I discovered Aminatta Forna when I read her memoir of her childhood in Sierra Leone as the daughter of a Temne doctor and a Scottish mother as well as the search for what happened to her father, who went into politics but refused to be corrupted and who subsequently disappeared. After the civil war which nearly destroyed the country, Forna went back to Sierra Leone to visit her family and research her father’s fate. It was getting to know the women in her father’s family that inspired her to write this book, which, though not set specifically in Sierra Leone, clearly chronicles the experiences of four aunts (sisters with different mothers) of Abie, an African woman who lives in London married to a white man but returning to her native country to revitalize the family farming business. The body of the book consists of 16 sections, four each in the voices of the four sisters as they tell their stories to Abie. The earliest story is dated 1926 and the latest 1999. The earlier stories chronicle life in a tribal village that’s relatively untouched by the contemporary world; the later ones chronicle terrifying experiences during the civil war.The novel does have some problems, primarily with the structure that holds it together. It’s difficult keeping the sisters straight. There’s a family tree printed at the beginning of the book and I found myself referring to it often to see how the various characters were related. I also found myself flipping back again and again to remind myself of the past of the sister I was reading. It was also sometimes difficult to recognize that each of the sisters is talking to Abie. I’d run into a “you” and wonder who she was talking to until I remembered the frame of the novel. That said, by the second set of stories, I found myself hooked on the characters, anxious to know what would happen to them, looking forward to seeing how they would survive the war years. Nothing I have ever read has brought me closer to understanding the lives of African women. When Serah chronicles her loneliness and isolation at a teacher's training college in London, I feel her frustration, not only with the cold and dark but with the lack of color and of human interaction: no one looks at her as she walks through a bigger city than she's ever known, with more people than she has ever seen before at one time, all avoiding eye contact.The experience of these women is rich and full, and the process of reading their stories is the process of living an African life and coming to problems of the modern world from a cultural experience totally unlike that of women raised in the US. It gave me more insights into African life than two years living in Sierra Leone as a Peace Corps volunteer. Incidentally it clarified for me why African-Americans were even more “at sea” than I was in that culture. I at least did not expect to “belong”. The main character, Abie, and her counterpart, the author, Aminatta Forna, had to pay cultural dues in order to belong. We see it in how the sisters view Abie, in how their attitudes toward her change, and in how she herself in the end gives up indoor showers in favor of bathing in the river. A bit of an awkward symbol but significant nonetheless.
Reading Aminatta Forna is like reading a bar of Cadbury’s dairy milk, delicious. (Other chocolate bars are available). Or if society calls me from afar and demands a more manly metaphor, it’s like reading a cold pint on a hot day. You enjoy and saviour every mouthful, not wanting it to end and after there’s a warm happy appreciation of what you’ve just finished.The shadows are solid, sharp, small. A dog lifts it’s head. A nose swings our way like a weathervane, marks our progress for a while and then is tucked back beneath a tail.Ancestor stones tells the stories of four women, four aunts of Abie, daughters of four wives of a wealthy plantation owner. Each one full of tales from various points of their lives, that together create a tapestry of customs, beliefs and everyday life of these women and a nation, going through profound changes.For here the past survives in the scent of a coffee bean, a person’s history is captured in the shape of an ear, and those most precious memories are hidden in the safest place of all. Safe from fire or floods or war. In stories. Stories remembered, until they are ready to be told. Or perhaps simply ready to be heard.Written in the first person, but not to you the reader, to Abie, the listener. Every now and then there are questions, accusations to the westernised young woman that remind you of Abie, as if she too is only just gaining insight into this world and it’s people, to which she belongs. Abie’s voice is barely a whisper that bookends the stories of the four aunts.As with The Memory of Love, it is Aminatta Forna’s beautiful, evocative and understated prose that carries the book along and brings the lives of the women, the plantation, and the country to life as each aunt recalls her past.I started writing down my favourite bits as usual, but had to stop myself, I was almost writing every lineHere boulders are scattered across the sand, black pearls at a Tuareg woman’s throat. It is morning, raining. Drops of rain splash onto the water, as though on to a scalding pan.The aunts are all individual, their lives take different paths until Abie returns to their life, lives that have changed irrecovably, as has their country, but those changes have not diminished their stories.(blog review here)
What do You think about Ancestor Stones (2006)?
Very gripping. It is very much in the style of Amy Tan's 'The Joy Luck Club' - a group of related women give first person accounts of their lives, focusing very much on their personal relationships, especially with other women, with a touch of magic realism in the stories. These sisters are living through turbulent times in Sierra Leone, and the lessons they learn and the strength they find as individuals do not guarantee a happy life in a war torn country - a harsh truth that makes the book stand starkly out from similar ones.The only problem I had was the intense focus on personal relationships - even though two of the sisters are very publicly active, one a political activist, they don't talk about important events except in the context of their feelings or impact on their family. Its not even explicit that this is occurring in Sierra Leone, apart from the chronology of certain events - there are no place names given apart from the invented village, and politicians and so on are referred to by their title. The author may be steering away from taking political sides in a book about female experiences, but it leaves otherwise assertive and intelligent female characters oddly unopinionated.
—LiB
Esta obra é formada pelos percursos de vida, contados na primeira pessoa, de quatro mulheres da Serra Leoa. Abie é uma jovem natural deste país, cujo pai viajou para a Europa, o que fez com que ela recebesse uma educação de carácter ocidental. Embora visitasse esporadicamente a sua terra natal, acaba por adiar constantemente uma nova visita, devido á instabilidade política vivida no país, até que recebe uma carta de um dos seus primos informando-a de que herdou uma plantação de café do seu avô, um rico guerreiro, e que a faz regressar. No seu país, mergulha nas recordações de algumas das suas tias, filhas de quatro das onze esposas do seu avô, um rico guerreiro. Aquelas confiam-lhe todas as lembranças do seu passado, desde a infância, aos casamentos, às desilusões e à velhice.As histórias destas mulheres revelam parte da história e da cultura africanas, permitindo recriar o ambiente social deste país ao longo do século XX, nomeadamente a cultura patriarcal, as tradições que à séculos se cumprem e as perturbações políticas vividas na época colonial e na guerra que se lhe seguiu.Gostei de ler este livro, na medida em que me transmitiu conhecimentos interessantes sobre a cultura deste país. Contudo, na minha opinião o livro transmite poucos conhecimentos rigorosos sobre a evolução política, sendo as informações passadas pouco esclarecedoras acerca da História nacional.Por outro lado, a narrativa dos acontecimentos não foi capaz de me envolver. Não me parece haver uma linha de acção, transversal às quatro histórias, contadas em paralelo, que mantenha a coesão entre todas. O alternar entre as histórias das protagonistas, passadas em momentos temporais e espaços semelhantes e que não estão suficientemente interligadas, leva a que o leitor vá esquecendo os percursos das várias personagens, perdendo-se no livro.No entanto, apesar destes aspectos negativos, esta foi uma leitura que me deu prazer, pois permitiu-me obter, de uma forma suave e nada maçadora, bastantes conhecimentos acerca de uma cultura que desconhecia.
—Joana
This story is set across almost 100 years of Sierra Leone's recent history, from colonial plantation days, through the initial hope of independence which was then dashed by a sucession of corrupt leaders, brutal oppression, mass killings and war. These events however, for the most part just form the backdrop to the recounting of the life stories of four sisters whose father had eleven polygamous wives and as a consequence the sisters also had a vast array of other brothers and sisters plus a myriad of cousins, nieces and nephews, not to mention the ten other mothers. There is a family tree at the start of the novel, but as the stories of the sisters are relatively similar in the early stages and the four narrative voices also somewhat indistinct from each other, I found it all a bit of a mess. I also found it annoying that although the backdrop was the political, violent implosion of Sierra Leone, the author seemed to take delight in not mentioning real places and real people, just the President, followed by the next President and then the next, with events taking place in the town or the city or the village. Whilst this may have been to concentrate attention on the four women, for me it had the opposite effect and was a constant distraction.
—Ian
