The Window Seat:
Notes from a Life in Motion
by Aminatta Forna.
Grove Press, 2021,
$26.00 cloth.
Last year, when I looked for The Window Seat, Aminatta Forna’s 2021 collection of essays, it wasn’t available at my branch library. So instead I checked out Forna’s latest novel, Happiness, which I found on the shelf. I assumed the title was ironic—who would presume to write about happiness? Yet even the summary on the front flap made me smile: the plot is set in motion by a chance encounter in London between Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist. Attila? Really? And the international blurbs on the back, signed by names like Salman Rushdie and Viet Thanh Nguyen, were encouraging.
In Happiness, Forna creates characters who care about their work and who have been knocked around a bit, people with responsibilities. These are people I recognize, adults who came of age elsewhere and ended up in London, where they survive, despite past mistakes and difficult times. Through Forna’s eyes, the city is wild and international: brazen foxes slip underfoot and the security guards speak Yoruba. Yet it is a temporary refuge. Of Attila, she writes, “When he was away, in the places where he worked, places lost in the moral darkness, London seemed unreal and distant. Even street lighting struck him as an improbable luxury, lights left burning so the population of a city could walk home without fear of injury and crime.”
By the time I started reading the essays, I was hooked. I wasn’t familiar with Forna’s work as a journalist in Britain, nor the story of her father, who served as finance minister for Sierra Leone and was executed for treason after a mock trial in 1975; all I knew was that she was a mixed-race British author a decade older than Zadie Smith. Offhand, I can think of many younger Anglophone authors of recent African heritage, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Maaza Mengiste, Yaa Gyasi, and Bernardine Evaristo, but the older black women authors, the ones I read in my youth, were homegrown, like me; our color was passed down from long-ago ancestors. Due to a change in U.S. immigration law in 1965, my children grew up with classmates with African parents, but I did not. Forna points out, in the essay “Crossroads”: “It can be hard to explain to people in America that there exist other and different experiences of being black.”
She makes the effort in my favorite essay of the collection, “Obama and the Renaissance Generation,” cleverly linking her family story to the one person of mixed African and American heritage everyone can cite—Barack Obama. For me, the essay also fills gaps in twentieth-century African history. Forna’s father was born in Sierra Leone in 1935, Obama’s father in Kenya the following year. They both traveled abroad for schooling, her father to Scotland for medical school and Obama’s father to the United States. The two men married the white mothers of their children abroad. Then both fathers returned to their home countries, Obama’s father without him, since he was already divorced from his mother, Forna’s father accompanied by his wife and three children. “Everyone recognized her. She was the doctor’s white wife. And there was only one white woman in Koidu. And only one doctor.”
The above quotation is from Forna’s first book, The Devil Who Danced on the Water, a memoir of her childhood, including the tragic story of her father’s political career in the early years of Sierra Leone’s independence. Her parents, too, got divorced, her mother returning to Scotland, where the family lived in a trailer until she remarried a diplomat from New Zealand. Her father also remarried, to a woman who shared his Temne ethnicity and language. It was Forna’s stepmother who flew to Britain to bring the news of their father’s death to the children in boarding school; later, she helped Forna research both the account of her father’s death and the two novels set in Sierra Leone, Ancestor Stones and The Memory of Love.
Forna was three when her mother left her father and flew back to Scotland with the children. When her mother remarried and began to travel with her stepfather, she was sent to boarding school in Britain, and she reminisces happily about flying back to school as an “unaccompanied minor” from visits to her father in Sierra Leone, or from the various countries where her stepfather served, including Iran and Thailand. The essay “1979” describes her life at age fourteen on school holidays in Iran, with the Shah on his way out and Khomeni on his way in. No wonder The Window Seat is subtitled “Notes from a Life in Motion.” Far from resenting her peripatetic childhood, Forna has worked to understand as an adult what she could not have known as a child. The parallel with Obama, who lived in Indonesia for four years with his mother and stepfather, comes to mind again.
In the essay “Hame,” Forna visits the Shetland Islands to explore her maternal grandfather’s roots, and meditates, “Ideas of home produce a cultural schism, for home is at once the focus of great nostalgia for some, equally for others home is a place they can’t wait to get away from.” Her mother (who retired to Auckland and never came back to Scotland again) was in the latter group. “My mother has lived in nineteen countries on five continents, first with one husband and then another and then alone.” Earlier, writing of Obama, she associates the birther movement with “the fantasy of normality which much American popular culture promotes—that all but a few people live in the same place all their lives.” I don’t think we Americans are the only ones who share this fantasy of “home,” with its implied suspicion of people who embrace a wider world. Interestingly, Forna does not discuss Brexit.
The characters in Forna’s novels all cope with the political events of their time, as she did as a child. She quotes Nadine Gordimer: “Non-fiction uses facts to help us see the lies. Fiction uses metaphor to help us see the truth.” Ancestor Stones tells the history of Sierra Leone’s colonization through the fictionalized wives of Pa Roke, her Muslim grandfather, who married sixteen women over the course of ninety years. The Memory of Love, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, takes place in the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s. Even The Hired Man, set in Croatia, speaks of the secrets of war, buried in the landscape and human hearts. Her characters’ choices have consequences, which they face if they survive. Like Gordimer, Forna is a witness, interested in how people go about their lives when society is disrupted. Her work says quietly, “These are the things that can happen, in fact these things did happen to people.”
In The Window Seat’s title essay, Forna writes, “Probably, if you have flown across borders very much at all, you will have flown over a war. I know I have. Consider the matter: people are killing and being killed and living in terror of being killed while, at a point precisely overhead, you are doing what? You are watching the drinks trolley edge down the aisle, handling the frustrations of plastic cutlery and those fiddly salt and pepper packets, selecting the next movie, whether it should be a thriller, a love or a war story.” She is not only mixed-race, but bicultural, with the freedom of a British passport and relatives on the ground whom she cannot forget.
Even when I disagree with Forna, her perspective from a different outpost of the diaspora intrigues me. She wonders why American blacks, especially those of us with light skin, call ourselves “black” rather than “mixed-race.” According to DNA, American blacks are all “mixed-race,” but few of us can point to a black parent and a white parent in a consensual relationship, as she can. She acknowledges the “one-drop rule” (whereby Southern whites labeled people who looked like them “black” in order to deny them financial and legal rights, even in the case of their own offspring), but puzzles that people “hold on to this way of thinking.”
“If you were light enough to look white,” she asks, “why didn’t that make you white?” But later she answers her own question, when she notes that Africans call her and Obama “white.” It’s not about color, it’s about privilege. However, in the U.S., even after segregation technically ended, a light-skinned person did not have the privileges of a white person. When my white-appearing cousins moved into a Chicago suburb in the Sixties, teenagers burned a cross on their lawn. The boys apologized some years later, and there is no evidence that they belonged to the Ku Klux Klan; they were just all-American kids, primed to react violently to the idea of a black neighbor.
Those who have read Forna’s novels will recognize many themes in her essays. Her love of animals and environmentalism are represented, with essays titled “The Last Vet,” “Bruno” (about a chimpanzee), and “Wilder Things.” “Power Walking” is a feminist romp. “As I write this, I wonder about all those guys, of every class and colour, who interrupted my thoughts in order to remind me of my place. For whom it was fun to try to unnerve or humiliate me. To them I say, just wait. It’s coming. Too late for me.” Ah, yes. In my profession, this reckoning began last year, shortly after my retirement, with the decision to publish a Perspective piece in the New England Journal of Medicine boldly titled “Misogyny in Medicine.” Sadly, the surgery professor who promised that someday we would thank him for his bullying died recently. Too late for him as well.
Those who start with The Window Seat will find an introduction to the wide scope of Forna’s fiction and her journalistic curiosity. As she says elsewhere, “I was a chameleon child, capable of adapting myself quickly to new surroundings. The whirligig of my childhood had made me unquestioning and passive in the face of change: parents, families, houses, countries, schools, revolved around me, while I stood still centre stage.” In Happiness, the characters find each other because of the upheavals in their lives. Trauma does not necessarily mean damage, the psychiatrist Attila decides, but it always means change.
OTHER BOOKS BY AMINATTA FORNA DISCUSSED HERE:
Happiness, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018, $16.00 paper.
The Hired Man. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013, $15.00 paper.
The Memory of Love, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011, $16.00 paper.
Ancestor Stones, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006, $16.00 paper.
The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Memoir, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002, $16.00 paper.
Toni Martin is a writer and retired physician who lives in Berkeley.
