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(The rebel army id number carved into the bare skin of 8-year-old boy soldier, Citizen’s, back, Moses, Citizen and Me, page 163)

Delia Jarrett-Macauley (Fellow of the Royal Society) is a London-based British writer, academic and broadcaster of Sierra Leonean heritage. Her first and, to date only, novel, Moses, Citizen & Me, won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to have been awarded the prize.

Stats

Moses, Citizen and Me is 226 pages long, with 3 pages of acknowledgements. It is divided into a 2-page prologue then 12 chapters of narrative.

It tells the story of a family coping with the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s civil war (1991 to 2002). The book’s protagonist, London-based academic Julia (Julia/Delia, kind of similar sounding names), receives a disturbing phone call from the neighbour of her Uncle Moses back in Sierra Leone. This neighbour, Anita, tells Julia that Moses’ wife, her Auntie Adele, is dead and begs her to return to her homeland.

When Julia arrives in the capital of Sierra Leone, Freetown, she discovers that during the civil war, her Aunt Adele was killed by a child soldier who is none other than Adele’s own grandson Citizen. Now the deeply damaged 8-year-old boy is back from the war living with Uncle Moses – the man whose wife he killed – and Julia finds herself joining this troubled household and trying to help all concerned deal with the terrible situation.

There’s no suspense about it: Julia is on the flight by page 5 and confronting Moses on page 7. The interest or motivation is not in finding out whodunnit but, I think, is meant to be in savouring Jarrett-Macauley’s sensitive emotions and the healing bonds of the women and girls (Julia, Anita and the latter’s two young daughters) who help Moses and Citizen.

Style and attitude

I didn’t like Jarrett-Macauley’s attitude or style. It came over, to me, as self important and entitled. Here are the opening sentences.

It was late November, crisp and chilly, but I was dressed lightly and wore no tights, to avoid discomfort on the flight. I had arrived at the airport in good time, no thanks to the minicab driver who sat in the traffic on Lavender Hill, stubbornly refusing to U-turn. (p.3)

1) ‘Crisp and chilly’ struck me as a cliché, the first of many throughout the book (‘Grandma Sara, a slender gracious woman with vivid eyes…’ p.13)

2) Why does she want to tell me that she was wearing no tights? It establishes that she’s the kind of narrator who thinks the reader needs to know absolutely everything about her, down to the state of her undergarments.

3) Why does she think I need to know about her argument with her taxi driver? She’s the kind of privileged, self-absorbed international traveller who finds drivers and hotel staff annoying. ‘Out of my way riff-raff, don’t you know who I am? I am a writer.’

All this clutter about taxis, planes and tights is hurriedly swept out of the way so that she can arrive in Freetown, take a cab to Uncle Moses’ house, and confront the boy monster.

His colouring was mine. But his spirit was so far removed from anything I had ever met that I nearly wept. Suddenly I felt panic, separate and afraid. (p.7)

I realised I was in for a long haul. The first few pages suggested the book is going to be mostly about its narrator’s rare and precious feelings, subtle perceptions, deep emotions, wonderful insights and so on, with very little factual background or useful analysis.

It is written, at least to begin with, in what I’ve previously called the Numb Style. This is very common in modern novels. It’s where the narrative so completely lacks all colour, warmth, subtlety or sophistication, all distance, detachment, analysis, irony or humour that it’s as if the narrator has had a lobotomy. Instead, like someone with severe brain damage, the text just registers one thing. Then another thing. Then another thing. Then another thing.

Small pink apples lay on the plate and I ate one. I asked Citizen whether he would like one too. He did not answer. I didn’t know if he had heard me. Then I realised I had been whispering. (p.8)

E.M. Foster at the start of Passage To India gives us paragraphs of description which vividly bring to life the Indian setting. Closer to the subject matter here, Graham Greene in Heart of the Matter vividly describes the sights and sounds and smells, the people and buildings and noises of Freetown. Those novels’ descriptions invoke a kind of man-of-the-world knowledgableness, the adult ability to sift and judge, to select certain details and descriptions and order them into well-organised paragraphs in order to build up sophisticated word pictures.

Jarrett-Macauley has none of this. What she describes is herself. In the Numb Style.

It is essential to take this slowly. I don’t know whether other people were standing or watching me. I remember only the squawk that came out of my mouth: animal anguish. (p.8)

As you can see, the all-too-frequent corollary of the Numb Style is the narrator’s claim that they have undergone An Enormous Trauma. The style is so brain dead, flat and affectless because it denotes Huge Pain. It shouts at the reader Look at me! See how much I suffer! The Numb Style generally accompanies a sustained outpouring of self-dramatising self-importance which I always find very tiresome.

My feet were cold, so cold they were dying, and speech had deserted me. (p.8)

The midday sun was grilling the earth but my heart was seized with a terrible coldness indistinguishable from doubt. (p.216)

I was bored by page 10, not by the subject matter so much as by narrator’s self importance, self centredness, the relentless emphasis on self self self, by the narrator’s relishing of her own precious feelings and responses, all told with the dead-eyed numbness of a car crash survivor.

He had looked at his watch. It had stopped. He had shaken it. (p.11)

When Jarrett-Macauley is not doing the Numb Style, she switches to bad poetry. Centuries ago critics talked about the poetaster, ‘a derogatory term applied to bad or inferior poets with implications of unwarranted pretensions to artistic value.’ Same here. When she’s not saying Look at me how I’ve suffered she’s saying Look in awe at my poetic perceptions.

Anita was coming towards me, gliding, her movements liquid. She poured herself into a shape of love and wrapped it around my tense body. (p.8)

There’s a lot of background about how young Julia lived in Brixton and how Uncle Moses came to stay, there were parties at their house on Sunday afternoons, how one day her mum brought Adele home. Moses was instantly attracted to her and everyone knew they’d get married. And then they did get married.

At that moment Adele did not know and Moses did not know but we all knew that Adele would love Moses and Moses would love Adele. (p.29)

Maybe this is intended to recreate the mental impressions of her 7-year-old self. But a lot of the rest of the text is like this and comes over as the thought processes of a simpleton.

Incidentally, I’ve lived in and around Brixton for 20 years and nothing in Jarrett-Macauley’s numerous descriptions of the narrator’s girlhood upbringing there in any way bring it to mind or capture its swarming, polluted, shambling, vibrant, smelly, noisy, threatening aspects (I’ve been mugged there, twice).

Anyway, Julia and Moses go to visit the camp for ex-child soldiers at Doria outside Freetown, where the main thing that happens is she has a bad attack of the Numb Style.

I looked about to see what was familiar. Nothing was. There were no trees and no flowers. I looked up and the sky was without clouds and the sun was hidden from view. I looked down and the ground was solid yellow dirt with no life. I looked ahead and saw no women. (p.31)

This isn’t a description of an actual place but of a state of mind, the brain-damaged mental state of the Numb Style. And then we have passages of the magical lyrical style, particularly associated with women communing, sharing deep feelings as only women can.

Sally and I sat opposite one another and said nothing but exchanged thoughts. (p.33)

But mostly it’s about Julia and her reactions to hearing the stories of the child soldiers.

Inside I felt a hazy dark cloud and guessed I was about to pass out. I made myself concentrate hard (p.37)

I moved closer to him; I moved closer to myself, into a narrow space where every emotion was restored to its full essence. (p.38)

For three hours I lay in my room, my body moist with the apple’s juices, and for three hours life wandered through my limbs slowly and steadily, like nothing I had felt before. (p.39)

There’s a lot of this self-centred, self-important, self-promoting sensitivity on every page. It’s like taking a wrong turning at the gym and finding yourself in a mindfulness class. Everyone is being very sensitive. Everyone is in touch with their inner self. Everyone is fondling their chakras.

Visions

At the narrative progresses Julia starts having visions which leads us into imaginative recreations of what Citizen the child soldiers must have gone through. She imagines a procession of child soldiers marching up her neck, she imagines her head is a map of Sierra Leone, she talks repeatedly about trying to come down to earth, trying to ‘control her mind’ (p.51), as these visions become more powerful and last longer.

She imagines herself joining the band of child soldiers, being with them when Citizen is abducted, seeing what he sees, watching the stolen children being whipped and crying, hallucinatorily entering ‘another world’ (p.54).

Suddenly the narrator is in the rebel camp, at their base, watching the child soldiers cry and fight and beat each other, being terrorised into undertaking another attack. Citizen is 8 years old. He is a member of the Number-One-Burn-House-Unit led by ‘Lieutenant’ Ibrahim. His friend is Abu, recently abducted from a village the unity burned down. Abu cries for his mummy. Ibrahim whips him with a 6-foot whip. When Abu’s brother gets up to go Ibrahim simply shoots him in the head.

Later she finds herself, in sleep, transplanted to Gola Forest where, apparently, the child soldiers had their bases. In her dream she encounters a mathematician, Bemba G, who entrances the boy killers with the delights of maths. She describes the entire visionary experience as a ‘multidimensional event’.

Among women

These kinds of intense visions alternate with passages from the ‘real world’, where Julia has got involved in helping old Uncle Moses with his collection of rare photographs by native Leonean photographers (because, we learn, Moses was himself at one stage a professional photographer), or spends a lot of time with Anita, a single mum her own age (late 30s) with two daughters, Elizabeth who is just discovering boys, and 9-year-old Sara (p.91).

These scenes are consciously very female, dwelling on the restful healing routines of female chores (cooking and washing and hanging out to dry) and female chat (about men and children and school and clothes). Julia sits on a stool in the yard and lets Anita redo her cornrows.

These quiet feminine times are very obviously designed to be at the opposite pole from the pure destruction of the child soldiers sent to burn down entire villages and murder everyone which Julia increasingly hallucinates.

Thus, in ‘homely world’, Julia cooks chicken groundnut for Moses and Citizen, and for Anita, Elizabeth and Sara. It is a recipe taught her by her mother who in turn had it from her mother, Sally. So it is not just a meal, it is an invocation of the matriarchy or, less grandly, female family traditions.

It is also, like all the dishes cooked in all of these books (by Chinua Achebe or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) delicious. None of these characters is capable of bad cooking. (Aunt Ida comes to visit and remembers how Auntie Adele’s baking was always ‘perfect’, p.141.; ‘We stopped for lunch. Everyone helped with the preparation, even the children.’ p.221) In much the same way that they are all wonderfully articulate, speak in perfectly rounded sentences, are full of inventive and creative thoughts, are always kind and considerate.

Also, none of them have jobs. Julia the narrator lazes round all day, reading, dozing, day-dreaming, or helping Uncle Moses in his photography studio or chatting to neighbour Anita or cooking up delicious meals.

We sat quietly for most of that afternoon – Moses, Anita, Elizabeth, Olu, Citizen, Sara, and me. Elizabeth began to sing. (p.222)

The book is marketed as a novel about atrocities, but it’s also a depiction of a pretty cushy lifestyle. Made me jealous.

In the perfection of their characters (and their cooking), and the way nobody seems to have a job, the characters are quite unlike most of the people I’ve ever met. There is a novel-ish perfection to every aspect of the book.

Love and peace. The love is in the taste of the food. The peace I took to bed. I undressed and laid my body on the white sheet. Here I am again, black on white, ready to dream tonight. (p.83)

One day Olu came early, before Elizabeth had laid plans for the day. He invited us out to Lumley Beach where we spent several pleasant hours. (p.222)

I appreciate the way Delia Jarrett-Macauley creates this feminist cocoon, this women’s swoon, a calm, undramatic oasis of homeliness, and I know lots of women who live this life and it’s lovely. But it’s not my life or my view of the world. My world is full of hard work and rare breaks and horrifying news. Unlike:

When we had enough prepared vegetables, we put on a pot of rice and retreated into the lounge with our drinks….I leaned my head back on then lounger, balancing my glass on my stomach, and closed my eyes, an interlude before dinner. (p.224)

Aaaah. Sunday supplement perfection. It’s no accident, or it’s entirely apposite, that the novel ends with the narrator imagining herself, Citizen, her friend Chloe and her young daughter going to a burger place in Lavender Hill (not, interestingly, to any of the ethnic restaurants and cafes overflowing Brixton Market) and, after a burger and fries, having rich apple pie, the image of apples one of innocence and wholeness and linking back to the pink Leonean apples she tried to share with the numbstruck boy Citizen right at the start of the story. It’s a happy ending. Citizen has been cured by the love of good women, family and cooking.

The child soldiers’ production of Julius Caesar

Slowly the dream visions take over the text. By three-quarters of the way through Julia is spending nearly all her time in the forest. On page 143 she appears to leave ‘reality’ altogether and magically transport into the bush. Here she rejoins Bemba G and the community of child soldiers at a place called Black Rock, a geographical which changes shape to create various settings (p.169).

Citizen and all the other child soldiers are there and new ones arrive every day. Bemba G organises a daily routine, organises periods for play and sessions of storytelling where they either recount stories of their true experiences or are encouraged to make up stories the others can relate to.

I think this is all in her head. I think these longer and longer ‘visionary’ passages are where the narrator has completely crossed over into an otherworld of fantasy and fulfilment. Here, in this imagined camp, she befriends child victims like Victor with letters carved into his skull or Miriam with her baby, with Hina, KT, Peter, 6-year-old Isata and many others, 35 in all (p.159).

Emerging to dominate this fantasy is Bemba G’s notion of having the children act William Shakespeare’s plan Julius Caesar – which, in some way, overlaps with contemporary African playwright Thomas Dekker’s reworking of it in Krio as Juliohs Siza.

Preparations to perform the play are described at length, as is the way the children feel themselves deep into the roles, practice the assassination and the fighting, meld themselves into this 400-year-old narrative. Whether or not it’s ‘real’ in the same way as Julia’s grumpy taxi driver, flight and hanging out with Moses and Anita are ‘real’ is beside the point. It’s very powerful and develops into the best thing in the book.

In between rehearsals, Julia plays a sometimes central role in organising the children’s playtime, in listening to their individual complaints and nightmares and stories. Her familiarity with the processes involved in addressing, listening to and gently coaching children made me wonder whether Julia/Delia was a social worker. Or a theatre director, maybe. The 60 odd pages from 143 to 200 have more focus and running energy than the previous chapters of the book, which felt more langorous and episodic.

This final third of the text builds up to an actual performance of Julius Caesar for an audience of about 200, including tourists and British peacekeepers. It seems to be staged both out in the depths of the forest beside the shape-shifting Black Rock and in a compound in the capital city, Freetown, at the same time. This doesn’t matter, in fact it’s a positive, lifting the final third of the book into a peculiar dream-fantasy-haze environment which I found more gripping than the first two-thirds.

Did Jarrett-Macauley help produce such a production, of Julius Caesar, in Freetown or here in Brixton? It really feels like it because the text is packed with detail about the Shakespeare play, about particular lines and scenes and moments, and a deep understanding of how the actors approach their parts and different scenes, having sudden insights, matching themselves to their roles, watching the whole thing suddenly crystallise into focus. Right down to the way that, at the end, appreciative journalists throng the ‘green room’ and ask for interviews and photos of the children. Despite being on one level a fantasy, it’s completely gripping.

Futility

When she’s in the ‘real’ world, Julia is helping Uncle Moses sort out his huge collection of photos, many by him, but also snaps by local Leonean photographers, so there are passages about some of these photographers and their work. She’s particularly drawn to (the real life figure of) Alphonso Lisk-Carew who travelled up-country in the 1910s to photograph tribal peoples (pages 105 to 107). At other moments, Moses goes off into long reminiscences about his wooing of wife Adele in the 1960s. In both eras (1910s, 1960s) Julia imagines scenes and conversations, notes records and writings, observes how the people of those times were artlessly optimistic about themselves and the future of their country. How, Julia repeatedly asks herself, did they screw it up so badly? How did they let the country fall into civil war and then collapse into out-and-out barbarism?

In among these reminiscent passages are scenes where, at parties, at dinner, at clubs, Moses and his wife and friends discuss politics and what the country needs. There are extended flashbacks to a period (in the 1960s?) when Moses did some photography work for a politician named Harris (for election brochures and such). At one point this guy tells Moses: ‘We need to make our country a success. You can help.’ (p.115)

Well, here we are in 2024 and Sierra Leone is still one of the poorest countries on earth, ranking 182nd out of 189 countries in the Human Development Index (Action Against Hunger). It is on most measures a basket case, the majority of its population living in abject poverty, still suffering the repercussions from its ruinous civil war, with tens of thousands condemned to live out their lives without hands, arms or legs, chopped off by the rebels.

Set beside such barely comprehensible savagery, the trite vapourings of characters from the 60s and 70s about ‘building a better country’ seem mad.

Summary

This book is useless for factual information or analysis. For Sierra Leone’s civil wars read Martin Meredith, for a deep dive into the reality of child soldiers read The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski.

What this book is is an immersion in a particular kind of sensitive female consciousness, with lots of emphasis on the strength of women and the beauty of women, the quiet heroism of women doing the household chores and women cooking and women washing, women caring for their sons and daughters and their ageing parents, women healing the sick and rehabilitating the damaged.

I took her hand as a token of female affection: we are safe. (p.188)

A novel about a woman having dreams and visions which open up into an otherworld of alternative values and perceptions.

An invisible thread runs between the hungry empty ghosts and our earthly selves. As time passes, the veil between our worlds thins. I can feel these souls deeply. They are the same as us but without the blood. (p.185)

That’s what you’re getting into if you read it, and I know this kind of writing about strong sensitive woman and the depth of women’s community and the healing power of women is very popular and very successful. As I mentioned at the start, Moses, Citizen & Me won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to be awarded the prize. But, I’m afraid, although it gains a lot of power in the final quarter, the book was not, in the end, for me.

Recent news from Sierra Leone

Although the civil war ended in 2002 and the era of child soldiers is over, Sierra Leone continues to be one of so many African countries whose people struggle to rule themselves.

Uncle Moses peeked at me to check if I was ready. ‘This is what you people must do, do not be held back by as many rules as we were. Be free!’ I understood what he meant, yet what had we achieved with our freedom? War. (p.97)

Sierra Leone’s most recent (failed) coup took place on 26 November last year.

• Sierra Leone coup attempt: What may have sparked the violence (BBC: 28 November 2023)
• Ernest Bai Koroma: Sierra Leone ex-president flies to Nigeria for medical care (BBC: 19 January 2024)

Child soldiers today

• World’s highest child soldier numbers in West, Central Africa (Al-Jazeera)

Guilty wish

You know that minicab driver the narrator was rude about in the very first paragraph of the book? I’d like to have heard his side of the story.

Credit

Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley was first published by Granta Books in 2005. References are to this Granta paperback edition.

Related links

• Delia Jarrett-Macauley website
• Africa Confidential web page about Sierra Leone

Related reviews

• The Sierra Leone chapters of The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005)
• The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski (2009)
• Africa reviews