According to editor Mike Butscher, Sierra Leone’s capital city Freetown had been known as “the Athens of West Africa,” famed for its universities and a lively literary scene. After the devastation of the recent civil war, writers in Sierra Leone are working to reinvigorate cultural expression and movement. Sierra Leone PEN sponsors a biannual writers’ award and maintains a library and resource centre that offers facilities for research, internet access, computer training and meetings. They organise writing workshops with local and overseas writers, and organise writing programmes in schools.

So that’s what it’s all in aid of — what about the stories themselves?

‘Book of Voices’ is neither worthy, earnest or depressing, but a collection of vibrant stories that range in genre and mood, style, time and place as they explore the power of words and imagination to change the world.

Contributions come from Ireland, the UK, USA, India, Israel as well as Sierra Leone. The internationalism of this collection is also reflected in the lives of some individual authors. Brian James was born in Nigeria, lived in England, the Gambia and Sierra Leone. Menashe Bennarroch was born in Morocco and lives in Israel.

It’s therefore fitting that Gary Quinn’s ‘Electric Fence’ details the absurdity — and damage — of borders with crackling humour.“Did you ever piss on an electric fence? It’s not a good way to go,” is the narrator’s opening question. A farmer finds that the border between Northern Ireland and the republic has been has drawn across his land. “So we live in the south and over there is the north and we can go there if we don’t bring our cows but if our cows go over there we can’t go and bring them back. We have to get a certificate.”

In ‘Polenta’ by Marc Paoletti, people struggle with physical and mental scars of poverty. A market trader lives with a faceful of scars from when he was splashed with lard in a soap factory and he was refused treatment; the wandering mind of young Lorenzo’s mother’s is the result of near-death from malaria contracted in steerage en route to America. During an abortive errand for his faltering mother, Lorenzo learns that there are many ways to remember and to reinvent. It is also a memorable story for the reader as well with its details: the taste and smell of corn and milk and cheese in polenta, the spice-laden fragrances inside a little Italian shop.

‘Sally Moore’ by Yolande Sorores brings back squirm-inducing memories of oppressive schooldays as a successful writer looks back on painful days as an often-punished and derided pupil. When she recreates them in her writing she gets an unexpected response from the former perpetrator of her misery.

There’s another school story with Brian James’ ‘On the Road to Godiva.’ Clearly, schooldays are the stuff of nightmares around the world! Imaginative and adventurous Yema is sent to boarding school by strict parents who find her too troublesome. The realism of the boarding school set-up is effectively twisted into a menacing and bizarre world where hairy demons serve the girls ‘wine’ in the dining halls. Yema is guided by a being in the shape of a boy. He shows her visions of a beautiful city that could be Freetown, and a Freetown where people are bound in chains and tortured by the serving demons: “the real Freetown, as it is behind the mask of normalcy that you know.”

After such an effective build-up, the author’s use of a certain fictional get-out clause was a bit of a let-down. But I had to chuckle when the fiendish head girl accusesYema of ”spending some quality time with that shape-shifting nuisance.”

In Andrew Hook’s ‘Beyond Each Blue Horizon’ a group of students in a city surrounded by mountains disappear one by one. There are echoes of the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina and Chile, yet there is a sense that the story’s international student household could be located anywhere. Even here. Eventually, there is more than people disappearing.

In Jeffrey Forde’s ‘Boatman’s Holiday’ the guy who ferries the dead to their fates across the River Styx wants a holiday. Hell in this story is an efficiently managed domain where damned souls are called ‘tourists.’ There is no escape from hell. But a tourist who flees the pit tells Charon about an escape in hell. The tourist gives Charon a map showing an island in the River Lethe that he created by writing about it: “God made the world with words.” And “Man made God with words.” Thus inspired, Charon sets out in his boat for a proper holiday.

The book finishes appropriately with ‘The Flame,’ a beautiful fable by Tanith Lee. An imprisoned storyteller who is denied access to any kind of writing material finds other ways to tell her tales as butterflies, moths and flower petals waft into the little window in her cell.

These are just some highlights in a very strong collection. Ultimately, these stories leave you with a conviction of hope and belief in what we are doing as writers and readers. Highly recommended.

Rosanne Rabinowitz’s published fictions include stories in The Third Alternative, Visionary Tongue and Roadworks, plus contributions to The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers and Deep Ten anthologies. Her work is currently showcased in Midnight Street 4 (www/midnightstreet.co.uk), and a story is due to appear in Café Ole: Too Hot to Handle (Independent Persons Press). She has also written reviews for TTA, Interzone and of course, www.laurahird.com. Rosanne lives in South London with a rather demanding 17-year-old cat. Sometimes she works as a freelance sub-editor; other forms of toil have included stints as a life model, oral history researcher, part-time mental health worker and full-time dole claimer. A graduate of the Sheffield Hallam MA in Writing, Rosanne has completed one novel and is working on a second.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.