ON BEING A SIERRA LEONEAN WRITER

By Oumar Farouk Sesay

 

Creative writing is a migration from our most private realm to the public space using language and literary devices already in the public domain. Poetry tells our emotions in the open, hoping our writing will resonate with the public and effect positive change. The literary landscape is littered with work that have impacted the world with their lofty themes, elevated language, and ability to speak to all ages. Some of those work is fiction yet tell lies of permanent truth to humankind.

 

As writers, we hope that our writing intervenes in someone’s life or alter a nation’s epic narrative toward the path of social cohesion. Among other things, writing extends our being beyond physicality; it takes us to places we could never physically be. We are yet to perfect a means to evaluate our work's impact on the public accurately. I started writing plays while in high school, and the plays were performed at our City Hall. In a theatre like ours, one could gauge the audience’s emotions as they hung on every line. Sometimes plays were written in Krio, the lingua franca of Sierra Leone, making the message more accessible to the audience; the impact was palpable. The potency of theatre in combining spectacle and voice impacted the audience. It heralded a mindset change in our history when the word change was a bad word and could even be extended to mean a treasonable word.

 

However, with a genre like poetry, the impact is not as immediate and dramatic as the theatre. Writing is, most times, if not all of the time, scarred by the mood and event of the

 

epoch that gave birth to it. In my case and several other writers of our time. The war erupted in 1991 and lasted till 2002 and was a significant intervention in my writing. The shattering impact of the war on my psyche then reshaped my thinking and realigned my focus as a writer.

 

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. Or the great British poet Wilfred Owen whose poetry about the war that killed him still haunts us today. Or the great Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo who died in the Biafran war of cession in Nigeria in the 1960s.

 

Other eminent Sierra Leonean poets and I (including the compiler of this anthology, Bridgette James) experienced the war on the run; metaphors scavenged as we sprinted from one hiding place to another with fellow compatriots. We deployed right into the trenches of human anxiety and fear. We saw humanity at its most vulnerable state and witnessed the insanity of war with all its lethal force unleashed on the innocent. We saw the bodies of women transformed into battlefields and weapons forged in their wombs used against them to decapitate their spirits and stigmatize them for a lifetime. Together with other writers residing in relatively safe areas of the city unaffected by daily combat, we established a poetry club called Falui Poetry Society and gathered in safe places like libraries and museums to recite our poems to each other. We later graduated to bigger auditoriums in the city before the war consumed every inch of the country.

 

During that period, we witnessed a flourishing of poetry, theatre, and many more in retelling the tale of the war. Poets and audiences flooded our poetry evenings and overwhelmed

 

our capacity to host them. Later, when the poet and writer Kirsten Rain and her team from the United States visited us, and they were using poetry to heal, we nodded our knowing it; our poetry evenings were healing places. They were hallowed grounds of humanity, a pathway to remembering and forging a return to our commonality. The brutal war fought in Sierra Leone for over a decade maimed the language’s capacity to capture the enormity of the war.

 

It seemed the language was paralyzed by the grotesque; the syntax, semantics, morphology, and metaphors developed centuries ago suddenly could not 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 saw relatives running into our hiding places and heard the horror in their beings even when they said nothing. It was a telepathic conversation, and we comforted 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 soot of burnt moralities, the beast mark of the arson ravaging our land.

 

How do we use words to convey our experiences 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 jargon connoting evil. In the dazed recovery of speech, our people used such military jargon as attack, retreat, surrender, and disarm to tell the tale of the war, a twisted linguistic rendition of the Stockholm syndrome –the victim in love with the language of the villain.

 

A fluent nation with 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 with extended meanings; words like attack now denote wooing, ambush meant outwitting a rival, and bullets meant gifts. Slowly, however, we freed the words from their violent etymologies. We poets were pivotal to the reversal of meanings, this displacement of the jargon of war, and this retelling of our stories in words that reclaim dignity.

 

Two decades after the war, the retelling of our stories continues with a new generation of poets, different themes, styles, and languages. Yet, the motif of the retelling continues. The poets in this anthology crossed paths with Bridgette James on Facebook and forged a relationship that culminated in this book. They are primarily young poets investing in reclaiming the soul of our country, becoming ministers of the retelling, and being the witnesses of our pursuit of happiness as a nation.

 

Art challenges the nihilistic logic of war; from the nothingness created by the war, we were able to produce a body of literature that carved a pathway to the healing of a nation. Nearly all the poets of the Falui poetry society are now established poets whose poems are now a standard text in several schools and colleges.

 

This anthology is one of the many projects involving a member of the erstwhile Falui poetry group established during a dark era of our country’s history yet holding a torch to future generations of poets. I recommend this book to anyone eager to listen to the emerging voices in Sierra Leonean poetry as they leave their sonic footprint on social media, for savvy media editors like Bridgette James to follow like Ulysses followed the stars to seek, to find, and never to yield.

 

 

About the writer

 

Mr Oumar Farouk Sesay is a renowned Sierra Leonean writer whose career spans 20 years. His books have been used in the West African Examination Council syllabus. He has been published in many anthologies of Sierra Leonean poets; Lice in the Lion’s Mane, Songs That Pour the Heart, Kalashnikov in the Sun and AFRIKA IM GEDICHT.

 

He has also written short stories; The Price, published by Sierra Leone writers Series and CLOSURE published by Sierra Arts publishers. His first volume of poems, Salute to the Remains of a Peasant was published in 2007 in America, followed by three more collections of poems; The Edge of a Cry, Broken Metaphor and Before the Twisted Rib.

 

Mr Farouk Sesay’s novel Landscape of Memories was first published in 2015 and republished in 2018 by Sierra Leone Writer’s Series.