The Memory of Love

The Memory of Love, Aminatta Forna, Bloomsbury, 2010

‘The Memory of Love’ is a novel written by Scottish born writer Aminatta Forna, the author of the powerful memoir ‘The Devil that Danced on the Water’ and two acclaimed novels ‘Ancestor Stones’ and ‘The Hired Man’. ‘The Memory of Love’ is a story of love and loss that binds seemingly scattered lives across a nation limping back to life. The landscape of the story is a small country in Africa, Sierra Leone, which has been ravaged by war and ravished by a hostile rebel group until a well meaning despot of a neighbouring country takes over and brings in peace. The coming of peace in this land is sudden and surreptitious. The people of the land, the recruits of the military junta, the soldiers who fought on and the soldiers who changed sides- all of them come together-the loyalists and betrayers, the rulers and former rulers, the persecutor and the victim all on the same side of a newly formed peaceful future. This is a new time and place, where they have to make peace with the past and their coerced present, marry murderers and love the enemies as their neighbours. People who cope, fill their life vehemently with the present alone, burying a livid past and live on as silent islands. That is why there is a different quality to the silence here- silence that does not find a need to be clothed with words, but is let loose and naked to roam among people like the wind and the sun. People who cannot cope are cleaved beings, caught between two worlds and stranded there, forever haunted by nightmares not of their making.

In this unforgiving landscape, four lives are irretrievably entangled. In the land of silence and muted sounds, an old man called Elias Cole talks from his death bed. He needs a listener, a witness to his testimonials and a man willing to be complicit in the making of ghost of memories. A British psychologist Adrian Lockhart arrives in search of a new purpose of life and finds much more than he hoped for. A committed doctor Kai Mansaray aspires to leave the shores of insomnia and gaudy nightmares and never does. A fiery woman Nenebah fights with equanimity for a place in her country and life. Four lives, whose beginnings are hard to trace, but are blessed with neat regimented endings. Four lives that are bound by love, loss and the memory of love.

Aminatta returns to her theme of war and its aftermath in her second novel and deftly weaves the threads of four haunted lives into an enduring tapestry of human survival. This story is of epic proportions both in the time span and thematic scale it hopes to portray. The questions of identity, loyalty and betrayal lead to the larger concerns of justice that is necessary for peace to be founded in this war torn land. In the end, what is left is whatever is unchanging- the red and mould of the earth, the salt of the sea and the blue and growling grey of the skies. Here, hope comes occasionally as a sunbird sitting on the windowsill or the birth of a child. Love comes as impromptu rendezvous between strangers. Words come unexpectedly, in low grunts piercing the silence. This is a stark, compelling story of four human beings, whose stale fear and colourless laughter stays on long after the last pages are turned.