Lamentations and Rainbows

Mohamed Sheriff wrote poetry throughout the war

The writers who share their poetry in African Performance's "Lamentations and Rainbows" are part of a writers group who met throughout the long war in Sierra Leone.

The work they produced over the period of that ten year long war, and during the five years since the war ended, provide important insights into the experience of war in their country.

Mohammed Sherriff along with Sydnella Shooter, Tom Cauuray, Mohammed Gibril Sesay, Kosonike Kosso Thomas and Oumar Farouk Sesay met where and when they could.

Oumar Farouk Sesay met with his fellow poets whenever he could

Mohammed Gibril Sesay describes each writer taking turns to organise the venue and the time they should meet.

In the latter stages of the war when the rebels arrived in Freetown and the city was ransacked, meetings became harder and all the writers experienced the violence that ensued at first hand.

In many cases the poems are a lament for a country that the poets felt they had lost forever, a paradise spoiled, and their words are witness to their grief.


 Listen to the poets talk about their writing

Listen to Mohammed Gibril Sesay's views on poetry

Listen to Oumar Farouk Sesay's views on poetry



An excerpt from Lamentations by Sydnella Shooter :

Oh my Sierra Leone I'm blind
Nature's beauty is now history
An uncovered grave
Bones skulls and bullets

Listen to Sydnella Shooter on the war in Sierra Leone

Cauuray was forced to leave Sierra Leone during the war

In Tom Cauuray's poem "Farewell to Sierra Leone" he describes his deep sense of loss and anger at being forced to leave his beloved country during the war. But he is also only too painfully aware that his escape was an opportunity denied to others.

Now back in Sierra Leone he talks of how hard it is for Sierra Leoneans to experience healing when there is such poverty. "True healing" he says "is not possible when most of an individual's practical needs are not met".

An excerpt from Farewell To My Dying Native Land by Tom P Cauuray:

When the sky played the rain-song
And the showers danced with you,
I remember the rhythm and the tune,
The whirring waltz which lulled my eyes to sleep.
These woes of war belabour sleep.

When you washed your dark-brown skin,
I smelled your spray of earth-perfume,
But now the scent of smouldering human flesh.
Your forests are scorched.
Your fauna crushed.
Your cheerful twigs on the bush-road edge,
Whose playful sprinkle washed my head,
Are all dead, now weevil's bed.

Empathy

Listen to Tom Cauuray talk about being abducted

Thomas' poem looks at how women are affected by war

The poetry produced by this group of writers offers us an insight into the pain of war experienced at an individual level.

Sometimes the writers are conjuring up their own experience or response to the war, sometimes they are empathising with others, as in Kosonike Kosso Thomas's poem "Hell has no lovers" where he imagines how a young woman might feel when her husband returns from war, brutalised and violent.

 Listen to Hell Has No lovers



An excerpt from Hell has no Lovers by Kosinike Kosso Thomas:

He yells at me, 'You go to hell!'
And fumes and puffs to his basement shell.
I feel entrapped in violence,
So sit alone in deep silence.



In their poetry, the writers all contemplate in one way or another how the aftermath of war has restricted the lives of the Sierra Leonean population.

Mohammed Gibril Sesay's poem "Where Will Our Child Lie?" tackles this issue.

An excerpt from Where Will Our Child Lie? By Mohamed Gibril Sesay:

Headside-footside-jamming-wall
The bed
Is workbenchwide
The room twice that
And my woman pregnant
Where will our child lie?



Five years after the war ended, Sierra Leoneans are trying to move on but are obviously still reeling from the war's dire effects. Kosonike Kosso Thomas sums up the tension of the war's aftermath in the poem "Trying to Forgive".

 Listen to Trying To Forgive

An excerpt from Trying to Forgive by Kosinike Kosso Thomas:

I hear your plea but now I'm losing
The spirit to forgive,
Just when it moves through me
And enters right into my thinking lobe.
I sense it fail to instruct the bits in me
Which respond to acts of love,
And keep me trying to forgive.

As Mohammed Gibril Sesay puts it "a poem is a rainbow, it is controlled emotion, you can tell the individual has experienced pain but right now it is not overwhelming him, the poet is in the driving seat of his emotions".

The writers also agree they want to persuade young Sierra Leoneans that poetry is something accessible to them, that poetry is about emotional responses and feelings and can be about familiar and immediate subjects. It is not something out of reach and removed, only learned about in school.

This group of poets and writers, in sharing the poetry of their country's war, reveal once again that poems offer an extraordinary insight into the experience of war and reminds us that war is an accumulation of individual pain.