Letters to the Editor
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I wish
I could post anonymously. If I could post anonymously, I would have the courage to expose a faux-memoir scandal. Because my judgement is addled by flu-like symptoms and boredom, I am going to speak anyway. The person who confided in me knows me for an unstable blabbermouth, so I'll probably be fulfilling his expectations.
There is no "Sloan Crosley," daughter of privilege and pretty good diction. She is in almost every respect a fiction. Yes, the true author has eaten potatoes, and has walked barefoot, but beyond those details, and the common bonds of humanity, there is no similarity to note. The author of this excerpt, and the rest of the "Sloan Crosley" corpus, is Kwame Adesa, former child-soldier, former refugee, probable native of Burkino Faso. He was introduced to English through parsing the operation manual for a grenade launcher, at 12, under conditions where failure would entail a severe beating and loss of food privileges. His first choice of a second language was French, but the beetles had eaten that portion of the manual. Had the beetles continued, he would be writing to us in Korean. Or not at all. Demobilized at 17, he spent the next four years in camps, where he refined his English skills with the intermittent assistance of Red Cross workers and Peace Corp volunteers, one of whom had an uncle in publishing.
Asked (by me, in the anteroom of a Berlin diskotek) why he doesn't write about his personal experiences, Adesa replied, "I prefer worlds that are prettier than the world I knew. I love lexicons where the terms, "Safety" "Danger" and "Loss" enjoy nuanced associations. You know, Jane Austin? Collette? Yes, many readers find these situations where "Happiness" means retaining your limbs so... compelling. The drama of keeping the vital organs out of the beaks of vultures. The very very very bad things, about which there is no question. But what may be said at the end of such a tale? Only, "God did not choose to strike me with his hammer." Or, "God struck me, but I survived." I said those sentences years ago. Now I want to write. Would you like another beer? Or shall we dance?"
Fictively yours,