For so long now have the subdued, the depressed and the voiceless wallowed into silence, accepting the painful and the unjust. Tears keep rolling down pale cheeks, on haggard faces, as enslaved women and mutilated children cower in tightest despair. Is it tradition or culture that justifies these deeds or has religion no means of deterring such injustice? This collection of stories reveals the horrible and hair-raising accounts of true experiences that only befit a crime fiction movie or a fantasy. Amie Sillah has taken a bold step and has become the first woman to use words as a weapon as she makes us discover the stunning ability of the silenced to triumph over adversity. The eleven stories have swept through pertinent themes such as early marriage, the caste system, betrayals, complexity in polygamy, difficult relationships with in-laws and mutilations meted out to young innocent girls. These issues have haunted our communities and people for years, and the intricacy continues to lie in the misconceptions and misunderstandings they have engendered. It is an act of courage for Amie Sillah to write and release such vital secrets that many continue to consider taboo to question. Questioning is provoking a fit of the fantods. To borrow from Yvonne Vera, in this collection, the text ‘is granted its intimacy, its privacy, its creation of a world, its proposals, its individual characters [and] its suspension of disbelief’. A pace is set by the emboldened Sillah to deal with such complex issues by opening the cupboard and exposing the skeletons. A new era of Gambian women’s literature is emerging.
