Book Report: The Window Seat

32. Aminatta Forna, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion (2021) (6/13/21)

I am delighted to discover this new (to me) voice, here in a collection of far-ranging essays. Forna, of Sierra Leonian and Scottish background, has traveled widely,  and observed closely, and then thought deeply about what she has seen and felt. The essays treat variously race in America as seen from an African perspective, being in the world in a Black female body, insomnia, the joys of flying, and the human-wild interface, or divide depending on your perspective (think: foxes, coyotes, and chimpanzees). She takes us to Sierra Leone and introduces us to family and acquaintances there, to Iran in 1979 as the revolution was taking place (she lived there then as a girl), and to the Shetland Islands where her great-grandparents hailed from. In "Obama and the Renaissance Generation" she compares Obama's story with her own, both being the children of African men who came of age during the wave of independence and traveled to Europe and the U.S. to take advantage of educational opportunities. In "The Last Vet" she profiles the only qualified veterinarian in private practice in Sierra Leone, Dr. Gudush Jalloh, whose passion is taking care of the street dogs of Freetown, the capital. 

Here is an excerpt from "Crossroads," in which she thinks about race.

In Sierra Leone, before the war of 1991–2002, a certain kind of traveller disembarked regularly from flights from the United States, alongside the missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers. Around their necks they wore leather pendants in the shape of Africa, they dressed in shirts and skirts made of printed kente cloth and they had African names, which were not the names they had been given when they were born. They were African Americans come home. . . .
     If I am truthful, I felt embarrassed for the returnees, to have come all the way here, to our little country dragging itself along the developmental floor, seemed like an act of desperation. I would later feel a similar discomfort in the United States faced with the same longing in African Americans, which found expression in Kwanzaa, books and posters about African kings and queens, tie-dye clothing. They seemed to know more about the history of my   continent than I did. They yearned for what I possessed and took for granted, worse still, failed to cherish or perhaps could not cherish. Sierra Leone is a beautiful country: a coastline composed of curved beaches, pale and bright as cutlass blades, iridescent sunbirds that drink nectar from hibiscus cups, city streets lined with trees so heavily jewelled with fruit that in mango season you buy from the street sellers merely to save yourself the effort of reaching up with your own hand. But Sierra Leone is no Eden. People were always trying to fleece the returnees and treated them with contempt. I knew because on the streets sometimes I was mistaken for one of them. There were other reasons, though, why I could not share in the romance. My relationship with my paternal country was an abusive one; I was the daughter of a murdered political activist.

In this same essay, Forna, in 2000, learns from an aunt the story of her great-grandfather Pa Morlai, "a warrior at the time of the Gbanka wars," and one of his wives, Ya Beyas, her great-grandmother, who was gifted to Pa Morlai by a chief of Temneland. Eventually, Ya Beyas earned her freedom and independence.

My aunt Adama died one year after we sat listening to her in that Freetown courtyard. She was the last member of our family who held the story of Ya Beyas and Pa Morlai. If I had not asked her to tell it to me, we would have lost it. So many things. We would have carried on thinking we were Temnes and never discovered our great-grandfather had been a Loko. The Sierra Leonians who landed in South Carolina and settled there and in Louisiana and around me here in Virginia and all over the United States brought with them only what they could carry in their memories and in their hearts. When I realised that I began to understand, in some small way, what it might feel like to lose the story of who you are.
     To have it taken away from you.

I loved Forna's sensibility, her wide range of interests, her language, the ways she connected experience, information, and story. I will definitely be reading more of her work (which seem to be chiefly in the form of prize-winning novels).