By Katie Willis, Staff Writer
Visiting author Aminatta Forna read as a part of the Seavey Reading Series on Feb. 21 in Isaacs Auditorium.
Forna’s published works include “The Devil that Danced on the Water,” her 2002 memoir of Forna’s dissident father and her country, “Ancestor Stones,” her 2006 novel set in West Africa, 2010’s “The Memory of Love,” 2013’s “The Hired Man” and 2014’s “The Angel of Mexico City.”
Associate professor of English and creative writing Glen Retief opened the reading with a few comments on how he had the pleasure of teaching “The Devil that Danced on the Water” in his classes.
Seniors Helen Savidge and Alan Codner followed Retief and introduced Forna. The two said they read Forna’s work in class and stressed her ability to translate empathy, compassion and commitment to truth through her work.
Forna, raised in both Sierra Leone and the United Kingdom, now divides her time between London and Sierra Leone. Her work heavily reflects her own life in efforts to showcase the intertwining of African and European culture.
Forna said that she likes to think that all of her work is interconnected in some way and that the stories and characters tend to “flip into each other like dominos and give rise to each other.”
Forna’s main goal is to allow readers to experience a new and unexpected world view through the use of elements that challenge mainstream thinking.
Forna began by reading excerpts from her newest book, “Happiness and The Memory of Love.”
As she introduced the story, Forna shared her interest in delving into different psychological approaches to trauma and how individuals tend to react and recover from it. She took this research and applied it to the characters she created.
To put this into perspective, Forna gave an example of a situation where one outlook viewed certain trauma as something more horrifying, while another simply responded with, “What you call trauma, we call life.”
This variation of conception illustrated the idea that it is impossible to pathologize everything in life because every individual will experience things differently.
Forna also shared her curiosity with cities and the microclimate within them. She mentioned the dynamics of dominance within these cities and how certain groups, like children, elderly and animals are much more disregarded than any other groups.
However, as Forna explained, it is these exact outsider groups that are the most intriguing to her and what she wants to emphasize in her writing.
To bring this to light, Forna mentioned an incident in London where higher-up forces were urged to rid the streets of stray animals, especially dogs.
Her essay, “The Last Vet,” details the effort to save those animals from merciless murder. Forna connects this back to human moral and claims that the way human beings choose to treat animals says a lot about how we act in society and what we value. She believes that as we show more compassion for outsiders, like the stray dogs or foreigners in cities, the better our morality is.
Forna also said that she tries to fully invest herself in the lives of her characters to be precise about every detail. She believes that without her thorough research, her characters wouldn’t exist in the same way. She ended by speaking to the fact that humans have story-telling instincts and that individuals will always want to share their stories, which compels her to continue writing.
Attendees appreciated the impact made from Forna visiting Susquehanna and noted her influence on students.
Junior Mimi Diallo said, “When I first saw the flyers for Forna’s lecture, I didn’t really know who she was, or why she was coming to Susquehanna. But I knew right away that I was going to attend this event.”
“Although Aminatta is a very popular West African, there was just something magical about seeing those posters on a campus where I’m the only Aminatta,” Diallo continued.
“I haven’t read any of Forna’s books because I did not know about her,” Diallo said. “However, the lecture last night was incredibly powerful and honest. As someone that grew up in Mali, which isn’t too far from Sierra Leone, I saw myself in the few pages that Aminatta Forna shared with us last night.”
“Not only did she capture the life of a fictional character in London, but she gracefully bridged the gap between the two worlds in which she and I both find ourselves blindly navigating,” Diallo added. “There aren’t many stories told about the lives of people like Aminatta and myself. We often find ourselves searching for characters that resemble us in different forms of literature. So I’m very excited that she came to SU and shared a snippet of our complex and intersectional identities.”