The Big Issue

'House Rulers'
Review by Helen Davies (extract)
14 February 2005

Delia Jarrett-Macauley's accomplished debut, Moses, Citizen and Me tackles the scars left by the civil war in Sierra Leone through the story of Julia, who returns to the country to find her eight-year-old cousin is a former child soldier and has 439K cut into his back. The true horror of what Citizen did in the madness of the war has left him mute, and we learn that his hands stopped growing when he pulled the trigger and killed his grandmother.

Lucidly written, the simple horror of people's lives comes trickling out over cups of stewed tea and bubbling pots of rice. Using dreamlike sequences and real-time drama, Julia follows Citizen into the Gola forest to a makeshift camp near where Bemba G, a storyteller-cum-shamen, is rehabilitating 35 child soldiers using a translation of Julius Caesar.

The pursuit of a happiness proves to be a hard-won necessity.

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