The Bite of the Mango (15 page)

It’s February 2008, and I’m back in Sierra Leone with Susan, Kadi, a woman from UNICEF Canada, and Sorious Samura, the filmmaker who made
Cry Freetown
, a documentary chronicling the brutal January 1999 invasion of Freetown by the rebels. I got the book deal: Susan and I were working on my memoir, and we have returned to Sierra Leone to finish and fact-check the book.

It’s early in the morning on our second week in the country. Sierra Leone smelled just like I remembered: the air thick with aromas of open fires, spices, and the ocean, and bright, like a soft fluorescent light. I’m in Freetown. I crawled out of bed, opened the window, leaned out, and inhaled. Just as I was about to turn and wake up Kadi, my cell phone rang.

“Hello,” I said after digging it out of my purse.

It was Sorious Samura on the other end. “You’re going to meet the president tomorrow,” he said.

The phone was crackling, and I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly. “I don’t understand,” I replied. “What did you say?”

“Mariatu, I’ve arranged for you to meet the president tomorrow. The president of Sierra Leone.”

As Sorious went on to give me details of the meeting with President Ernest Bai Koroma, including how I should present myself to the leader of my native country, I thought back to the time, nearly nine years earlier, when I had first heard the word
president
.

“Mariatu, are you listening to me?” Sorious’s voice broke into my thoughts.

“Yes,” I said. “I have been listening. But I don’t see how I can meet the president.”

“All you have to do is tell him your story,” Sorious said gently. “Can you do that?”

“I will think about it,” I whispered after a long pause. “I will try to remember.”

After my conversation with Sorious, I didn’t feel like talking to anybody. I was too worried. What could I possibly say to the president? Why would he want to listen to me?

Susan and Kadi and I were going to Yonkro to visit my family. I had to get bathed and dressed or else we wouldn’t make it to the village until midday. Kadi had awakened at the sound of the phone, and as she stumbled to the bathroom, she asked me who it was.

“Sorious,” I replied. “He says we’re meeting the president tomorrow.”

“Good,” Kadi said as she shut the door to the washroom. “He went to school with my brother. It will be nice to see him again,” she called out nonchalantly. I then heard the sound of water running.

For a moment I laughed, thinking that everyone in Sierra Leone is either related to Kadi and Abou or knows them. But
then my mind returned to the actual meeting with the president. Even the president being a friend of Kadi’s brother did little to soothe my nerves. I said barely a word all the way to Yonkro.

I was still mulling over Sorious’s call when we reached the tiny village outside Lunsar. As we got off the bus, the village children and a few women sang a song of welcome.

“Mariatu! Mariatu, is that you?” I swung around at the sound of my grandmother’s voice. She was shuffling her way down the dirt road in an Africana wrap skirt and baby blue head scarf.

She had aged so much since I’d last seen her. Her face was wrinkled, her eyes sunken, and several of her teeth were missing. I realized she was using the long stick in her hands not only to prop herself up but to feel her way.

“I’m here, Grandmother,” I called back, taking off and running into her arms.

We embraced, and then my grandmother clutched my face in her hands. “I never thought you’d come back,” she cried. “But you did.”

“I wanted to surprise everyone, Grandmother.” Her brown eyes appeared blue, because of what I learned were cataracts. Cataracts could be fixed easily in Canada, but not for poor people in Sierra Leone. I realized my grandmother was now blind.

I hadn’t told anybody I was coming home. A month earlier, I’d used part of the advance from my book deal to buy and ship to Sierra Leone a crate full of clothes, shoes, toothpaste, soap, and umbrellas. I’d talked to Marie and Alie on the telephone since then, but I’d given no hint that I was about to see
them for the first time since I’d left six years before. I didn’t want them to go out of their way, preparing big feasts or using the little money they had to take a minibus to greet me in Freetown. I wanted to spoil them instead.

We worked our way through the crowd of singers, and I led my grandmother to a small wooden bench by the side of my mother’s hut. Four puppies snuggled up against our feet.

I laid my head on my grandmother’s lap, the way I had when I was a little girl, as she stroked my hair and asked me about my life in Canada. I told her about Kadi and Abou and how much they had done for me. I broke into tears as I lifted my head and looked into her glossy eyes.

“Grandmother, I’ve been wanting to tell you something for a very long time. Remember how you told me that dreaming of palm oil means blood will spill by the end of the day?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I had such a dream, the night before the rebels came.”

“Tell me your dream,” she said.

Over the next hour or so, I let everything out. I told my grandmother about my dream, about the rebels, about the boys’ faces. I told her about the rape and about Abdul and how, even to that day, I blamed myself for his death. I told her about the amputee camp and begging, and about going to London and then Toronto.

When I stopped talking, my grandmother and I sat there in the shade, listening to some roosters crow. Some of the village kids were playing a game of hide-and-seek while two boys pushed a metal tire rim around with sticks.

“What would you have done if you’d been in Manarma with me?” I asked my grandmother.

“If I had been there the morning of your very bad dream,” she said after a pause, “I would have done what was customary. I’d have cast a spell to make those demons go away.”

“What kind of spell, Grandmother?”

“We would have gone to the lake together and thrown a big rock into the middle of the still waters,” she said. “We would have asked the spirits around us to leave those demons in our heads and not let them take the guise of the rebels.”

“So you would have believed me?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But Mariatu, many things have changed because of the war. And witchcraft can’t change the past. I wish a spell could have stopped the attack on you. But you have turned your hurt and pain into something positive. When those demons reappear, think about all the angels who have come into your life since then.”

Sulaiman was one of those angels, as were Fatmata, Kadi, Adamsay, Abibatu, Mohamed … the list goes on. When it was Christmastime in Canada, Sulaiman had died. One morning he had woken up and had difficulty breathing. He wheezed and coughed and couldn’t pull himself out of bed. He hadn’t gone into the shop he kept in Freetown, selling needles, thread, and biscuits. Instead, he lay on his back all day. His wife, Mariatu, soaked his brow with a damp cloth.

Sulaiman’s breathing became more labored, and a shooting pain ran up and down his arms. Mariatu tried to feed him using a big wooden spoon, but in the end his heart failed.

I was very sad to hear this news. Sulaiman was no more than 30 years old when he died, but he had spent all his money on
medicine for my cousins and me after the rebel attack; he had no savings to pay for the doctor or the medication he needed.

When I learned of Sulaiman’s death, I offered to pay for the 40-day funeral ceremony. In Sierra Leone we mourn the dead with festivities at the time of burial and again at the 40-day and one-year marks. Sulaiman’s body was buried in Yonkro, where he and my father, Marie, and Abibatu had been raised. He was buried alongside my father, who had died from old age while I was living in Canada.

Leaving my grandmother, I slipped down the alleyway between two grass huts and came out into an open space, where women were cooking rice and boiling chicken in huge pots over several open fires. Mariatu was there, dressed from head to toe in black to indicate that she was in mourning.

A few women were rolling rice in sugar, making a dessert that is common in Sierra Leone. I handed one of the balls to Mariatu. “I’m sorry for your suffering,” I said, looking down.

Mariatu answered as if she knew the guilt I was carrying. “Sulaiman never regretted helping you,” she said kindly. “Never once.”

Over the years, my mother had given birth to 10 children. She was still young-looking, but thin—too thin. Her Africana skirt was dirty, and her T-shirt was torn on one shoulder. I felt self-conscious in my silver hoop earrings and new white, blue, and pink Africana docket-and-lappa that Kadi had bought for me in Freetown to wear to Sulaiman’s funeral.

My younger sister Mabinty and I had never met, but any onlooker would have known we were siblings. I looked into my
own brown eyes when my mother introduced us, and saw my own smile spread across her eight-year-old face. We laughed as we threw our arms around each other. A minute later, though, Mabinty was crying.

“I’m sick, Mariatu,” she sobbed. “I can’t breathe, just like Sulaiman. Sometimes I have to stay in the hut all day, not moving.”

I wondered if Mabinty had asthma, something I knew about from living in the West. In this remote village, halfway between Port Loko and Lunsar and well off the main road, I was sure she had never seen a doctor. Her life was probably just like mine had been before 1999, before the rebels.

Mabinty dried her tears as she showed me around the village. Before she was born, she said, rebels had burned down all the huts in Yonkro. The village men had rebuilt the place one clay brick at a time.

Back in the center of the village, we sat down in the shade of a hut to listen to the traveling imam, who was reciting verses from the Quran to mark Sulaiman’s passing.

“It’s better to have a goat and chicken than to give birth to a girl,” the imam said to the 10 men sitting in a circle around him.

I rose to rejoin the women. “Many things have changed, Grandmother,” I thought, “but some things remain the same.”

As the day wore on in Yonkro, I grew increasingly quiet. My mind was churning over everything that I was seeing: my family’s ripped and dirty clothes; the sadness in their eyes; the wilted stems of their crops, now that the rainy season creeps upon them for only a few weeks each year, rather than a few months, because of global warming. I hadn’t noticed any of this
when I lived in Sierra Leone. But now I lived in a place where many families drove two cars, bought new clothes every month, and dined out at restaurants regularly.

En route back to Freetown, I gazed out the window at the elephant grasses and swaying mango trees. I thought of Ibrahim, who was now living in Guinea, trying to find work, but with no luck. Adamsay was still in the little village outside Masaika, now mother to a five-year-old daughter named Kadija. Adamsay had never left Sierra Leone. No nonprofit group ever approached her again, and she sold any extra produce from her small farm on the side of the main road. She wanted to send her daughter to school but didn’t have the money for the tuition or uniform. Not once, though, had she complained to me about her life. “I miss you so much,” she had said when we saw each other. “I hope you have been doing what Marie asked of you: to always look forward!”

As the main road became congested with boys on motorcycles and women and children selling mangoes, coconuts, and plantains from big bowls they carried on their heads, I asked the minibus driver to stop at Waterloo, a small suburb of Freetown, where I wanted to visit Mohamed.

Mohamed, like everyone else, was flabbergasted to see me. He had a quizzical expression on his face at first. I didn’t think I had changed that much, but my hair had been woven into a sleek shoulder-length style, and I was a little heavier than when I’d last seen him. I was wearing nice clothes, too, not tattered hand-me-downs from Father Maurizio.

“Yes, it’s me,” I said, laughing.

He grabbed my arm, pulling me into a long hug.
Mohamed looked so toned that, if he lived in North America, I’d have teased him that he had to be going to the gym every day. His wide smile, as always, showed off his perfect white teeth.

Mohamed’s eyes sparkled as he plopped his four-month-old daughter Safia onto his lap. She was dressed in a crisp blue cotton dress with a matching bow in her hair.

“I fell in love,” he said, beaming. “Can you believe it?”

I couldn’t believe it. In my heart, Mohamed will always remain that joking older cousin who used to pull my hair and steal my food.

Mohamed lived in one of the small cement huts that a foreign nonprofit group had donated to some victims of the war. He showed me around the Waterloo suburb, which had been a displaced persons camp for amputees, like Aberdeen, during the war. Litter lined the ground like a carpet. Tin cans and the carcasses of dead dogs and cats filled the sewage ditches.

“I’m still begging at the clock tower,” Mohamed told me. “But we don’t make as much as before. There are so many of us on the streets that businesspeople usually just walk on past. The girls and boys coming home from school in their uniforms spit on us.”

Uncharacteristically, Mohamed turned bitter as Sorious, who had joined us, began filming. “They used us,” he hissed. “The government used the kids at Aberdeen to gain media and money from foreign countries. We’ve seen none of it. This is all we have.” He swept his arms to indicate the huts. The one-room buildings were sheltered from the biting sun by mango trees, but Waterloo was nowhere near any farmland, and it was a half-day’s
walk to get to downtown Freetown and the clock tower.

Four years earlier, several members of the theater troupe had organized a march, shutting down the streets of Freetown for a whole day. They held up placards demanding that the president listen to their stories. “We need education, a shot at life!” the posters read. Many amputees took part, including Mohamed. In fact, he had been in the march’s front line, linked arm in arm with other amputees, as the 1,000-strong crowd rounded the corner toward the presidential palace.

“Nothing happened,” he told us angrily. “The government did nothing, just watched us screaming out to be heard.” He stopped speaking for a moment. “You know, the kids around here play war games. They pretend to shoot and kill the rebels who cut off their parents’ hands. Turn around, Mariatu,” he said softly. “Return to Canada and don’t look back.”