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Stars, arrows and question marks
The test of a good book for me is when I remember it after I put it down. Plenty of tales and accounts are funny, moving or bracing at the moment. But rare is the story that lingers. That changes the way you think, because its themes, motifs, argument, or approach rattle around your brain for a time—unwilling to be displaced by the next diversion. I want to tell you about such a book.
Spellbound is written by Karen Palmer and subtitled Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps. Over the course of a couple of hundred pages, the writer ably guides the reader through a place they will likely never see, likely never experience. With her eyes wide open and equipped only with a notebook and a powerful determination to keep an open mind, Palmer reveals a people shaped by superstition, hobbled by poverty and poor education. People regularly tested by the unforgiving sub-Saharan environment. Yet, Palmer’s picture is of the resilience of humanity, of life clinging to a hard landscape. It is the story of proud and welcoming people who are nevertheless a bit weary of explaining to others. The unsettling sense emerges that we are all more products of superstition than we might imagine or contend otherwise.
Spellbound opens with a frantic account of one woman’s fate which is about to be determined by the direction—beak up or down— in which a freshly slain chicken finally falls to the earth. The unfolding scene is as maddening as it is disconcerting. The village has gathered. Women and men, including the woman’s husband, revel in the spectacle. Children dance with excitement. The smell of grain alcohol wafts through the air. The reader feels the heat. The pungent aroma of the assembled sweating bodies. Dust fills the nostrils as accusations spread through the crowd with increasing intensity and fury. The effect is dizzying. Revolting. Yet compelling.
Palmer’s story settles into a finely crafted account of the forces that buffet the lives in these communities, and that can produce such violent cruelty upon the vulnerable, mostly women. For as Palmer explains, a special power attributed to a man makes him extraordinary, whereas a woman attributed with special powers is a witch—to be feared, banished or worse. Given the inevitable and frankly heartbreaking outcomes, it is unsurprising such accusations tend to arise from the prosaic human motivators of jealousy, rivalry and revenge.
Palmer trained as a journalist and worked for a Toronto daily for several years. She is a sharp and unflinching observer of detail— ever mindful that the reader is reliant upon her reporting for full and balanced window upon this world. Yet this is a confounding place. There is no easy narrative. Her notes are illustrated with vivid stars, arrows and question marks.
She describes one encounter with a woman near collapse from hunger.
“We’ll eat anything but shit,” writes Palmer quoting the “rail-thin” woman.
“Her hunger wasn’t the product of famine, drought or war. It was her everyday existence, the sad consequence of an old woman exiled in a place where survival depended on a web of able-bodied family members.”
In a few short sentences, a three-dimensional human appears from the page—of broken and withered flesh, shackled by circumstances, not of her making. Of cruelty made personal.
Palmer is a beautiful writer. She has the rare facility to turn a phrase from prose to something approaching poetry.
Introducing the reader to a new character, Palmer observes:
“Asara Azindu’s curves told the story of her success. A huge woman with a slightly lazy right eye and knees weakened by her appetite, there was no greater symbol of her wealth than her prized figure.”
Ultimately, Spellbound is an intensely human story, packed with the contradictions, frailties and randomness that form every life—but more so for those who live mostly outdoors in this harsh place. Her subjects are exposed and vulnerable. Palmer’s writing, too, reveals a sympathetic vulnerability.
In doing so, the story often takes a comical twist, gently lifting the reader from the hardness of the experience of the women at the heart of the story. In one scene, Palmer recounts spending “lazy Sunday afternoons” shelling peanuts and sharing stories with them. How curious inquiries about the writer escalate to become urgent exhortations that she must “try to marry.”
Attempting to understand the context of one woman’s exile, Palmer arranges an interview with the woman, her 12-year-old son and an uncle. What follows is a wonderfully chaotic exchange in which the reporter’s questions are responded to by ever more confusing and contradictory statements, timelines and narratives.
“It was frustrating, and there were moments when it became clear that the women were lying, telling me half-truths or deliberately leaving out details that might have been considered incriminating. There was nothing to be done but keep those vivid stars and arrows, go back, ask more questions and seek more clarity, even if sometimes I felt I was being led down a rabbit hole.”
There are images, phrases and impressions in this book that swirl in my consciousness months after putting it down. I am not a book reviewer nor is this a book review. I only know I enjoyed this story. Perhaps you will too.
Spellbound is available at County libraries, through Indigo or Amazon. Karen Palmer lives and works in Prince Edward County.
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