Forna’s novel seeks an end to human, wildlife conflicts
I’m a man who gets things done. Whatever it takes. Any fool knows the answer.”
“Well, then, you’re a fool.”
Things heated up to an altercation one morning as emotions ran foxy at the Big Show programme in the London City radio, over the vexing matter of marauding foxes in the city. The exchange is between a conservationist and animal behaviourist, Jean Turane, who is in the studio and the city’s Mayor, Don Cob, who is calling in.
He was pricked to call by some of Jean’s assertions which he interpreted to be pro-fox. Like other enraged callers, primed so by an equally biased radio host, the mayor fulminated, waxing ad hominem, at the guest.
The drama is playing out in Aminatta Forner’s fourth novel, Happiness, which explores inter and intra-animal-human conflicts and coexistence.
Jean is an American researcher currently studying urban foxes in London thought by residents as a menacing phenomenon to their peaceful and serene lives with their children and pets. The Mayor, on the other hand, is leading a populist anti-fox sentiment across the city and has proposed drastic measures to annihilate the pests dismissing and disdaining expert views.
But Jean thinks that fox culling won’t guarantee happiness to the residents. She advises Londoners to just let their foxes be and nature to balance out things between the animals and human beings. Killing them en masse will only trigger a re-population instinct and they will fill the (earth) streets again.
“These are animals, they are conditioned to survive. Start to kill them and they’ll hyper-breed, bigger litters, sometimes two... You’ll have more than the number you started with, ... If you leave foxes alone they will pretty much leave you alone,” she counsels.
War trauma
Happiness is also about war waged by man against man which Forna explores through another key character, Attila Asare, a Ghanaian psychiatrist who specialises in war trauma. He is in London to attend a psychiatry conference and give a keynote address. Well, he also has a side errand to look for a niece who has gone quiet for quite long.
Aminatta, born in Scotland, UK, to a Sierra Leonean father and Scottish mother, is no stranger to violent conflicts. She grew up in Sierra Leone amid the political turmoil of the 1970s that culminated in the execution of her father, Mohammed Forna, in 1975 by President Siaka Stevens’s government.
The cover of Happiness by Aminatta Forna.
In the book, Jean and Attila crash into each other literally, then figuratively, at the Waterloo Bridge, as the former chases a fox and the latter wades his way through the crowd to a theatre. Turns out that the bridge would play a significant role in bringing together not just two land masses in London, but symbolically different people and cultures from around the world as well.
When two humans, one an animal scientist from America and the other, a human scientist from Africa, it is not just two humans from two continents that meet on the bridge. The human and the animal too meet, as both study the behavioural patterns of their subjects.
The book is about the coexistence between humans and nature and what better way to demonstrate than through experts who have delved into the lives and traits of both sides? Besides, Jean is divorced while Attila is widowed and the bridge encounter breeds some chemistry that soon brews some love between them.
Her mastery of animal instinct and behaviour comes in handy when she helps Atila to look for his niece’s missing son. She mobilises her network of fox watchers from among immigrants, mainly from war-torn West African countries to trace the boy.
Attila has been to nearly every war zones in the world offering psychiatric support to war victims. And in his “filthy work of clearing up after other people’s wars” he has seen both the physical and the psychological ravages of war. He steps off planes to be driven through streets of shelled buildings devoid of people and colour. At one time in Bosnia, he interacts with the commander of a Kenyan peace-keeping force in the country.
“I specialise in trauma among civilian populations... Teams of us go in, some to count the dead, others to trace the living and return them to where they should be or send them elsewhere. I work with the survivors,” he states.
The professor is widely known for his publications among them ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Non-Combatant populations’ and ‘Misdiagnosis of Schizophrenia in Refugee and Immigrant Populations’.
In the latter book, Attila examines the tendency among clinicians in Western countries to over-diagnose schizophrenia in certain immigrant groups. He finds this to be a misdiagnosis of PTSD.
But then Happiness shows us more problems and situations that society misdiagnoses almost every day. The interview in The Big Show is symptomatic of how broadcast media hosts, waxing “sanctimonious” and “sarcastic” in their shows often misdiagnose issues and misdirect sentiment to the wrong conclusions.
Police too make the wrong diagnosis of events based on their prurient prejudices. When Jean goes to report the illegal fox hunting at a police station, the cop taking her statement jumps to the conclusion that she has come to report an assault on her with a possible sexual dimension.
“What happened then?
“Nothing.”
“I thought you came to report an assault case?”
And the cop lost interest in the matter and shuffled off, perhaps seeing that there would be no juicy story to regale his colleagues with. BY DAILY NATION




Post a Comment