Survival and Resilience

~ Little Family, by Ishmael Beah ~

Somewhere in Africa, in a clearing on the edge of a small town, a boy sits among the grasses, motionless, unresponsive, looking into the distance.

When you look again to where the boy was sitting, he is gone, without your having heard him leave. You set aside your fear and try all the pathways that are visible to you, but none goes any distance. Each time, you find yourself returned to where the boy was sitting, the smaller plants stretching to regain themselves in the wake of his human weight.

So starts this remarkable novel, set in an unnamed country (but much like Sierra Leone), whose near past includes civil war or strife that has created many orphans and displaced children. One of them is the boy above, a member of the eponymous Little Family.

The path came to an end in a clearing enclosed by palm and baobab trees. In the middle, the skeleton of a medium-size plane lay on its belly. Vines had wrapped themselves around most of the exterior, giving it a natural camouflage. Nearly all of the windows in the front were intact, and towards the back, where more were missing, they had been covered with cardboard, plastic and tarpaulin to prevent snakes and other animals from entering. The faded Air Lyoa insignia could be made out against a background of green, white and blue.

In this plane the five children have made themselves a home and a new family. Elimane, the oldest:

Poverty has a great appetite for eating one’s dignity, but Elimane was one of those people who fought to keep his, even when that was the only battle he was living.

Khoudiemata:

Raffia bag slung over her shoulder, beanie on her head, this bright-eyed young woman of eighteen with smooth, sharp cheekbones […]

Ndevui, a talented and determined footballer:

He went for a run every morning, with a white towel around his neck and his earphones deep inside his ears […], the cord of the earphones tucked under his shirt and into his football shorts, so that no one could see what it was connected to. The truth was that it was connected to nothing, but that did not stop him from singing to himself the songs he had heard on the streets and in the music shops. Who needed a device when you had a mind that could record songs and play them back for free?

Kpindi, the boy in the opening chapter:

bony frame, his rib cage drawing away from his long belly, he sat erect, with an unreadable stare calculated to inspire fear, curiosity, and confusion in anyone who happened upon him.

And Namsa:

They had found Namsa, shivering and alone, in an open field not far from their home. They tried saying ‘Hello, please don’t be afraid’ in the fifteen languages and three dialects that they collectively knew, but it was weeks before she did more than nod or shake her head in response.

Their pasts are hinted at, but remain unknown to the reader as well as each other:

Elimane never spoke about his earlier life, any more than the rest of them did. They only knew that, of the twenty years of his life, he had spent four living in the plane, the first year all alone. Kpindi had arrived next, then Khoudi, then Ndevui, and last of all little Namsa, only six months before.

They may live together, but once they leave the clearing, they travel apart.

They never did anything all at the same time in view of others, to avoid notice or suspicion.

The family survives by their wits, by stealing, and by picking up any temporary jobs they can. To call them ‘street-smart’ simply trivializes the intensity and caution with which they live. ‘Do not betray emotions’. ‘Do not show weakness’. ‘Be attentive’. Even little Namsa, less than 10 years old, who struggles to keep up with the others’ long legs, is capable of reading a situation, melting into a crowd, distracting a target, stashing their money for safety, or refusing to back down to older boys.

The country and their lives are in flux, even though their airplane home appears to be stable and secret. Elimane performs a favour, very precisely calibrated to engender trust, for a man in a suit and tie. No names are exchanged, but Elimane dubs him ‘William Handkerchief’; later, the man hires Elimane and occasionally the rest of the group for small tasks. Khoudiemata is developing a consciousness of her own body and beauty, and sometimes leaves the family to wander on her own and find herself. There are many threats to the Little Family’s precarious life, but will these two developing situations be disruptive?

The family is so vividly drawn that it is difficult to write about them as characters. Khoudi is the heart of the novel: an integral part of the family, unquestioningly loving and caring towards Namsa, but also calmly desirous of her ‘own space’ (an Americanism that would not appear in this novel. Obviously, I’m no authority, but the dialogue and descriptions rang dead true to me). At the start of the novel she travels in a baggy, overlarge sweatshirt and pants, “to mask the contours of her body and keep herself safe”. Her beauty and originality find her friends among the upper crust who live very, very differently, and she begins to enjoy nice clothes and jewellery. These upscale people are less interesting as characters, but were, I thought, a necessary contrast, even though more about the little family would have been very welcome instead.

The casual details, so easily woven into the fabric of the story, are riveting.

Elimane waited for the battery [to be charged in a small shop] alongside a long line of others who had no electricity to charge their phones for whatever their daaily hustle was. He reflected on the undeniable benefits of these devices — the incredible speed with which they transmitted information — but also on their drawbacks. Conversation among the poor was neither free nor as pleasurable as it once was. When someone called you, they spoke fast, and so did you, preoccupied as you were with the life of your battery, and the unreliability and cost of service. People no longer stopped to ask “How are you and your family? Are the children well?” or, if they did, waited to attend to the responses.

Beah’s pacing is perfect: it matches the slow pace of their days, focused on getting food or money for the day, as well as the sudden bursts of activity when action is required or forced upon them.

Apart from their pasts, there are hints of untold stories: Khoudi carries a tattered old newspaper clipping everywhere, a taxi driver has ‘something familiar about him that she could not place’, Elimane mourns his missing books. It is a novel crying out for a sequel, so invested are we in the characters that we long to know more about their pasts and futures. But the novel is also complete in itself.

In these depressing times I’m not sure I have the fortitude to tackle Beah’s first book, A Long Way Gone, a memoir of his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. But I can’t wait to read his previous novel, Radiance of Tomorrow.

Highly recommended.