it.
So, I mean, you definitely give him the best lines. He's the one who debunks the 99 percent PTSD.
And also that line you call it disorder, my friend. We call it life.
Yeah.
So interestingly, I mean, it really was inspired by a real person, but I must say, before we will run away and say it is a real person, he's not.
He's inspired. He was inspired by a real person. And I spent two weeks in a mental institute in Sierra Leone and the head psychiatrist
there who's acknowledged in the back of the book and who's read the book and ah,
and he was like that, you know, he was able to see the world cross-cultural from different perspectives.
And he was very much like that.
And he thought that the West, if he thought that he said that the West thinks they have all the answers and they don't.
And, you know, sometimes that's another reality which a Western has had to take into account.
So he in fact, if I hadn't met him, that whole sections but would not have existed.
Somebody just said I was at that time in the medical hospital watching operations.
And somebody just said to me, you know, who's really interesting here? Why don't you talk to the chief psychiatrist at the mental institute?
So I went there and he had this very combative manner and he went, come in, come in, ask what you want, go where you want.
And he just let me be in this mental hospital, which isn't quite dangerous people without any safeguards, I say.
And so I just spent a lot of time there wandering around, talking to patients, talking to staff.
I spent a lot of time with a Cuban psychiatrist who was working there, and he too,
had some very interesting insights in this whole international cross-cultural exploration of psychology.
And so I really learnt a great deal about it.
And it became that part of the book. And an interesting, interesting thing happened that that particular section, the you call it a disorder.
We call it life, interestingly. And it went into the quotes that whatever it is, 99 percent of the population are suffering from PTSD,
which was written in an NGO report, was genuinely written in an injury report.
And I have found my audiences and readers have a completely different response to it.
Typically were often, not typically, often the non to see it exactly the way I intended it, which is he's saying, come on, all right.
But very often the Westerners take it very literally that 99 percent of the country is suffering from PTSD.
And so it became and that was something that I hadn't anticipated.
I you know, you just hope people will read it the way you wrote in the way you intended it.
But here was this point where, you know, readers were taking it very differently and they were reading a book, writing a book.
It's a symbiotic experience. Once I've written that people bring their own lives to it, their own ideas to it,
and they and they make of it what they will, and I'm completely fine with that.
But I was absolutely fascinated that this was a turning point of difference between two different groups of people.
There's a question that you said earlier that in some cases people wouldn't.
I can hear you anyway, OK, that people who have suffered trauma may not want to revisit their past experiences.
And and of course, there are passages in the book which are very graphic.
These is story. There is CAIS memory of what happened on the bridge.
And I wonder what, um, when people in Sierra Leone have gone through similar experiences and read the book, um, what what does it do to them?
Have you had a chance to to discuss.
Well, a good number of people, well intentioned people who were going to buy the book for friends in Sierra Leone.
And I thought I'm not sure they necessarily want to read this now.
But I mean, I wrote it for all Australians, but I didn't write you know, I wrote it with a longer view.
I wrote it as an act of witness.
But people in Sierra Leone have read it and, you know, and I've had a very good response from it there about it there,
but what I noticed when I went to Sierra Leone and just after the war,
I went in 2000 when the war was still ongoing and I was researching the the devil that dance on the water.
And then I started teaching at the British Council, teaching creative writing at the British Council.
And I would run a week or two week course every time I was there. And.
The first thing I noticed was that my students come to the class and I would assume you see before all of this,
before I did all this thinking, I would assume what they would do was talk and write about their experiences of war.
My first class, I thought we're going to do. And that's why the British Council wanted me to do it, because I thought it was going to be this kind of.
Well, you know, not I mean, I don't believe that writing is therapy. Don't get me wrong.
I really don't think that.
But I do think that artists own the responsibility for holding that, paying for a culture when a culture can't talk about something,
the space in which to do it is the is the artist's right is the dramatists in particular in Sierra Leone,
the dramatist, the novelists, the poets, the short story writers and pamphleteers, the fine artists.
I do think that is a central purpose of art, is to hold on to and examine and explore what individuals may be too pained to do.
But what I noticed with my students, I thought they were going to write about their experiences.
You know what they all wrote to a one.
Love stories all wrote love stories, some of them were funny and, you know, they were beautiful, but they all love stories.
And the minute they all started reading it and we were going through them, I thought, how could I have been so dumb?
Right. Of course, they want to think about something else cause they want to travel somewhere else.
Of course, they don't want to mine that pain or we're not ready to mine that pain yet.
So that's really what made me think about the sign and to think about which is the silence isn't always wrong.
It's about actually if you've been through something, you don't necessarily want to revisit it and be pressed on it.
Or you may want more time in which to do that or another way in which to do that.
And so my my beautiful students really showed it to me very elegantly in one short workshop
is actually we want to return to the land of love and we want to think about love,
so. I wondered just following up from that, whether you did consider calling it a memory of pain?
Well, I mean, that metaphor, of course, comes from the.
You know, would you call it ghost pain and phantom phantom pain?
No, I didn't think of cutting it every not. I mean, sometimes titles come up for me very early on and sometimes they take forever.
And the title for this one, once I'd written that passage and I thought, this is the memory of love.
And the reason is because of my students, because what people actually very often dwell on is what is beautiful, not what is painful.
I mean, they also dwell on pain.
But what I wanted this book to evoke is the idea that there was a beauty in this country and there is a beauty in this country and it is not based on
those of us or those of you who don't necessarily own base interpretations
of that country on the time that it was in the news because there was a war.
And it was so shocking to me at that time to end it all through the war.
And I was mostly here.
And I knew my country very well to talk to my British friends who just thought the whole place was one long, miserable hellhole.
And so what I do in the book is I have people constantly talk about before, before and then and then there's the silence about the war.
And then there's after. But before was a place of beauty and after an injury.
And of course, I all the pain and then after becomes this place of rebuilding.
Ed. This is more of a comment and a question,
but I suppose I'm I'm curious about to what extent this was part of that that
embodying or living inside the characters that you were talking about earlier.
When you're talking about writing these male characters,
what I read admired was how you slowed the pace down on everyday comings and goings and how you made that interesting.
So, for example, the many, many times that Adrian or I come into the flat, open the fridge, have a beard, take out another beer, hand each other,
you know, making food is kind of very, very good at throwing meals together from where you're little and you're having a shower when it's hot.
Observing the bird out on the on the telephone line, I think it was just that is, you know,
aside from the very big themes we talk about fugu and and war and conflict, those moments stay stay with me.
And I wonder whether it did have to do with how you inhabited those characters spaces.
I think it does, because, you know, every single character I entered their lives for, I became a surgeon and became a psychiatrist over the next book.
I thought, that is so exhausting. And so that's why we've got a handyman.
Well, I'm not sure I can carry on researching in depth and living all these lives, but.
I suppose two things. I mean, the book is written in the present tense, whole sections are written in the present tense,
and when a writer comes to choose a tense, they we think very hard about what the purpose of that tense is.
And people say the present tense is very fashionable. Yes.
You know, after the 60s became incredibly fashionable, before that, there were very few books written in the present tense.
But actually there are craftsmen reasons behind it.
Right. And I picked the present tense when I won a book to live absolutely.
In the moment. So I wrote the 40000 words first 40000 words several different times.
I changed the tense and I changed the person.
I went, I thought, I'll try it in the first and third and I'll see which.
And I thought again at one point was in the first person,
I switched him to the third person so that the reader could just see a little bit outside Adrian.
They could see Adrian. They weren't entirely locked into his point of view.
And the same with Kai. You had to be able to step away from Kai sometimes.
So think of it like having a camera, a writer, the first person I can go inside the I.
Then, you know, you you write, you can write third person limited, you can write to third person omniscient with the cameras all the way up there.
So was third person limited? What you want is you want your the camera to be sort of here, but you want it to be able to do that.
Right. So you can see doing things you're not. Just so it took me a long time to figure that out.
I mean, probably if I'd done an MFA, it would take me a shorter time. But I had to learn, you know, study creative writing.
So I had to do everything on the page and figure it out myself at the at the coalface.
But that's what I was really aiming for. And so those sections that are written in the present tense take place in the present.
But they also it's because you're inhabiting the moment and you're inhabiting these little moments of life and also inspired by it again.
Friends of mine in Britain who only watch the news images. And when I went to Sierra Leone in 2000 and 2001, 2002, the war officially ended in 2000,
2002, they thought I was running around in a flak jacket the whole time.
I mean, they thought I was going like a war correspondent. And I said, no, you remember people actually live through all of this.
They still get married, they still give birth, they still fall in love.
They still cook. They still go to the fridge. You know, they well, they don't get at the fridge, actually.
So no electricity. But, you know, they still have to deal with the ordinary tasks of life, but they still go through that.
So I wanted to create that reality. And it is it's walking through.
It's being there and it's having Kay and Adrian with these two different levels of of of reality coexisting in the moment.
One last question. Yes, thanks. I wanted to ask you so you mentioned that you went to Sierra Leone in and.
I'm interested in the relationship between the novel and your memoir.
And I guess particularly thinking about, you know, the forensic I mean, I see in your memoir what I would call something like a forensic aesthetic.
I mean, there's the whole issue of truth telling. And I'm interested in the novel.
On the one hand, we have ileus obfuscating the truth.
We have different attempts through different world, through Adrianne's to try to get characters to tell the truth.
Agnes's story is told by several people. So I was I'm interested in.
Yeah, your thoughts about, well, the relationship between these and perhaps how writing the memoir might have.
What difference that writing? Well, I wonder there's a phrase I have tacked on a wall in my office, a quote, and I'm not entirely sure who said it.
I have a sense that it was Nadine Gordimer, but I can't find in any of her work.
And now when I look on the Internet is ascribed to me because I've said it's a very false news and it is non-fiction reveals the lies,
but only metaphore can tell the truth.
So the reason I became a novelist and I became a novelist quite slowly is I started as a journalist.
I wasn't happy with that book. I wrote my memoir because I felt journalism was not doing the right job.
I wrote my memoir and out of that experience and I see the memory of love in the of the dots in the book,
the two hander's of my of my books, out of the expense of writing the dance and the water came my inclination to examine those people,
you know, the lives and unself told narratives of those people who had perhaps not behaved as well as they would have wished to the complicit.
So, you know, I went to Sierra Leone to write The Devil in the Water.
I spoke to loads of people of my parents' generation. And I was very fortunate that the time that I went was the war was still ongoing.
There was still fighting. Freetown was overrun in 1999.
I went back in 2000 and people were absolutely shocked.
I just I often say it was like 9/11 where people were just walking around looking completely dazed.
And they were we were so astonished that this had happened to us because we kept the war in
Liberia going on for ages and we thought that we were different and safe from all of that.
So.
People were very, very willing to open up to me at that point and remarkably candid, even the people who had not behaved as well as they might have.
And then a few years later, they'd all closed down again and they had had time to reform their stories and to what
extent they were doing it deliberately and to what extent they were doing it reflexively.
I wasn't always sure, but they had had time to start telling themselves,
I know a different kind of truth to the truth that they had told me the first time around.
So I became really interested in that. And so, you know, my father was a political prisoner.
I'm extremely proud of him. And I people were often asked me what it was like to lose my father.
Of course, it was awful. But then I think, oh, my goodness. But what if he'd been one of them?
What if he'd been one of the complicit? That would be, to me, so much worse.
And I had a conversation with a friend of mine from Argentina who lived grew up during the dirty war.
And we were talking about our fathers and she told me a story about her father, who was a hugely successful academic, and she said that at some point.
After the dirty war was over, when she was in her 20s and 30s, she began to think to herself,
how come everybody in this country who stood up to what was going on paid a price?
They were imprisoned, they fled into exile, they were killed or, you know, they were they certainly weren't given a promotion anyway.
But everybody paid a price. And she looked at her hugely successful father and she just said to me, how can it be so?
How can it be so?
And she is there were a couple of things that had happened in her youth which hinted that even if he hadn't been entirely a collaborator,
he had certainly been complicit and he had looked after himself and to a certain extent, his family.
So I became very interested in that when I spoke to somebody in the same position in Sierra Leone who had behaved rather similarly.
And I knew his daughter. I got to know his daughter very well.
She was a human rights lawyer and she was there when I was interviewing, you know, her parents and.
She came to me and she said, because I got nowhere with them,
they had just completely closed down and she came to me afterwards after we become friends and the years had passed.
And she said, I asked my parents the questions that you had asked them in the interview.
And I said, you know, what did you do? What did you do? Because that was the question I had asked.
And eventually her father had said, well, what could I do?
I had five children. And I said I didn't say actually I thought it was too cool, I thought, but my father would have given you the same answer.
What could I do? Because I had children? So people have their own reasons for doing the things that they do and some of.
So with Elias Cole, he does it for Mamak, right?
In his mind, he does it for Mamak. And I think that's something that we can all understand.
It does it to protect her when the students are arrested or not.
And so I allow the lawyers to be the vehicle by which people would examine their own conscience of what they might or might not do.
And that, I have to say,
has been very much the case with his life as the character of who I am particularly proud because some people love him and some people hate him.
And it's all about where you are. Your moral compass is pointing at that particular time.
I was wondering by way of closing, if you could ask.
I mean, I've had to read from this very powerful work of another sort of brief passage that would be we wanted to end with your words.
I mean, that was I think 27 is what you 37.
Now, I don't have my annotated copy because I do a little edit to make this a bit shorter, but forgive me if I.
Jump a little bit. In this country, there is no dawn, no spring or autumn nature is an abrupt timekeeper about daybreak.
There is nothing in the least ambiguous. It is dark or it is light with barely a sliver in between.
Adrian wakes to the light, the air is heavy and carries the faint odour of mould like a cricket pavilion entered for the first time in the season.
It is always there, stronger in the morning and on some days more than others.
It pervades everything. The bed sheets, towels, his clothes, dust and mould.
Outside his window, somebody is talking in a loud voice.
He has no idea what they are saying for a moment, his mind drifts with a thought to be surrounded by languages.
You don't understand of how it must in some ways be like being deaf.
The deaf children he knew, whose parents sometimes came to see him, became remote, cut off even inside their own family's silent islands.
In the kitchen, Kai Mansaray barefoot, but dressed in the clothes the night before, is opening and closing cupboard doors.
He doesn't turn when Adrian greets him. Hey man, not much here.
Tell me you have coffee, Adrian. Open to covid on the opposite wall and find the tin of instant coffee.
He fills the kettle with water from the plastic bottle and lights the gas ring.
Kai Mansaray watches him. Boiling, sterilises it.
Yes, I know, says Adrian, feeding the others, get these pictures down,
the only two mugs he possesses and prises, the lid of the coffee chain opened at the end of a teaspoon.
How did you find the couch? I hope it was all right. Yeah, yeah, fine.
Fine. I mean, your couch go back a long way. I'm not a big sleeper. Anyhow, I had to check on my patient.
How is she doing? When there's no reply, Agent glances up Chi Mansaray studying the label on the coffee tin,
Adrien can't be sure whether he has heard the question or not. Suddenly, the other man looks up.
I could eat, he announces. I'll make us breakfast.
There's nothing much here you don't say for the first time since they met Chi Mansaray smiles, you relax,
he steps around Adrienn so nimbly, Engine doesn't have time to move out of the way, opens the door of the apartment.
I say, come. He beckons a hospital. Porter hurries over.
Can I hand him a few coins in a short time?
Later, the porter reappears carrying a plastic bag and two freshly baked loaves of bread wrapped in newspaper.
On the kitchen counter, Kai lays down the loaves of bread and unpacks the bag, a tin of powdered milk and other Kraft cheese,
onions, a dozen eggs, a fruit large, open and green with a rich skin, a single line.
Adrian dresses to the sounds of his visiter, preparing breakfast in the kitchen,
efficient sounds that relayer deftness of hand, a certainty of procedure.
Still, he dresses quickly. By the time Adrian reappears, department has been overtaken by the smell of frying onions in the kitchen.
Ky Mansaray breaks eggs with one hand into a Super Bowl.
And whisks them into a froth is made coffee in the teapot and replaced the broken lid with a saucer.
Adrian was two cups and sets, one where the visitor can reach it, then leads back,
leaned back on the counter in the silence, a prickle of self-consciousness touches him.
He shifts from one foot to the other, watching the newcomer move around the kitchen,
his kitchen, as though he were a man entirely alone in his own space.
It is Adrian who feels like the intruder.
He has yet to become used to it, the silences between people in Britain, people came and were sent to see him.
He learnt to examine their silence to see if it was tainted with shame or pain or guilt, coloured with reluctant or tainted with anger.
He himself used silence as a lure, putting his own silence against theirs until they were compelled to fill the void.
Here, those tricks have no place, even with those whom he calls his patients.
If Adrian fall silent, so too do they, waiting patiently and without embarrassment here,
the silences have a different quality, are entirely devoid of expectation.
Thank you very much, Ivan.