The Truth in Fiction

Have you ever had a hard time giving back a library book, because you've bookmarked half a dozen pages you need to read over again? This is what happened to me when I read Sankofa, by Chibundu Onuzo. Sankofa tells the story of a "mixed-race British woman who goes in search of the West African father she never knew." (Reese Witherspoon)

Read on if you're interested in the tough but linguistically delicious kernels of truth I extracted before giving the book back to the library.

the same, or different? (page 151)

In this conversation, Anna,our heroine, is talking with her white British mother.

"Did you ever wish I was white?" I asked her when I was an adult. "What do you mean? Of course not." "But you always said, 'You're just the same as me, Anna.'" "I didn't mean it that way. it was just when you came home and some kids had been mean about your hair being a bit different from theirs."

"A lot different. You can see that, can't you. It's very different. There's nothing wrong with it being different."

"I never said there was."

As narrator, Anna then says: We couldn't speak about my childhood without me getting angry. It puzzled her. What had she not done? What had she not given? A sense of rightness, a sense of self. It was nothing when you had it. You hardly noticed. But once it was missing, it was like a sliver of fruit on a long sea voyage, the difference between bleeding gums and survival.

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There's so much truth on this one page. For me, it speaks to parent-child relationships of diverse dimensions and configurations. The questions I ask myself now are: Do I, as a parent, have a responsibility to make sure my child has a clear and true sense of self? And if yes, How do I let go of my own sense of identity and rightness in order to let that child find her or his own selfhood? Later in the book, while Anna is in Bamana, her father's (fictional) homeland, she undergoes an initiation ceremony into womanhood, under the guidance of a Bamanian bush woman. The ceremony involves hallucinations brought on by a plant potion, administered to Anna without her knowledge. Is it important for a child to knowingly seek their own identity? Or does that knowledge perhaps get in the way of the search?

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injustice at home and abroad (page 288-289)

Here, Anna is talking with a young Bamanian activist who has just introduced her to a girlchild who is being unjustly held captive under harsh conditions.

"Your face is still long," Marcellina said. Her eyes had taken on the mood of the bar, twinkly like a garden gnome.

"Sorry, I can't stop thinking about her."

"Don't worry, she'll be okay. I'll get her out by tomorrow."

"Everyone is so cheerful, and just a few miles away there's a little girl chained in a hut."

"Don't people do bad things to each other in your country?"

"Yes, but --"

"It's no different."

She was right, of course. I felt I had witnessed the depths of darkness tonight, but I had never thought of the cases of abuse I read about in London, of babies found in quiet suburbs with cigarette burns on their skin, as the "depths of darkness." My obroni prejudice was revealed, and by a woman not yet thirty.

"Obroni" is a Bamanian term for a white person.

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The passage above reminds me of conversations I've had--mostly with U.S. citizens--about conditions in my own home country, Jamaica. Many people I've met seem to be blind to injustice in their own country, while amplifying injustices in other countries. I think this tendency deserves self-examination, and I think it also appears as an inherent blindness to our own missteps through life. (cf Matthew 7:3 "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?")

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There are several more pages I would like to unpack, but I'll leave it here for now. I am so glad I read the book. Wherever you are as you read this, take it easy on yourself, but give the people around you a similar courtesy. We are all quite literally family, and as one of Anna's brothers said after she tried to call him a 'half' sibling... "We don't have that in Africa." (page 326)