The Guardian Review

'Citizen pain'
Review by Maya Jaggi
5 March 2005

Maya Jaggi on Delia Jarrett-Macauley's haunting attempt to come to terms with the tragedy of child soldiers, Moses, Citizen & Me.

Seven years ago Delia Jarrett-Macauley published The Life of Una Marson 1906-65, a landmark biography of the Jamaican feminist who became the BBC's first black programme maker. In her debut novel, Jarrett-Macauley again breaks ground with a delicate and brave, if over-ambitious, fictional treatment of child soldiers in the aftermath of a west African civil war.

Julia, a Londoner in her 30s, is called "home" to Sierra Leone to comfort her estranged uncle Moses, whose wife Adele was killed before the peacekeepers arrived. Julia finds her orphaned cousin, Citizen, perched on the balustrade of his grandfather Moses's wooden house, "munching on some tobacco like a Cuban plantation worker more than twice his age". She discovers, as Moses had, that Citizen was responsible for Adele's death, her decomposing corpse unearthed in a swamp, several bullets in her back. Under instruction from "the big soldier man", he had killed his own grandmother. Citizen is eight.

"Was there any bridge back to normal childhood?" asks Julia, as pressure grows on her to take her cousin back to England. Most people, the neighbour Anita says, "will not even let a child like Citizen near their house after what he's done ... Who wants a child who only knows how to kill? What kind of nightmare is that?" Yet Julia's dilemma echoes an earlier conflict with her uncle, when she refused to return to her ancestral Sierra Leone to teach.

As Julia moves between memories of Moses's visits to London in the 1970s, and dreams inspired by a visit to a rehabilitation camp for former child soldiers, the novel probes appalling questions about violence perpetrated by children, and the extent of society's responsibilities towards them. While some voices argue for rehabilitation, others brand and abandon them as evil.

After Julia imagines her cousin being engulfed in flames in his bedroom, the novel strides further into a dream world, in which the child soldiers of the terrorising "number-one-burn-house unit" tell their own stories. "Corporal Kalashnikov" is being weaned off the tea laced with marijuana and gunpowder that dulled his fear. A teenage mother Sally nurses the infant born of her abuse after she lost sight of her parents for a moment, and a "hand grabbed her waist and pulled her into the war".

The stricken Moses is a photographer, and the novel alludes, through the work of local 19th-century photographers JP Decker, Alfonso Lisk-Carew and WS Johnson, to the ironies of diamond-laden Freetown, its freedom and wealth squandered in war. Prints of "African ladies in bustles, leaning against Grecian urns" betray no sign of the impending "utter degradation", the "shameless scenes from which we always want to shield our eyes". Yet in another of the novel's surreal gestures, a spectral small boy with a gun corrupts Moses's official photographs of the country's leaders.

The prose is limpid and restrained, as conversation poignantly skirts the unspeakable, and the mundane jostles with the horrific. As Julia arrives bearing rice and teabags, her jeep passes a "line of handsome young men bisected by a line of others whose limbs had been chopped off". A persistent monkey stands by a car "like a valet", while a child in the throes of fear and remembrance "swayed around in circles as though trying to stir a liquid in his belly".

The ambition of this first novel, to shape a possible redemption through imagination and art, is only partially realised. The transition from actual to dream worlds seems contrived, while the transformative power of the play exists only as an idea. Yet as a deftly sensitive exploration of a tormented generation, and a family's dilemma, it is a haunting piece of fiction.

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