The Devil that Danced on the Water is a 2002 memoir/detective story by Aminatta Forna in which the author tells the story of her childhood and investigates the causes of her father’s execution (“The Devil that Danced on the Water”). I first came across this book while on a search for contemporary novels that dealt with the experience of postcolonial African identity. However, my search was for novels and so I did not get a chance to read this book. After reading through reviews and summaries, I was able to gain a general understanding of the memoir’s plot and major abstractions. As a result of exploring ideas of self-representation, personal and shared memory, identity, authority and more in ASTU, Forna’s memoir seems to offer a compelling understanding of these concepts. Forna is an Afro-European writer born in Scotland and raised in Sierra Leone, she also spent parts of her childhood in Iran, Thailand and Zambia. Having grown up in 1970s Sierra Leone, national unrest as a result of post-independence civil conflict is a major part of Forna’s life (About Aminatta Forna).
The memoir offers various links to the concepts explored in ASTU, memory is a major theme in the memoir. Both personal and shared memory are central to this text because of the position of Forna’s text within the larger context of civil war and national memory (The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest). Similar to Forgiveness and Persepolis, Forna’s memoir contributes a unique experience of national tragedy in Sierra Leone. Like Missing Sarah, Forna’s memoir is her own story as well as that of her father’s. Therefore, her methodology and research process are central to the production of her story. Forna makes use of similar methods to De Vries such as interviews with the men associated with her father’s death (Brittain). We have explored the memoirist’s research process considerably in Missing Sarah by highlighting who De Vries cites in telling another’s story, observing how Forna does this could provide for an interesting analysis as she tells the story of a different family member, her father. Additionally, Forna’s memoir can be viewed as a counter-narrative similar to Knighton’s Cockeyed, as it challenges the historical exclusion of women of color, particularly African women, from the literary marketplace. Furthermore, as Victoria Brittain highlights, the memoir “gives a more personal framework for understanding the horror” that challenges the western media coverage of the conflict in Sierra Leone which depicted the nation’s conflict as having been fueled by “a generation of drug-fueled youths” (Brittain).
Forna’s memoir differs from the texts previously studied in ASTU due to the narrator’s post-colonial, African diasporic characteristic. Ideas of self-representation can be analysed differently through the diasporic lens and even more so when situated within the postcolonial context. Forna’s memoir allows for an exploration of ideas we have not investigated in ASTU such as colonial trauma and cultural hybridity. In choosing this memoir, I was driven by my interest in postcolonial literature because of the dynamic ways’ identity can be understood through contemporary African literature. Using my newfound understanding of life narratives and self-representation, I can combine this with my interest in African literature in order to show how the genre of African and diasporic life-narratives can offer future ASTU students a different understanding of self-representation and life writing.
Works Cited
About Aminatta Forna. n.d. March 2019. <https://aminattaforna.com/about-aminatta-forna.html>.
Brittain, Victoria. The truth about Daddy. 18 May 2002. 16 March 2019. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/18/politics>.
Weekly, Publisher’s. The Devil that Danced on the Water: A Daughter’s Quest. 2002. 16 March 2019.