Aminatta Forna was just 11 when her father was hanged for treason in Sierra Leone. His real crime was being a popular leader of the opposition in a country sinking under one-man rule and headed for civil war.
Forna fled with her family to Britain, and from there she gazed back until she could return, as an adult, to write a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water. Her next book was a novel, Ancestor Stones, which tells the story of an unnamed country in West Africa, as seen through the lives of four sisters and spanning eight decades.
"The book is set in Sierra Leone," Forna tells Renee Montagne as part of a weeklong series of conversations on war and literature. "I chose not to name it when I wrote the novel because I simply wanted people to enter the stories and not overlay upon them what they thought they knew about Sierra Leone" — that is, a war-torn country of summary executions, amputees and child soldiers.
Forna, who spent a year in Sierra Leone researching Ancestor Stones, found that women have a distinctly different perspective of war.
"I spoke to a lot of women about their experiences of war .... The experience of war is different for women. Every woman in that country lived under the constant threat of rape and sexual assault. In my family's village, on a single day when the rebels invaded, every single woman was raped and some of them were taken away."
When men talked about the civil war, "it was very much about what they did and where they were. 'This area was taken over and then I went here.' Whereas the women talked much more about the emotional truths of war — what was really happening as opposed to what was simply happening in newsreel terms."
One scene vividly captures the desperate reality of war. It takes place in a camp where refugees have been waiting a long time for a shipment of food to arrive. But when the crates are opened, it becomes apparent that there has been a mix-up.
"War does reduce people to terrible circumstances, and it's that attempt to hold on to moments of pleasure, moments of joy in these tiny things ...." Forna says.
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