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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822349150 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/16/2011 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 246 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Michael Jackson, Distinguished Visiting Professor in World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, is an award-winning poet, novelist, and anthropologist. His many books include The Palm at the End of the Mind, Excursions, In Sierra Leone, and At Home in the World, all also published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
Life Within Limits
Well-being in a World of WantBy Michael Jackson
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4915-0
Chapter One
Fathers and Sons
OUR FLIGHT WAS DELAYED. Instead of leaving Gatwick at midnight we were confined to the Departure Concourse in the North Terminal and obliged to wait. The airport was deserted, the duty free shops locked down. Aluminum grilles sealed us off from Harrods Tax Free, World of Whiskies, Seafood Bar, Next, and Sunglass Hut, though W H Smith reopened briefly so we could exchange our £10 vouchers for snacks, magazines, and cold drinks. Most of those waiting were Sierra Leoneans going home for the holidays, and though everyone was dog tired the delay was taken in good heart. Some fell asleep in the Instant Massage Chairs; others sat in circles, chatting in Krio, sharing crisps and candies as kids chased each other around an illuminated Christmas tree. Two men strolled up and down the concourse, deep in conversation. And my seventeen-year-old son Joshua played his Game Boy.
My other traveling companion was a young man I had gotten to know in Freetown in 2002 while researching my biography of S. B. Marah. Sewa had been working as a chauffeur for his uncle S.B. at the time, and his ambition was to get to Eng land. This he achieved eighteen months later, and over the next few years I visited London several times, chronicling Sewa's adjustment to metropolitan life. When I asked Sewa if he would accompany me to Sierra Leone, he jumped at the chance. He had found it difficult to keep in touch with his natal village and was eager to impress friends and family with what he had made of himself. Dressed to the nines, with silver rings, a diamond ear-stud, and a silver chain around his neck, Sewa projected a complacent image of migrant success. But his outward cheerfulness belied doubts that he would be able to meet the demands kinsmen might make on his limited resources. Though he had done his best to keep his baggage under the maximum weight allowance (Joshua and I had transferred some of his surplus to our own bags), Sewa had been obliged to leave several intended gifts behind and this bothered him.
I found it ironic that the duty-free stores were closed to us, for many young Sierra Leoneans feel they have been locked out of a world where one's worth depends on purchasing power and the conspicuous consumption of foreign goods. In the Sierra Leone hinterland, access to imported commodities like salt, sugar, cement, cloth, cows, and medicines has long been as vital to well-being as the traditional staples of rice and kola. Nowadays, one can add a multitude of manufactured articles, digital devices, and various forms of symbolic capital, such as education and geopolitical mobility, to this ever-enlarging repertoire, so that even in the remotest village a person's destiny will be determined as much by doing his or her duty as by being duty-free. For my friend Sewa, it had not been easy striking a balance between his desire to make his mark in the world and his determination to keep faith with a traditional ethos that encouraged one to accept one's lot, honor one's elders and ancestors, and live within the limits set by one's birthright, one's circumstances, and the powers that be.
It wasn't until three thirty in the morning that we got an update on our flight. We were now free to move to Gate 48, though we would not be able to board for some time; the aircraft had developed a "technical fault." Some of the passengers moved quickly toward the gate as if their haste might speed our departure. Sewa, Joshua, and I saw no point in hurrying and when we finally reached the cold dingy gate area, with its mottled gray carpet, gray walls, gray ceiling panels, and dim fluorescent lights, the crowd was already expressing anger and irritation at not being able to proceed any further. Minutes later, things began to get out of hand. A middle-aged man began berating a female airline official, demanding an explanation for the long delay and cursing the airline for treating us like cattle. A second man stood nearby, preparing his own tirade. I was too far away to hear what the airline official was saying, but her calm and impersonal manner seemed to enrage the two protesters even more, and with several women now stridently pitching in, the beleaguered official turned her back and summoned security on her walkie-talkie.
"We've reached the end of our tethers," a woman next to me explained. "Why don't they tell us what's going on? It's common courtesy."
With the arrival of security police, the confrontation became a stand-off, and though it was announced that our aircraft's technical problems could not be fixed, we were quickly assured that there was no need for panic, and that baggage, catering, and crew were being transferred to another aircraft and boarding would soon begin. Though this was enough to placate the crowd, it wasn't until six o'clock that we found ourselves in a long line, hunched against an icy wind, inching our way across the tarmac and up the gangway into an unmarked aircraft that had obviously seen better days.
WE LANDED IN FREETOWN just after midday. Many of the passengers clapped as we touched down, either in relief that we had made it or in joy at being back home.
Rugie was at the airport to meet us. I found it hard to reconcile the overweight and affluently attired woman I now embraced with the slip of a girl I had known in 1970. Her mother and Sewa's mother were twins, though Rugie had been raised by her maternal grandmother, Aisetta Sanfan. For many years she had been called Musukura (lit. "new girl"), a name parents often assign a baby girl until they can think of a personal name for her.
I climbed into the backseat of the 4Runner with Joshua and Sewa; Rugie sat in front beside her driver—a wiry, affable man in his mid-forties who answered to the name of American. As we sped along the road from Lungi toward the ferry crossing, a warm breeze blew against my face, and the smells of salt water, charcoal, and orange peel carried me back to another time.
Joshua plied me with questions—the very questions to which I sought answers when I first arrived in Sierra Leone almost thirty-eight years ago. What kind of palms are those? What are they selling at those roadside stalls? How should I greet people? Where will we stay? What is Rugie saying?
I was explaining my research to her. How I intended to explore the Kuranko notion of well-being (kendeye). How I would begin by asking people about the sweetest and hardest experiences of their lives.
Rugie said that the hardest experiences would be the war. She had lost her daughter during the war years, unable to get the medicines she needed when she fell desperately ill. Now Rugie herself was unwell, with diabetes and heart problems. She hoped to avoid costly bypass surgery in Ghana by cutting down on carbohydrates.
Shouting to make myself heard above the noise of the engine and the buffeting wind, I asked Rugie if she was still in politics.
She had stood as the Sierra Leone People's Party candidate for Sengbe-Mongo in the recent national elections but lost to her All People's Congress opponent. People had become disenchanted with the slPP government and wanted a change. No hard feelings. That's the way things go. And with her health bad, she was happy to take it easy for a while.
At the ferry crossing, Rugie summoned a young man to buy our ferry tickets, another to secure our place on the ferry, another to bring oranges for Joshua. Immediately I saw her uncle S.B. in her, the same compelling physical presence, the same assumption of authority, and again I found it hard to believe that this charismatic and confident woman was once a reticent ten-year-old with bare feet and tattered dress who used to bring messages and food to my wife and me from her grandmother's house and sit in our parlor without speaking, shyly sipping the cup of lemon tea Pauline made for her and declining our invitation to eat.
As the ferry pounded its way across the Sierra Leone River, I pointed out to Joshua the site of Fourah Bay College on Mt. Aureol, and the great silk cotton trees around Kissy Cemetery where my friends S.B. and Noah were both buried. I told him how much the city had grown during the war years, the refugee shanties now covering even the most inaccessible slopes. But Joshua was already feeling overwhelmed, and I was reminded of when I first came to West Africa, my disorientation compounded by jetlag, the brouhaha of a strange language, the press of bodies, the unfamiliarity of almost everything I saw or heard or smelled.
As Joshua refocused on his Game Boy, I observed a scratch-card lottery seller working his way through the crowd on the ferry deck. Unlike the orange sellers, he was doing a brisk trade.
"You going to buy a card?" I teased Sewa.
"They don't have the right numbers," Sewa said.
"How do you know unless you buy one?"
"I checked before. They've got to have the right pattern. Not jumbled."
I was reminded of a Kuranko adage Sewa had invoked the previous summer, talking with me about the stress he had experienced during his first two years in London. "There is a lot of water in this world, but the water you drink is meant for you alone." When I had asked Sewa to elaborate, he told me that you take what God puts in front of you. You can't take what's not meant for you, or what is meant for someone else. You can't force things to happen. You can't use underhand tactics to bring good fortune your way. You must be patient and keep faith. Certain things are in your future, but only God decides when and how they will come to you. It might mean a long wait, years of hard work, but eventually the day will arrive when what has been destined for you will find its way into your hands.
One thing that had steadied and sustained Sewa during his years of struggle in London was the "belief" he had inherited from his father—by which he meant both Islam and a sense of what in Kuranko is known as bimba che—ancestral legacy or birthright. "Ni le wola," he said. "My life is from them." Not a day passed that he did not offer prayers to his late father, asking him to beg God to open a path for him, to give him what he needed to make his way in the world. He would make this plea every morning over a bowl of cool water, then drink some of the water with Ade, his wife, and sprinkle water on the threshold of his room, so bringing coolness to his heart and peace to the house before he headed off on his bicycle to work on the other side of the city. If woken by bad dreams in the middle of the night, Sewa found that speaking the name of God and praising Allah would dismiss dread and anxiety from his mind. Just as he had a rough idea of his lucky number, and would recognize it when it came up, so he had a strong sense of his destiny.
As a scion of a ruling house, Sewa had always been aware that a political career, either at the local or national level, was in his stars, and that, God and the ancestors willing, it was only a matter of time before these things unfolded for him. But for the time being, it was important that he remain in Eng land, earning money, encouraging his kinsmen back home to do everything in their power to retain the staff of chieftaincy in Diang. "That is my destiny," he said. "One day, when the moment is right, I will go home. You see, you have to do what you have to do, and be patient that things will work out. Like with my cinema job, I could see that the supervisor was not hard working. He would phone me in the morning, say 'Oh Sewa, I can't make it, can you go and cover my shift?' I would say 'Yeah, no problem.' Then, come to the summer, he went to Kent and saw his girlfriend, and Kent is far from Wandsworth, so he phoned me and asked if I would do his shift as well as my own. So I knew that one day this fellow would be sacked. It was just a matter of time. And I was waiting, waiting. Even if it had taken two or three years I would still have waited, because I knew definitely that if he went I would be the next supervisor, you see. You have to know what you're doing in life, you have to get focus."
Inevitably, Sewa became a supervisor. But his philosophy was neither fatalistic nor thoughtless. "When people do things or say things, you have to think twice, think why, why they're doing this, is it because of this? I'm young. I've got to think that even if the [Diang] chief lived a long life or I die, I have kids coming up, and if I have access to the chieftaincy they might be interested, you know. People don't write history, they don't write things down. You have to remember everything. We say, 'i tole kina i bimba ko' [your ear is as wise as your grandfather's words]. When my father was young he was listening to the elders talk about things that happened long before his time. Then he told me those stories, and I will tell them to my son. They're not written down, but if you listen you will know them. Those are the things you have to think about, that you have to know deep down. Ade says, 'You think too much,' but I tell her there are things you have to think about, things beyond normal, so that you'll know."
Sewa's father, the late Paramount Chief Sheku Magba II, was his role model. As a small boy, Sewa had been nicknamed "walking-stick" because of the way he followed his father everywhere, dogging his heels, head down, concentrating on placing his feet exactly where his father placed his, literally walking in his father's footsteps. This was the "kingly way of walking" that his uncle S.B. had often upbraided him for, thinking it impertinent that a small boy should comport himself as a chief. But Sewa had inherited more than his father's way of walking; he wanted to emulate the political even-handedness and incorruptibility for which his father was known during forty years as paramount chief of Diang. By contrast, the present incumbent, Sewa's brother Sheku, was at odds with the older section and town chiefs and increasingly embattled and unpopular. "If Sheku gave up the chieftaincy," Sewa told me, "and I was called upon to go home tomorrow and contest, I would do so, even though I am only twenty-nine."
From the ferry landing it was only a short drive to Sewa's mother's house in Kissy. We sat on the front porch for a while, paying our respects, before Rugie drove Joshua and me to our hotel.
I was assailed by a familiar odor of varnished wood and mildew, and for a moment I was back in the apartment at Fourah Bay College where Pauline and I lived before heading north to Kabala in 1969. Outside, I heard the murmur of voices, the cheep of a bird, the bleat of car horns, and the thrum of traffic along Kissy Road.
I asked Joshua how he was feeling.
"I'm fine," he said. "I just need to pace myself."
I knew what he was experiencing and was deeply moved by his courage and common sense. Months ago, when I began planning my trip, Joshua insisted on accompanying me. I had tried to dissuade him, with daunting descriptions of local food and living conditions, but he had not been put off. Even now, using his old Game Boy as a parallel universe into which he could escape and recover some sense of being in command of things, he had the presence of mind to say that no matter how difficult the day had been he had no misgivings about the journey ahead.
I WOKE IN DARKNESS to the muezzin's call from a nearby mosque and a crowing rooster. When the hotel generator started up and a light came on in our room, I wrote in my journal. But since neither Josh nor I had eaten a full meal since London, I soon left off writing and went out in search of some bottled water, bread, and bananas.
When I got back Joshua was awake. He wanted to know my plans for the day. I explained that Sewa would need to drop off gifts at the houses of friends and family. I would try to conclude arrangements for hiring Rugie's Land Cruiser for our trip north, buy some supplies downtown, and visit Kaimah. "You don't have to come if you don't want to," I said. "If you prefer to stay here and rest ..."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Life Within Limits by Michael Jackson Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Imagining Firawa ix
Fathers and Sons 1
Forty Days 13
Scenes from a Marriage 30
Smoke and Mirrors 46
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World 63
The Reopening of the Gate of Effort 77
Something's Missing 88
The Politics of Storytelling 100
The Road to Kabala 112
Their Eyes Were Watching God 122
Albitaiya 134
The Year of Supernatural Abundance 145
Strings Attached 158
The Shape of the Inconstruable Question 172
Not to Find One's Way in a City 187
Coda 199
Acknowledgments 201
Notes 203
Index 225