Dangerous Proximity: What I Saw and Why I Had to Write It

"Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously....Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”

― Edwidge Danticat.

In Breath, Eyes, Memory, Haitian American author, Danticat explores the relationship between women and the nationalist agenda of the state - generations of women "test" their daughters, by penetrating their vaginas with a finger to confirm their virginity, they "become enforcers," or proxies, of the state's.

What struck me most was her distance—writing from New York, yet able to name truths that many living inside that reality could not say out loud. Did she have the privilege but not the right?

That made me pause.

I remember landing at Lungi Airport in Sierra Leone and seeing a South African mercenary working tirelessly with staff to make things smooth for passengers. Right then, I knew I had to write. I had to share something. I saw what no one else would see quite like I did. I had proximity, and I had distance. That combination gave me clarity—and responsibility.

In beach bars, I watched women—some barely more than girls—trying to survive in the margins. Selling themselves to NGO workers, mercenaries, soldiers. No one spoke of it. But I saw the ache in their eyes. It meant something to me. And I needed it to mean something to the world. It was bigger than me.

It felt dangerous. Who was I to write this? I left Sierra Leone at 15. I came back to the Ibiza of West Africa for the holidays. Did I have the right? What would people say—about writing on prostitution, on foreign soldiers, on our market women?

Forever adding to the negative African construct.

2 Sierra Leone women smiling wearing colourful traditional clothes. Katimu (right) at the Aberdeen Women’s Centre, Freetown © UNFPA Sierra Leone 2018/Angelique Reid

When the BBC called me to speak on Have Your Say. I held back. People warned me: Charles Taylor has plants in Sierra Leone. Say the wrong thing, and your family could pay. So I spoke—like a good little girl but I wanted to scream:

How does a man escape an American jail, become president, and then tear my country apart?

I didn’t say it then. But I wrote The Palm Oil Stain. I created what needed to exist.

Now? I don’t care who gets offended.

A writer’s job is to demonstrate different perspectives.

Because if you leave it to the masses they will all swarm over their own perspective and destroy us all with a collective blindness.