Mslexia

Mslexia, the magazine for women who write | www.mslexia.co.uk

Interview

Aminatta Forna

talks to Daneet Steffens

Issue 38 ◊ Jul/Aug/Sep 2008

‘Let me tell you the story of the stones,’ Aminatta Forna says, sitting forward on the comfy-looking couch in her living room. ‘I was asking my stepmother what people in her village in Sierra Leone believed in before Christianity and Islam, and she said she couldn’t remember because she was brought up Muslim and later converted to Christianity. The only thing that she could recall was about these stones, way before her time. So she took me to see her “co-mother,” one of her father’s wives, who was now living in a council flat in Balham having fled the war in Sierra Leone. And this woman said, yes, her mother had stones but she herself had no idea what they were for. But she knew that they must have meant something because her mother would scatter the stones and talk to them. She said, “I knew they were really important because I always felt that something my father had done with them had led to my mother dying.” Her father had embraced Islam and he had found his wife talking to her stones and he’d picked them up and thrown them away. And my stepmother’s co-mother said, “Three months after that, my mother was dead. She took to her bed and never got up and then died.”

‘She was sure it was connected to what her father had done with the stones – but she wasn’t sure what the stones were. Then,’ says Forna, the excitement of discovery gleaming in her eye, ‘eight months later, I was reading a paper by a Scottish missionary who’d worked in that exact area in Sierra Leone one hundred years ago, and in this paper he wrote [something to the effect] that “the women here have stones that they worship and divine with and they represent their ancestors and each woman, on her death, gives a stone to her daughter.” And that was the other half of the story, of what the father had done to the mother.’ Forna pauses for breath, but just barely.

‘And I wanted that character, those characters. I wanted to explore that question of what are you doing to somebody when you just strip away their culture. It’s absolutely what’s happened in Africa and in colonised countries over and over again, stripping away culture, stripping away beliefs, telling people they can’t believe what they’ve always believed, telling them it’s irrelevant, that it doesn’t matter, that now they have to do it this way. So that’s where the character of Mariama in Ancestor Stones came from: I wanted somebody who’d gone through that experience of having things taken away from them, then having to find their own way back. She ended up being my favourite because she was the one who saw what had happened, what was happening, that it was all about losing their gods and having to take on those of other people.’

That story gave Forna’s 2006 debut novel, Ancestor Stones, its name – and its heart.

AMINATTA FORNA was born in 1964 and lives in London with her husband, furniture designer Simon Westcott. For more information on the Rogbonko Village School, visit www.aminattaforna.com

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