196 Books: Guinea

 My Heart Will Cross This Ocean: My Story, My Son, My Amadou by Kadiatou Diallo

Here's Guinea, in West Africa:

Here's the summary:

Descended from West African kings and healers, raised in the turbulence of Guinea in the 1960s, Kadiatou Diallo was married off at the age of thirteen and bore her first child when she was sixteen. Twenty-three years later, that child—a gentle, innocent young man named Amadou Diallo—was gunned down without cause on the streets of New York City. Now Kadi Diallo tells the astonishing, inspiring story of her life, her loss, and the defiant strength she has always found within.

It was Kadi Diallo’s voice that captivated the public when she came to America to defend her slain son, and it is that same voice—candid, wise, and generous—that fills the pages of this extraordinary book. Kadi reaches back to her earliest memories of growing up in Guinea, the daughter of a strict man who was thwarted by the relics of the French colonial system. Raised in a world in which age-old religious and cultural rituals were disappearing before the onslaught of modernity, Kadi saw her own childhood end abruptly at age thirteen when her father literally gave her away in marriage. Kadi prayed for death, but instead she found herself plunged into a baffling new life—the life of a second wife in a strange household in a distant country, and soon afterwards the teenage mother of a sweet-natured son.

Yet somehow, Kadi managed not only to survive but to flourish. Despite the rigid strictures of African-Islamic culture, she attended school and later started a successful business of her own. She eventually divorced and remarried and lived for eight years in Bangkok. Back in Guinea, she learned that her oldest child Amadou had been shot in New York City in a case of racial profiling.

Kadi read with outrage the American newspaper description of her son as “an unarmed West African street vendor.” “Nothing,” she writes, “could be more distant from the truth.” Now, with great pride and searing love, Kadi Diallo finally tells the truth about herself and her son.

My Heart Will Cross This Ocean is an extraordinary book—a girl’s story of desire and innocence, a wife’s story of defiance, a mother’s story of unbearable loss, and a woman’s story of unshakable strength and love.

Whew. What a book. After I finished it this morning, I had to call my mom so I could talk to someone about it. It was beautiful and intriguing and heart wrenching. Honestly I was hooked after just reading the prologue. And this is going to be a really long post because there's so much to talk about, and I highlighted so many passages. But I felt like I should be highlighting more; the entire book felt important. Maybe that's because you know the ending before you start, but I actually like spoilers so it was a nice change. Alright, let's get into it. 

Let's start with colonialism and modernity vs. tradition. 

These two go together: "The French had announced that each family must choose one son to go to the government's European school..." It goes on to say how the French (much like happened with the Native Americans here) wanted to "teach" the natives the modern ways. Next. "Before the French left, the emptied everything from bank accounts to file cabinets. They burned records, and took nearly all of the country's engineers and agriculture experts. ... The last of the planes flew out over crops still burning from the fires they had started." It's just...the audacity of colonialists. We're going to go into this country, take over, make them conform to our ways, squeeze everything we can out of the country, then fuck them all over when we leave.  

Now we have modernity vs. tradition/religion.

"If I wanted an educated wife, I would marry one from the city. I married a girl from the village on purpose." DAMN THE MAN. "Before the scholars entered Guinea with the word of Mohammed, the Fulah women picked their husbands. ... Then, after days or even months have gone by...she could declare a change of heart." "The men told the women what to think and then thought little of what the women said. The men preached the Koran to the women but did not let them read it." Why does it seem like so many religions came in and just oppressed women? Can we bring back the matriarchy please? I think we'd have more empathy. 

These ones don't necessarily go together, but they're just about Kadi growing up. 

"There was a field outside the health ward and in this field were strewn the discarded utensils and supplies from the ward: small needles, bandages, cups, tubes with blood, plastic bags, pillows, bigger needles, a couple of file cabinets, and mostly, old bottles of penicillin." WHAT?! I was just so grossed out by this. 

When it came to the female circumcision, Kadi's father originally said he didn't want her to get it done. That times were changing and that tradition needed to go. Her mother said she would comply with his wishes, then took her daughter to get it while the dad was away. It made me so sad. 

Kadi talks about a rally for their president, Sekou Toure, holding a rally at the local school. "A few months later, they started hanging people on the football field." Supposedly they were people trying to overthrow the government. The President then tells the populace that, "for the good of Guinea, he had arrested the country's scholars and thinkers and put them in a military compound in the center of Conakry, Camp Boiro." There was a lot of panic and fear. But, what really surprised me based on many of the other books I've read, "In a few weeks, the worst of the crisis seemed to have passed." And things seemed to just kind of settle back into the norm. 

Next we have married life and motherhood. 

So one day a relative comes to the house and decides he wants to marry Kadi. Who is fucking THIRTEEN. Her dad asks her if she wants to and she tells him if he wants her to she will and, neither of them really want it, but for some asinine reason they both go along with it. Kadi's family makes her new husband promise that he'll send her to school and not make her a young mother, but it turns out a 28(ish) year old man who decides he wants a second wife who's 13 is an asshole. So she's pregnant at 15. And she doesn't have her mom or her family and her husband was out of the country and nobody told this poor girl anything about sex education or childbirth! "'How is this baby going to come out?' I asked Saikou. He laughed and said that when it was time I would know, and that nature would take care of everything." WELL ISN'T THAT HELPFUL. So Amadou is born to this poor 16 child who was robbed of the opportunities she had and who wasn't given any information on how to take care of her baby. But damn it, this girl is a rock star. She ends up running a successful business, living in multiple countries, taking care of her children, and finally getting rid of that dickhead. And Amadou was a gentle soul, kind and wise. He was left-handed and stuttered and of course his wanker father has an issue with both of these and sees them as weaknesses. Because he sucks. 

And then Amadou decided he wanted to make a life in New York. I know I came at this book in light of all the things happening in the US today, but reading the description, I just assumed his murderers were cops. But I'm skipping ahead. It made me sad that when Kadi and Amadou said goodbye, it wasn't emotional. "I did not say I love you. Nor did he. We did not hug. It was not our way." I couldn't imagine not repeatedly hugging my family and saying I love you, especially if I was moving to a different continent. But he goes and moves in with some relatives on his dad's side, and they have a pretty good life together. "Theirs was a communion rooted in a sense of triumph for having made it to New York, constant fatigue from their long working hours, and a lingering, gray sadness for the people they had left behind." It talked about how they shared everything and took care of each other, and it was a really warm feeling. But, there was also some foreshadowing; "'In America,' Amadou said, 'the police know how to handle things.'" 

So now we get to the crux of the story. It's maybe 1 or 2 in the morning, Amadou has had a long day, he dozed on the couch, and then went out to the front porch. He sees a car. "The car moved past Amadou, by about four houses, and then it stopped and began to back up." Four men got out of the car in front of Amadou. "The first two men each fired sixteen bullets, emptying their weapons. The man on the sidewalk fired four times, the man on the street, five. Forty-one shots in all. Nineteen bullets struck Amadou." "The shots kept coming while Amadou was falling and even after he was down." "The four police officers, members of the New York City Police Department's elite Street Crimes Unit, were taken away, complaining of ringing in their ears." 

Let that sink in. Four police officers put nineteen bullets into a man and then complained about the sound in their ears. 

But of course, the cops wanted to paint the victim as a villain. They tore apart his room, grilled his friends about whether he used drugs, had enemies or a gun. They wanted anything to make it okay. They said they thought his wallet was a gun. 

After that, it's a media storm. Kadi goes to New York and eventually Amadou's body is brought back to Guinea for burial. When they land all the important people are there. Kadi says, "Modest Amadou had returned a hero." But how is that heroic? Getting gunned down for no reason. I'm not sure you can even call him a martyr. It's just a tragedy. And in a final fuck you, "I waited at Saikou's house with Nene and Laoura, prohibited by custom from attending my son's funeral." Just...just so messed up. 

During all this, many famous lawyers and advocates rush to Kadi's side. They even secure Johnnie Cochran (of OJ Simpson fame) for their top counsel. She paints him as a pompous jerk, which kind of made me laugh. The officers were charged, but were found not guilty. Which is surprising because it's so obvious, but not at all surprising. 

Again, I read this book in light of what's going on in the US today. I plan on doing some more digging on whether or not anything ever happened to those officers. There will probably only be a few people that read this post, but I want them to be named. Edward McMellon. Sean Carroll. Kenneth Boss. Richard Murphy. They are murderers. And I would be more than willing to bet Amadou wasn't the only one. 

Please, please, please, if you have the slightest interest, read this book. We need to know these stories so we can stop them in the future.