Customer Reviews

Moses, Citizen & Me

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This bold novel explores the rehabilitation and healing of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone. As the book opens, we learn that eight-year-old child soldier Citizen has killed his own grandmother but has now returned home to his grandfather (Moses). His aunt Julia, whose parents emigrated to London, flies to Sierra Leone and narrates the story of the gradual healing of Citizen and his family.

The book certainly addresses an important and relevant topic. Amnesty International claims that there are at least 300,000 child soldiers actively fighting in the world today. During Sierra Leone's eleven-year civil war (1991-2002), many child soldiers were forcibly recruited. Commanders would commonly require their young charges to kill a parent or another close relative so that the child would no longer be welcome in his home community. Because of how it deals with this difficult subject matter, it is the first novel to win the Orwell prize for political writing since the prize began 16 years ago. For some of these reasons, I was excited to read this novel.

The book has powerful elements. Once the narrator returns to Sierra Leone, she alternates between scenes in her uncle Moses' home and dream sequences in which she visits a camp for former child soldiers, directed by a mysterious "soothsayer." Here and there, a child soldier will recount part of his or her experience; those passages are powerful. While at the camp, the soothsayer directs the children in an adaptation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and the ironic parallel between the ancient Roman conflict and that involving the children is clear and effective. As the children practice and stage the play, they learn how to stop being soldiers and to find peaceful solutions to their problems.

At the beginning, it was unclear whether the dream sequences were dreams or real (and if dreams, why was almost half the book dedicated to a not-particularly-fantastical fantasy?). I would also have liked to see more of Moses' internal struggle as he accepts his grandchild (and the killer of his wife). On net, the book was worth reading; I just wish the author had managed to draw me in more.

Though it is true the market for literature and film on child soldiers in the west has brought much needed attention to this ugly phenomenon in Africa, it is also true that the gory depictions of drug-crazed pubescent boys raping, mutilating, and disemboweling pregnant women dovetails with stereotypes of Africans as savage, and resurrects Conrad`s notion of Africa as the embodiment of darkness and Kipling's injunction its black inhabitants are the white man's burden. So, I approached Delia Jarret-Macauley's child soldier story, Moses, Citizen and Me, a little jaded. Is it just another sensational story of mayhem, savagery, and depravity that confirms stereotypes of Africa? Thankfully, Jarrett-Macauley, born in England of Sierra Leonean parents, avoids the gratuitous violence. The 2005 winner of the Orwell Prize for political writing provides a thoughtful literary exploration of a serious subject. But she does not shy away from the brutalities of child soldiering; instead, she uses them as the backdrop to explore the rehabilitation of Sierra Leone's former child soldiers.

While a plane load of development experts descend on the war-devastated country with plans to rehabilitate its physical, economic, and political institutions for a sustainable future, protagonist Julia, the "me" of the title, deploys an empathetic imagination as the cornerstone of her efforts to rehabilitate the relationship between grandfather Moses and child-soldier grandson Citizen who, on orders, shoots his grandmother in the back. In other words, Jarrett-Macauley's novel argues that civic sustainability, the condition where all Sierra Leoneans regain the bonds of trust that make for sound social and civic interactions, begins with a willingness to understand the Other, represented in the novel by the socially ostracized child soldiers, and requires an effort to break through the tendency to cling to tribe, region, age, gender, etc. The novel's mix of the real and imagined, urban and rural, home and abroad, war and peace, past, present and future, young and old, indigene and foreign--derives artistically from Jarrett-Macauley's desire to encourage readers to understand problems holistically, to engender what she describes as "a wider view, encompassing not only other geographic territories but other landscapes of the imagination." It is this imaginative mix that makes the text immensely interesting in the classroom because it offers students a variety of entry points that make for lively discussions. The text resists passive readers, but it repays the engaged reader and certainly provides an example of an "African" writer successfully marrying form to content.

In Delia Jarret Macauley's wonderful first novel, Julia, who grew up in London and spent her twenties traveling in Europe, experimenting with photography, is brought back to Sierra Leone by serious events. Her 8-year old cousin Citizen, conscripted by fighters in that country's civil war and forced to kill his own grandmother Adele, has come home at last. Citizen won't speak of his experiences, and his grandfather Moses (Julia's uncle) still anguished by the death of his beloved wife, is finding it very difficult to take Citizen back into the family. Like Citizen (though less dramatically, of course) Julia's position in the family is ambiguous. Despite Moses's entreaties that she come `home' and contribute to Sierra Leone's development, Julia's made her life in Europe. What kind of space can be made for her as a member of the family, when others have suffered so directly from things she hasn't experienced first-hand? The novel explores Julia's attempts to bring healing about at several levels: How will she help Citizen? How will she mend her relationship with Moses? Some of the sharpest answers to Julia's questions come in the form of dreams, and through the active forging of new bonds. Julia, in a series of beautifully rendered, tender, often funny, dreams, witnesses Citizen and a boisterous, alternately inspiring and infuriating group of child soldiers finding solace and transformation in a magical forest. Through the intimate rituals of daily life in her uncle's home, Julia also remakes her relationship to her uncle Moses. Moses is a professional photographer, and, as the two undertake the task of sorting through his archive of photographs, niece and uncle develop mutual respect: their lives have taken them on different paths, but they both value the particularity of individual ways of looking at the world (On this note: apart from the good story and the often gorgeous language, the discussion of photography and its long-standing importance in West African cultural, artistic and political life is especially interesting). In the end, Julia, who went home with the aim of `helping,' does provide important guidance--but she is, just as much if not more, also guided and healed by those around her: Moses and his neighbors, and the other varied and distinctive characters she meets along the way. This well-paced, wonderfully written book offers us important reminders that are distinctly tied to social justice: story-lovers have a duty to ensure that all humans have the space, peace, and comfort requisite to telling stories of their own, for it is only by speaking our own truths without shame and making room for others to that we can ever hope to hear each other clearly, and, in the end, to love each other truly. This book left me eager for Jarret-MacCauley's next!

N.S. Koenings, author of The Blue Taxi and Theft.

Too much detail being focussed on food and its preparation rather than action is conducive to drowsiness for me. Boring.