In Sierra Leone (review)

More than a generation ago, the late French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, wrote a highly provocative essay called "Eye and Mind." In this groundbreaking work, Merleau-Ponty wrote about how paintings enable us to know nature on the inside, for, as he wrote, the "quality, light, color and depth which are there before us are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them" (1964:22).

Merleau-Ponty believed that much is lost in operational thinking in which scholars define rather than experience the reality of things-in-the-world. In the essay, he suggests that painters sense the life that resides in objects and recognize forces that create sensuous reverberations in the eye and mind of a person who experiences the world. Merleau-Ponty says that the painter..."sees what inadequacies keep the world from being a painting...and sees painting as an answer to all these inadequacies" (1964:25). Painting, then, is a metaphor for seeing and thinking in the world—a seeing-thinking from the depths of one's being. As the painter Paul Klee put it: "In the forest I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me. I was there, listening...I think the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not penetrate it...I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps to break out" (Charbonnier 1959, cited by Merleau-Ponty 1964:31).

Given his fine-tuned phenomenological sensibilities, it is not surprising that at the beginning of Michael Jackson's extraordinary new book, In Sierra Leone, the author's epigraph is a passage from Walter Benjamin, writing about Paul Klee, the painter, lest we forget, who sometimes felt that the trees in the forest were looking at him.

A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

(Frontispiece)

Does this complex image capture the contradictory dynamics of the angel of history in West Africa, In Sierra Leone? Can the angel awaken the dead In Sierra Leone and make whole what the atrocities of civil war have torn asunder? Are human beings resilient enough to use the flotsam and jetsam of a horrific past to reconstruct their lives?

Jackson's answer to these existential questions is a resounding, "yes!" His book is, in fact, a powerful reaffirmation of Sierra Leonean social resilience. But there is more, for Jackson's lyrical passages also speak to the complex resilience of the human spirit. The storm winds evoked by Klee's painting—and through Jackson's narratives—carry us forward to the future and yet, like the angel in the painting, the force of the storm immobilizes us. Careened toward the future, but not knowing what to expect, we look to the past for reassurance and find little solace. Thus propelled, we are not fully prepared for the horrors of the present; and yet, somehow, someway, we find the strength to live through the sometimes painful, sometimes tragic experiences of change in the here and now.

In Jackson's In Sierra Leone, this...