The Memory of Love

"It’s not so much about the events, it’s about the personal stories from the events. I’ve always been about the personal in my own stories, which is why I tend not to write political fiction. If I am writing about politics it’s always in the background, it’s always about how it’s affecting my characters at a micro level. That is why I picked Memory of Love . I actually realized, in retrospect, that I chose three books about war . I know I have this fascination with war because even my book, Only This Once Are You Immaculate, is set in a time of war, there are wars happening, and the landscape is a war landscape. I was thinking about it last night, and I realized that it might have something to do with my own experience of war, which was not very direct. I was born three years before the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe began, and my parents were quite active in it. My father was helping the guerrilla fighters, who were considered terrorists. My memory of war is when my parents were arrested. I remember these plainclothes policemen coming to the house and taking my mother away. They planted a letter on her and said, ‘Oh, you’ve got this letter from xxx.’ I was there when she was taken away. It was a very dark time after that, I remember a lot of darkness. I was with my aunts and my siblings and we were always in the dark in the house, for some reason. I remember going to see my mother and taking her food when she was in the stockade. I could see her from the car, and they were behind this fence. So I think maybe, somewhere along the line, I have had a passive trauma from the war. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Even when I did my Master’s, my dissertation was on the role of the military in African politics. War is so rife in Africa, there’s always a war somewhere. For me, it’s just trying to rationalize why it happens and, when it happens, what are the effects? Just the fact of taking lives. It’s like a fear: I have this fear of being in an actual war situation, even though what I know of it is always on the periphery. Maybe this is why personal stories really, really interest me, because this is the real effect of war, not so much soldiers on the battlefield, but how everybody else is affected by it. I like a close look, putting lives under a microscope and really examining what is happening with people within that space. And that’s exactly what Memory of Love does. It’s about Adrian Lockhart who is a psychologist in Sierra Leone and talking to Elias Cole, who is telling his story. Adrian also befriends a doctor. The doctor is trying to heal people physically affected by the war, whereas Adrian is trying to deal with those people affected psychologically. So it encompasses both aspects of the effects of war. Ultimately it was quite a personal story of Elias Cole, who I didn’t like very much, who he was in the telling of his story. But the way the story sort of unravels…I was particularly intrigued by the mother’s state of ‘fugue’, where she shuts off and loses her sense of space and time. That was really interesting for me, because I’m also interested in psychology , what makes people who they are and how they behave, and what affects them. Yes. It’s the unravelling of things that affect all the people in the story. You don’t just hear, ‘Oh, this happened, and this happened, and this happened.’ It’s a very close study of what is happening with the person and then a revelation of why that is happening. I thought that was masterfully done, it was very well-crafted. There was always something at the end of the character’s story that you discovered, and made you think, ‘Wow’. I thought it was a very strong piece of storytelling."