Reparative transnationalism: The friction and fiction of remembering in Sierra Leone

Abstract

Analysis of the “productive frictions” that emerge when cosmopolitan paradigms are implemented in local contexts may nuance accounts of how and when memory travels, and when and why it stalls, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the cross-border travels of memory. I explore the frictions of truth-telling in Sierra Leone as articulated in ethnographic analyses of local engagement with the normative paradigm of public remembering and truth-telling promoted by the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and mediated in Aminatta Forna’s post-conflict novel, The Memory of Love. While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission disappointed victims’ expectations for meaningful transnational relationships, the novel performs and models what I call reparative transnationalism. Through the intimate but public form of literature it imagines entangled transnational futures that work toward the promise of transnational belonging promoted in much writing on transnational memory.