Description

Protagonist Fina�s search for happiness and belonging begins on the night of her aborted circumcision and continues through her teenage years in Freetown, Sierra Leone�s capital; her twenties in the Washington Metropolitan Area; and ends with her return to Sierra Leone to work as an advocate for war-traumatized children. The novel explores the problems she encounters in each setting against the backdrop of the tensions, ambiguities, and fragmentation of the stranger/immigrant condition and the characters� struggles to clarify their ideas about �home� and �abroad.� Fina�s circumcision gets significant, though not sensational, play in the different attitudes toward the practice between her and her fianc� Cammy, a Trinidadian urologist. The differences complicate their relationship at a time when skeletons from their pasts threaten their impending marriage. The stories of Fina�s friend, African-American Aman and her fianc�, Nigerian Bayo; of Edna (Fina�s foster sister) and her husband Kizzy; and of Mawaf, a war-traumatized teen, unfold in subplots that merge with the main plot and overarching theme of belonging as characters straddle �home� and �abroad� places.