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The Dangers of Someone Else Writing Your Story
by Eva Acqui
The article focuses on the life of the literary text basing on war stories, in case the writing is not done by the story teller. I came across a book on one of the many horrifying stories of the Liberian war, whose writer claimed to be a mercenary, and who gave the account of facts he had witnessed. I ran across a few pages, with interest and curiosity, as I myself spent two years in that war-torn country, I was there from the beginning to some point in time, in the early nineties. So, I took the book with haste and looked at the text. Other people might have bought it without even thinking. I placed it back on the shelf. The shop-assistant knows me and she asked why not wrap it for me right away. I really did not want it. It wasn't the real thing.
It is not the book or author I am ready to place under critical eye, but the fact that I am not sure that the witness is the real author, writer of the story. The text is somehow lifeless: it does not base on several angles. For people who know Liberia, and its capital city Monrovia, who were witnesses of the war, and know the positive and negative heroes of those days, it will be hard to appreciate, or like, the action perspective without its background.
By background I mean the real setting that makes a story tick. The background is a war-stricken city, a former flourishing African capital, on the shores of the Atlantic, a green, flower-wreathed city, on the delta of the St. Paul river, with water-lilies and walls of green creepers, with coconut trees, with rocky beaches, and with joyous, dynamic people. Monrovia was a very friendly city, with women carrying fish baskets on their heads, with fruit and peanuts at every street corner, with Coca-Cola sellers running up and down the streets, with stores, tailor shops, market places, humming with people. Its nightlife was very exciting, with those girls dancing the night away at Hotel Africa, or downtown, its weekends were dream-like, with Barnes Beach, Coconut Beach, Kenema Beach, where people spent the day between the ocean and the lagoons with paradise-like vegetation. I could talk about Monrovia for days, about Liberia and its people for years, without exhausting things.
Here the rebels kept the city under siege for months, here several war factions separated and continued fighting, here atrocities took place, like the massacre at St. Peter's Lutheran Church, in Sinkor, here the soldiers broke into the UNDP premises and collected people in trucks, carrying them to the beaches where they slaughtered them. It is on those once thriving streets that children and parents alike dropped dead from hunger, from stray bullets, from exhaustion, from disease. It is on these streets that drunk soldiers would shoot at the walls of buildings for hours, with no enemy in sight, shouting that they were making war. It is on the beaches of Monrovia that many of its inhabitants found their death, in sand and wave graves. The sea will mourn forever, and so will the coconut trees on Coconut Beach.
The heroes of the war, whether negative or positive, are very complex personalities. Just showing them in one or two circumstances creates a hilarious flatness. The book mentions the name of the Liberian president, Charles Taylor, and presents a few facts. Charles Taylor is one of those people who could make a very complex and contradictory literary hero. And so are all the other warlords, or the Liberian generals who made legend there, Kolako, Quiwonkpa, Prince…
It is a rather hard task to write a novel about a war. It may fall into the category of a news report, a historic account, a personal wailing, an existential file, because the situation is too complex, especially if the would-be author is an actual witness.
But the greatest danger of all is to let someone else write the story. You can tell the person everything, narrate whole sequences, and the writer will do the job, but according to his personal filters. Of course, such a move will avoid subjectivity and will concentrate on facts. However, the value of a story builds on several patterns, not only on action, on facts. Again, complexity is a hardship that the writer will surely encounter.
A good writer can deal with complexity, but how vividly can the narrator provide all those details that bring the story to life? Is the narrator a keen observer, does he or she have a good eye for detail? If the writer has not actually seen the places, does not know too much about the people, with the facts provided by the narrator, the story may lack flavor.
I personally, an eye witness of events, find it very hard to write the book on the Liberian war. I have picked many details from here and there, writing articles, poetry, news reports, but have not found the right way to put the story down, an angle of approach, a structure: the time may not have come yet. Then, there are African traditions of silence on certain issues, but without those, any African story lacks that aura of mystery people experience about so many things on that continent.
One of the dangers of the very attentive eye is that it encounters hardship when times comes for focusing. That is my case. If I'd require someone else's services in writing for me, that person would quit within a very short time, as it would be impossible to keep the flow of the story. It would never be satisfactory, never relevant enough, always lacking details, the pictures would be too pale, the characters would be rather flat, the text would always seem lifeless to me.
In order to preserve the corner of life in its true colors, it is advisable to make an effort and put the story down, without involving someone else's filters. Whether the time is right or not, it is worth trying, or waiting if that's the case, because the context is alive within us, the writers, and it will generate a lively text when it comes to be written down.
About the Author
"This person has power in the written word". Writers Institute of America, 1989
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