Short Stories: Sierra Leone has become a byword for horror: drug-crazed child soldiers, banks of rotting corpses. It's estimated that 200,000 people died in the civil war in the 1990s, and another 500,000 were displaced to refugee camps. It is officially the poorest nation on the planet. In one of the short stories in this book it is described as being "seven miles from hell". During the war it seemed a lot closer than that.
But before the war Sierra Leone was Africa's oldest centre of learning. When the university was established in Freetown in 1828, people from all over the continent went there. There was a strong community of writers and in 1998 a branch of the international writers' organisation, PEN, was set up. The war destroyed everything though and most of Sierra Leone's writers and journalists fled in despair. When British writer Caryl Phillips visited in 2003, apart from a small church shop selling Christian material, there were no bookshops in the country.
Now Sierra Leone is crawling back towards democracy. In this more tolerant climate PEN has been re-established and writers are beginning to find their voices again. As a gesture of solidarity, ethical publisher Flame has issued this collection of stories by writers from various countries to help their counterparts there. It is edited by Mike Butscher, the secretary of Sierra Leone PEN, and Phillips has written the introduction.
Fittingly, many of the stories have the power of words and of writing as a theme. It is a pleasingly diverse collection of voices, and, as one would expect, the quality varies a little too. There are a number of typographical errors in Moshe Benarroch's story, Home, which is ironic, given that typos are the subject of a conversation in this strange, futuristic tale, about a legendary book, each copy of which is different. Scott Kelly's No Story at All is about a conversation between a resident and a blow-in in Luckenbach, Texas, where most of the people are has-beens who have already played out the parts allotted to them in God's "big giant storybook of life".
In Jeffrey Ford's effectively macabre fantasy, Boatman's Holiday, Charon, on a break from ferrying passengers to hell, is informed that "God made the world with words" and "man made God with words", and in Yolande Sorores's Sally Moore, the eponymous heroine is a child who is afraid of the harsh and damaging words spoken by adults but who nonetheless grows up to be a successful writer.
I loved Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar's sad, lovely and cleverly structured Dasi, in which a beggar at a Hindu temple looks back at her life, and Gary Quinn's wryly funny Electric Fence - a Border counties tale in a style reminiscent of a less ebullient Pat McCabe - provided welcome light relief.
There is some magic realism and the most effective example is Tanith Lee's passionate, poetic The Flame. In it, Chaia, the storyteller, is imprisoned and refused paper to write on. She fears she will go mad, and writes on anything she can - walls, stones and the wings of butterflies who fly into her cell - with anything she can, including bits of blackened food, menstrual blood, tears. Eventually her efforts pay off and the forces of oppression are defeated. In other contexts, The Flame might seem indulgent (writers are mystical and special) and overly lyrical, but as part of this collection it is stirring and affecting - a newly minted fairytale offering hope.
Buy this book and reassure its indefatigable editor that Lee is right and he is right - in the long run, the PEN can be mightier.
Cathy Dillon is an Irish Times journalist
