Ishmael Beah - Searching for my Grandmother

 

At the end of the civil war, 11-year civil war in my country, Sierra Leone, everyone was looking for somebody they knew before the war, before that madness, family, friends, neighbors, somebody to be able to remind them of what their lives had been before that violent and horrific time. I was 12 years old when the war started, and my grandparents were really instrumental figures in my life, especially my grandmother. 

 

My grandmother always did whatever she wanted. She didn't conform to anything at all. And this was very uncommon in the community that I grew up in. In fact, she was one of the only women who owned her own farm, a plot of land where she grew cassava, rice and any other crop that she wanted. I would watch her do it from scratch. I would come along, not necessarily to help, because my help was not really much. I would stand back and admire my grandmother with a machete and axe in her hand when she would literally attack a jungle and cut down humongous trees fiercely with ferocity. And then, she would come from under the bushes and she would say to me, “Now, that's how you brush. Make me proud, my grandson.” 

 

I would look at her as she had looked at this jungle that the sun couldn't even penetrate in before, that was now flattened. She would look at it. She's sitting just to catch her breath a little bit. And of course, just by holding the machete, my hands were already blistered. I hadn't already started cutting anything, and then I would go in there to do whatever little walking I needed to do. 

 

My grandmother also, even though she was doing this uncommon thing, she remained quite feminine. Whenever were going to the farm or to brush to do this really difficult work, she would dress elegantly. She would tie her hair. She would come out looking as if we were going to a festivity. I always look at her, thinking to me and say, where are we going? But then, we'll be going to the farm or to brush. 

 

One afternoon, while we were brushing, some man was walking down the path and sent his greetings to us. I guess the sound of how the brushing was going, how the trees were being cut down and falling into the forest, he assumed that my grandmother or the person who was doing the brushing could only be a man. So, he sent his greeting as if he was greeting a man. My grandmother came from under the bushes, she arranged her head cloth, tied her shirt properly, put her wrapper around and looked very decent and stepped onto the path, the man froze. My grandmother walked up to him and slapped him really hard and said, [audience laughter] “Don't you have any training? Do you think all these bushes are only cut by men?” 

 

And then, the man, after awakening from this stupor of unbelief, ran down the path looking behind my grandmother [audience laughter] was going to chase him down. My grandmother looked at me and smiled a little bit and did some of her stuff again and went under the bushes and started swinging machete and axe cutting trees again. 

 

This was my grandmother. She had that same smile that she casted my way whenever she came to visit my older brother and I. We were living with our father after our parents had separated. And so, whenever my grandmother was coming, my father would get really nervous. He wasn't somebody who was afraid of anybody, but he would tuck in his shirt and he would pace up and down, he would sit down, he would stand up and we knew our grandmother was coming. [audience laughter] When my grandmother arrived, we took advantage of these moments to ask for things that we would not necessarily ask of our father, [audience laughter] because he would say yes in front of our grandmother. 

 

And so, my grandmother also had left my grandfather. She was the first of three wives in a village called Bandajuma. And one morning, she decided that she was done. She just packed her stuff, took her children, including my mother, five of them, all women, and just left the town of Bandajuma to another place called Kabati, where she would be able to do her business, but also she wanted to get away from the gossip and the inquisitiveness of all the other women. 

 

Now, traditionally, no woman was doing this. To do this required a lot of ceremony. The elders, mostly men, would agree to it. They would sit down and they would talk the woman out of it, but not my grandmother. She just left one day and said to my grandfather, “If you want to be with me, you will come to where I'm living now if you want to see me.” And this meant my grandfather would have to walk from when the sun rose in the morning to when he was in the middle of the sky to be able to do so. So, she went there and started living there. So, she would travel, she would make [unintelligible [00:06:41]. She would travel and buy fish. She would paddle her own canoe and go to villages that were miles away. Sometimes she would hire a motorboat, and she would put all this palm oil that she would bring to sell at the market. 

 

So, every now and then while she was gone, a stranger would come and would exchange small talks with my grandfather and would say, “Well, I've seen your wife a week away from this village.” And my grandfather, he was a very nice man, soft spoken, really nice to my grandmother. But my grandmother was just a very independent natured person and very just on her own thing, she didn't care what anybody thought. And so, through this conversation, my grandfather would say to some of the people that, “She lives by her own rules and she does whatever she wants. The only thing I know is that she loves me and her family deeply, and that's enough for me.” 

 

I remember watching my grandfather whenever my grandmother returned, he was ready and he would open up. He had this old suitcase that was old as the world. It was dark, like the color of earth. He would open it. Inside was very new. He had books and pens arranged, and he had this small perfume bottle he would take, and he would dress very nicely and he would spray it. I watch him and I look at him, and he would turn to me and say, “I have an advice for you, my grandson. A man is only as good as his ability to make his woman loved all the time. Remember that.” And I would say, “Okay.” [audience laughter] 

 

And then, he would come back on the veranda with his cassette tape and he would press play, and he would sit and he would play [audience laughter] that music that my grandmother would love. The traditional music begin to fill the air. And my grandmother would be sitting in the yard resting, and she would look, and my grandfather's eyes would be ready to meet hers. She would look at her, and then she would get up and she would go into the room. When she returned, she was elegantly dressed. My grandfather was waiting to hold her hand. She would refuse at first, be reluctant, and then they would start dancing, and they would start dancing and I would admire them. This was one of the last memories I had of my grandmother before the war began, where we lost everybody and a lot of people died during that time. 

 

At the beginning of the war, everybody was separated from their families. I didn't know what had happened to my brothers and my mother. Eventually, I found out that my brothers, my two brothers and my immediate family, my two brothers and my mother were killed in the war. And so, it happened to so many other people in Sierra Leone. During this war also, children were being sought after and recruited to fight as soldiers. And at that time, these children were forced to inflict violence upon their elders. 

 

In my community, you couldn't speak back to somebody who was older than you, but the war used this as a way to terrorize the structures that had existed. So, all through this time, when I was running from the war, I kept thinking about my grandmother, whether she had survived because she was an elder. 

 

Eventually, I was recruited to fight as one of those children that was used as a soldier to fight in this war. I came out of that war, luckily for me, alive, and I thought about my grandmother. I spent 10 years going back home to Kabati, to Sierra Leone, looking for my grandmother constantly. But each time, I would have leads, and I would follow them, and they would come to a dead end and I would lose her, I didn't know, where there was something within me always believed that my grandmother survived, that if anybody could survive, she was the one who did it because of how she was before the war. 

 

I'd been going around back and forth every now and then. Then one day, I was back in Sierra Leone in my country, and I went to the village and someone told me that my grandmother had returned. I didn't want to believe it, because I'd done this so many times. Yet nonetheless, I began to walk back to the house that I knew my grandmother had lived. When I began to approach it, I saw somebody sitting on the verandah and I recognized from afar that this was my grandmother. 

 

She was looking somewhere else, lost in her thoughts. And as I got closer, she raised her head and she saw me. She stood up as strong as she had been when she attacked those bushes and she began to wept. As I came closer, she shook my hand, she held me closer to her and she tried to pick me up, [audience laughter] but she couldn't do it. And so, she said to me, “What has happened to you? How come you've gotten so heavy?” [audience laughter] She looked at my height, and she looked at my face and I said, “Grandmother, it's been many years. So, I'm an adult now.” 

 

The last time my grandmother saw me I was 12 years old. So, she was still thinking of me in that way. So, we sat down to talk, but she tried again to see if she could pick me up, [audience laughter] and she couldn't do it. So, we sat on the verandah, and we started to talk about what had happened during the war. So, I asked her, how did you survive this madness that was difficult for even a young person to survive, let's just say an older person. She looked at me and said, “First of all, I am not old. [audience laughter] And secondly, what happened was that when the war came to my village, I ran to my farm because I knew that there, I would be able to have access to food and stay there for a little bit until I decided what to do. But I knew eventually people would come to the farm looking for food, and it would be people with weapons.” 

 

So, she left that place and began going towns and villages that she knew all these pathways, the waterways, and she would get into [unintelligible 00:11:40] weeks after weeks, she would walk and swamp. She slept standing in swamps and made her way to this island called Bunce, which is one of the places in the country that the word in rich was very difficult to get to. As she was telling me these stories, I thought to myself, I wish I'd had the strength and the wisdom to go to that place and escape all the madness that had occurred during the war. But I was a child, and I hadn't gone anywhere as my grandmother had traveled. 

 

After she finished telling me, she asked me what my story was. And I told her that I now lived in New York City, that I had written a book about my experiences in the war because I fought in this as a child. She thought about it and she said to me, “Where is this land that you talk about in New York, and how does one get there?” I explained to her the time it would take, the place and everything. And I asked her, “Would you like to come and visit or perhaps stay with me in this land called New York City?” She thought about it for a little bit and she said, “Will there be elders that I'll be able to exchange thoughts with?” And I said, “Well, it's not the same as here. You don't see many old people wandering around just like that.” 

 

She was quiet for a bit, and she said, “I will stay here in my beautiful village and home and you will come and see me every time I say so,” [audience laughter] she pointed her hand at me. And I said, “Yes, of course, I would do so.” I remember her face just as it was when I was a boy. It was very calm, as if she had slept for centuries. And so, we sat and talked. I stayed with my grandmother for weeks and weeks, close to a month, just exchanging things. But it was very difficult to do so, because at the end of the war, when you found somebody that was close to you and you were exchanging pleasantries with them about what life had been, sometimes you could not do it in front of your neighbors, because people who walked by seeing this, it reminded them of people they could not be able to find. So, we had to hide sometimes we would go for a walk along the path, long walks where we'll be able to laugh about things, where we'll be able to-- Perhaps I would cry. My grandmother never cried. She remained strong for me. I knew she was trying to hold it. So, we would do all of these things. And then, I left. At some point, I came back to New York. 

 

My next-door neighbor to my grandmother had a cell phone. So, I would call my grandmother sometimes and I would speak to her. And often, she would borrow the phone and she would call me. My grandmother did not understand that I was in a different time zone, so she would call me anytime she wanted. [audience laughter] And mostly, it was around 04:00 AM in the morning. [audience laughter] She would call me and she would say to me, “Why do you sound so sleepy? It's the middle of the day,” [audience laughter] or something like that. And I would say, “Well, I was just a little tired, so I was asleep.” I didn't want to explain anything to her. [audience laughter] So, then we would talk about all sorts of things. 

 

So, one time she called me. It was again 04:00 AM, I picked up the phone and she said, “You cannot believe what happened.” And I said, “What?” She said, “I was just minding my own business sitting on the verandah of my house, and these white people came by, and they had this book that had your picture in the back and they wanted to take a picture with me. So, I went inside and dressed very nicely and I took pictures with them. [audience laughter] And then, a few weeks later, others came and they just keep coming and I just keep taking pictures with them. [audience laughter] You must be a really, really big chief over there where they are, because these people coming and asking.” [audience laughter] And I said, “Well, I told you earlier I'd written this book.” She said, “Really? Okay, okay.” 

 

And so, we were talking. And of course, every time I spoke to my grandmother, she would ask me the question, “Have you found yourself a good woman that you're going to make some family of yourself? Better yet, I want you to make great grandchildren, so that I can teach them everything that I've learned about life.” And I'll say to her, “Well, you know, I'm working on it.” She'll say, “Well, if you need any help, definitely I can help you.” And I said to her, “Grandmother, throughout your entire life in my childhood already taught me how to do that just based on who you are.” And so, as she said this and the phone line began to break a little bit and I lost her. The phone hang up. And so, I said to her, I whispered to myself that I will talk to you soon, grandmother. I knew it was the same thing that she was thinking. Thank you.