This morning I received an email from a poet in Sierra Leone, cc’d were 6 additional names, a handful of the most celebrated poets in this war-torn west African country. A year and a half ago I was in Sierra Leone, talking metaphors and scratching down words with former boy soldiers, young girl mothers, village elders, and poets. Since then, our own off-site wars continue, lives are lost, and we are all working every day from whichever corner of the world we happen to have landed in, to be within our definition of home.

During my time in Sierra Leone, the writers organized a poetry night in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city. Before the reading begins we are all sitting around a table drinking bottled water and eating ground nut cake. It is hot, the generator is whirring, the fan is spinning, and except for the heat and surrounding blown out buildings, it could be Portland, a jarring familiarity of gathered poets, speaking in images, hanging on words, weighing thought.

It has been a night of sad metaphors, Gibril says, about halfway through. He is moderating the reading, he himself an activist poet.  There are about 20 or so of us, members of Sierra Leone’s literary community, poets and professors at Farough Bay College and University in Freetown, some educated overseas, thoughtful individuals who survived the war, but of course were affected as everyone here was in some way, and have their voice, as do I, through words.

One of the poems read is called What is a Rebel?  The men walking the streets of Freetown or living in villages, who committed unspeakable atrocities in this vicious ten year war, they speak the same tongue, he writes, they laugh, their skin it is the same. It is an unanswerable question, how one human can act beyond the boundaries of heart.  In some ways this question haunts, because without definition, there can be no recognition, and without identification of root reasons and human character there is perhaps always a tension that it could all erupt again with those walking among us.

The buffer against this re-occurrence is the tangible sense and open acknowledgement on a public level that everyone lost and suffered terribly in this war. The rebels, the Kamajor fighters, the government forces all killed and looted and kidnapped and raped. All were sons of mothers, all lost family and friends. It was a Muslim woman who was one of the key people in opening talks with the rebels near the end of the war. The rebels spoke to her, gave her letters to bring to their mothers, she read them on the radio (for which she was threatened and seen as a rebel sympathizer—which she wasn’t).  But she was able to make the point: that these are mother’s children.

And children they were. Rebel forces in particular kidnapped children, pumped them daily full of ‘magic’ (drugs), smeared palm oil on their young bodies and told them it would protect them against bullets, handed them guns, gave them bush names to empower them, showed them Rambo movies over and over and over, killed in front of them and told them if they didn’t do it as well, it would be their lives next. If you are 10 years old and your entire family has just been killed in front of you, what exactly do you do?  It is not a choice, there were no choices in this war for the children who became the rebels who became the killers.

Another man writes about his sister Fatima, who died during a genital mutilation procedure, an initiation still widely performed here, especially in the rural villages. It was told that one of the leading presidential candidates in Sierra Leone’s election last year paid families to have 1,000 girls have the procedure and used this as a campaign platform, as one of his accomplishments. At the time, this man was the vice president of the country.

Another poet tells one of his stories from the war. About three years into the war, he was studying at the university in Madison, Wisconsin, and the war was raging back home in Sierra Leone. So he travels back to Africa to bring his mother and sisters from their rural village to relative safety (at the time…the rebels reached Freetown near the end of the war) in Freetown. His father had died years earlier of natural causes. When he lands, his cousin tells him that his family was killed by the rebels. They had not known how to tell him while he was in the US, fearing how he would react alone. Tom is an actor and when he reads his poems they sprout legs and wings and hearts and souls and fly to each of us on the strength of strung words.

We talk about forgiveness. One of the most compelling thoughts is that forgiveness is a social act. A poet says, you cannot have closure, forgiveness is not for you to give. In the western sense, ‘forgiveness’ implies total closure; forgiveness is a continuous act, it cannot be forced, it is a simple mechanism for moving through your life, he says…

Another poet says, “We live to learn…what I want to do is tell all the stories between the poems.”  I talk about my belief that poems are each end of a bridge, and the way we live our lives fills the space from one point or person to the other.  One poet says, “To forget [about the war,] would be an insult on humanity.  To heal we must remember, we need to know what the scars are for.”

They continue, “If you’re a writer, you write until you’re heard.”

“Our writing comes from an understanding of the songs of our mothers.”

They each give me piles of poems to take, printed off, scribbled corrections and crossed out words, self published, photocopied and stapled books, and an anthology they compiled about three years ago. I tell them I will do what I can to get it published in the US. How, I’m not sure, but I will try.

At the end of the evening Gibril closes with thoughts about why we write, about this country…he says, “We have many sad stories here. But we Sierra Leoneans, we write them beautifully.”

And I think that captures the undercurrent of Sierra Leone. Every single person is carrying memory and working daily to carve out a new definition of home.  There is not enough of anything—food, water, beds, doctors, cool breeze or time to reconcile the level of loss. Several lifetimes would not be enough. Yet each day, the morning brings light, people get up, start the fire, boil water, make rice, wash clothes, braid hair and start all over again. They keep going, and if that’s not poetry, I don’t know what is.