5.6 A Forensic Level of Honesty: Aminatta Forna and Nicole Rizzuto (AV)

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Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzuto and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about reversing the gaze.  Aminatta is deeply aware of the power to look, to define, and to control the narrative.  Although she accepts the moniker of “African writer,” she sees it as the creation of a European way of looking at other parts of the world and rejects the double-standard of authenticity it implies.  Aminatta is from Sierra Leone, but has Scottish and Malian ancestry and grew up around the world. Her mixed upbringing led her to develop a prismatic view of identity, and she chafes against the Conradian image of Africa, which infused so many of her own literary encounters with her home continent. In response to these distortions, Aminatta describes developing a “forensic level of honesty” that allowed her to re-encounter Sierra Leone on her own terms. She also learned to look back at those who would look at her.
Reversing the gaze extends not only from Africa to Europe but also to the human-animal divide. Aminatta and Nicole reconsider Western stereotypes around African animal cruelty, what it means to portray animal consciousness, and what the treatment of dogs in Sierra Leone and foxes in London tells us about what those societies value. Finally, Aminatta reads from Ancestor Stones and offers a chilling vision of the civil war in Sierra Leone through the dissociated perspective of a character inspired by the women who lived through it. Listeners will feel the “underground rising” in Aminatta’s memorable phrase.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Kazuo Ishiguro
Dr. Gudush Jalloh – veterinarian in Sierra Leone and subject of Forna’s essay “The Last Vet”
Pablo Picasso, Bull’s Head
Forna, Happiness
Forna, The Hired Man
Temne – largest thenic group in Sierra Leone; also the name of one of the official languages of Sierra Leone

Listen and Read:

Audio: A Forensic Level of Honesty

Transcript: 5.6 A Forensic Level of Honesty

10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT) – Novel Dialogue

“I am haunted by history: the history of dictatorship, the history of empire, history as a whole,” declares the Iraqi novelist, poet, scholar, and literary translator Sinan Antoon near the start of this conversation about his most recent novel, Of Loss and Lavender. Sinan, speaking with Magalí and critic Michael Allan, goes on to say that “the novel allows for a more wholesome, in-depth confrontation with history.” That confrontation, in turn, requires narrative forms that are complex, sometimes fractured, and often non-linear in order to braid together a range of different perspectives on a particular moment or event. As Sinan observes in a discussion of the Arabic term nisyān—“forgetting” or “forgetfulness,” although its nuances in Arabic are not easily rendered in English—even memory itself is not static. And yet, shared histories of empire and imperialism make it possible to draw connections between far-flung locations, as Sinan does in Of Loss and Lavender by drawing together Iraq and Puerto Rico. From here, the conversation turns to the pleasures and challenges of translation, including some of Sinan’s choices when translating his own work into English. This includes the effort to make legible the nuances of race, class, and other forms of difference across contexts; although, as Sinan notes, much of his younger readership in the Arab world today is often well-versed in US culture. The conversation concludes with a discussion of Sinan’s frequent use of poems and songs in the novel, a device that points back to the multi-genre experiments of the premodern Arabic tradition, and a moving portrait of a teacher who transmitted to his students ideas about justice and equality despite the dictatorship under which he worked. Mentioned in this episode: About Baghdad The Baghdad Eucharist Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence Darwish’s “Memory for Forgetfulness” (on nisyān) The Book of Collateral Damage Elias Khoury and the use of dialect in contemporary Arabic fiction Quebecois literature Breaking Bad Um Kulthoum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
  1. 10.5 The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT)
  2. 10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)
  3. 10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH)
  4. 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)
  5. 10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP)
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