The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion

by Aminatta Forna

Overview

A stunning new collection of essays from the award-winning author of Happiness, The Window Seat explores border crossings both literal and philosophical, our relationship with the natural world, and the stories that we tell ourselves.

Aminatta Forna is one of our most important literary voices, and her novels have won the Windham Campbell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. In this elegantly rendered and wide-ranging collection of new and previously published essays, Forna writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human world.

Movement is a constant here. In the title piece, “The Window Seat,” she reveals the unexpected enchantments of commercial air travel. In “Obama and the Renaissance Generation,” she documents how, despite the narrative of Obama’s exceptionalism, his father, like her own, was one of a generation of gifted young Africans who came to the United Kingdom and the United States for education and were expected to build their home countries anew after colonialism. In “The Last Vet,” time spent shadowing Dr. Jalloh, the only veterinarian in Sierra Leone, as he works with the street dogs of Freetown, becomes a meditation on what a society’s treatment of animals tells us about its principles. In “Crossroads,” she examines race in America from an African perspective, and in “Power Walking” she describes what it means to walk in the world in a Black woman’s body and in “The Watch” she explores the raptures of sleep and sleeplessness the world over.

Deeply meditative and written with a wry humor, The Window Seat confirms that Forna is a vital voice in international letters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802159861
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	05/17/2022
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,117,153
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Aminatta Forna is also the author of the novels Happiness, Ancestor Stones, The Memory of Love, and The Hired Man, as well as the memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water. Forna's books have been translated into sixteen languages. Her essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, and Vogue. She is currently Director and Lannan Foundation Chair of Poetics at Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.

Table of Contents

The Window Seat 1

Ice 21

Obama and the Renaissance Generation 25

Santigi 47

1979 55

Technicals 79

Crossroads 83

In Timbuktu 109

Hame 111

How Stories Get Told 141

The Last Vet 143

The Watch 169

Power Walking 189

What If You Gave an Inauguration and 207

Nobody Came?

Bruno 213

The Peanut Butter Thief 227

Wilder Things 231

Author's Note 259

Acknowledgments 261

Editorial Reviews

02/22/2021

Novelist Forna (Happiness) explores notions of place, identity, and movement in this bracing collection. In vignettes and long-form essays, she describes traveling through Mali; England, where she went to school; Sierra Leone, where she spent much of her childhood; and the U.S. In the title essay, Forna recalls flying as an unaccompanied minor, with maternal stewardesses and a heroic captain: “For six hours we lived inside the perfect patriarchy.” “Obama and the Renaissance Generation” captures the difference between an African and an American perspective on Barack Obama as she traces her own father’s history. The essays flit from childhood to adulthood and from place to place, which can at times be disorienting—the shorter essays, such as “Ice,” a three-page meditation on an ice skating performance, offer a welcome change of pace. Forna is a razor sharp prose stylist (airplanes, for example, are “like a galloping draught horse that, through sheer determination, somehow succeeds in clearing the oncoming fence”), and her attention to detail moves the collection forward, as in “Technicals,” in which she examines emotional responses to war vehicle model names: “Defender. Patrol. These names invoke violence, force.” Full of careful observations, Forna’s meditations hit the mark. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Window Seat:

“[Forna’s] at her best when coaxing hard-won wisdom out of everyday details . . . Forna glides smoothly among memoir, travel writing, history, and literary studies. The prose is intimate and conversational… but the feeling of chatting over coffee belies the attention she gives to each sentence . . . A grand sweep of peoples and cultures united by a longing for what home really means.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Novelist Forna (Happiness) explores notions of place, identity, and movement in this bracing collection . . . Forna is a razor sharp prose stylist . . . and her attention to detail moves the collection forward . . . Full of careful observations, Forna’s meditations hit the mark.” —Publishers Weekly

“A dynamic tapestry of resonant topics...Forna retains a lightness of touch and depth of insight in her writing, alongside perceptible senses of both self-awareness and humor...[an] evocative, provocative essay collection.” —The Boston Globe

“A compelling essayist … her voice direct, lucid, and fearless.”—Claire Messud, Harper’s

“Intelligent, curious and broad.”—Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

“Thought provoking collection.” — AudioFile

"The Window Seat is gutsy, funny, risky and wise, full of dazzling late night insight, in-the-middle-of-everything epiphanies, moments of sheer honesty blooming into gut truths, in a clear-eyed voice that makes you listen in wonder.” —Marlon James, winner of the 2015 Booker Prize

“These essays, ranging across continents and time, so broad in their themes and so deep in their perceptions, are essential reading, combining Aminatta Forna’s great gifts as a storyteller and her razor-sharp analytical skills.” —Salman Rushdie

“If you had to take the middle seat and sit next to anyone with the window seat, Aminatta Forna would be the perfect stranger to talk to. Wise, witty, sensitive, and sophisticated—about travel, politics, globalization, writing, and the nuances of the human heart and soul—Forna has lived a life of which many of us would be envious. Her essays illuminate that life but ours as well, making us understand the many ways we are connected, even if we only see each other from a distance.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Committed

“The essays in this magnificent collection are exhilarating and expansive meditations on traveling—and living—in places so consequential and historically significant that they cannot be measured simply by distance. Who are we far from home? What becomes of those who return, and what do we owe to those who stay behind? These are just a few of the questions that Forna raises in this sharply rendered, personal collection. But she doesn’t stop there: by the end, this book invites a reckoning with our rightful place on this earth. Generous in spirit and breathtakingly intelligent, The Window Seat reminds us why Forna is one of our best writers working today.” —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

“These brilliant essays, reflections from a boundary-crossing life, are urgently needed in America right now. Forna writes to us from a world where democracies are in the process of being made and unmade, where 'nation-building is no simple task,' where lives are lost to civil war. With expert storytelling, she provides a vivid context for our politics and culture. The Window Seat is a wise guidebook for how to be at home in the world.” —Eula Biss, author of Having and Being Had

“From the Shetlands to Sierra Leone, from Teheran to Georgetown, Aminatta Forna has been everywhere, paid attention to everything and everyone. She is brilliant at thinking in narration and can thus tell superb stories about her life and experience. She contains multitudes, and her essays are populated with those multitudes, dense with unforgettable details and landscapes, amazing people and animals, astonishing histories. The Window Seat is dazzling.” —Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Lazarus Project

“The Window Seat is a journey. Imagine yourself on a scenic, thought-provoking flight around the world—from the UK to New Zealand, Sierra Leone to the USA—in this candid exploration of nostalgia for a lost past and the trappings of home. These essays are altogether a sharp, elegant meditation on childhood, adulthood, race, migration, and itinerancy. Astutely balancing illuminating research with intimate personal anecdotes, Forna expertly suffuses the book with her insights on everything from politics and insomnia to food insecurity and biodiversity.” —Chinelo Okparanta, author of Under the Udala Trees

“Forna’s essays are simultaneously introspective and political, big-hearted and hard-edged, adventurous and wise. She can write about race and war and family and loss and everything in between, and she has the words to match her extraordinary experience. This book enlarged my world.” —Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of Songs for the Flames

From the Publisher

2021-03-03
The award-winning Sierra Leonean novelist looks at her life through multiple lenses.

“I love to fly….I love the drama of the takeoff. The improbability of the whole endeavor.” With this endearing admission, Forna inaugurates her first nonfiction work since The Devil That Danced on the Water (2002), which chronicled her search for the truth about her father’s execution in Sierra Leone in 1974. This collection ranges across topics as varied as colonialism, childhood memories, and chimpanzees. Her gaze takes in big events like Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the Trump inauguration, but she’s at her best when coaxing hard-won wisdom out of everyday details. “Sleep is a political issue,” she declares in an essay about insomnia, noting how 18th-century Parisians would smash streetlamps to protest the conditions of sleep forced on them by the government. Forna glides smoothly among memoir, travel writing, history, and literary studies. The prose is intimate and conversational—“I do not have resting bitch face”—but the feeling of chatting over coffee belies the attention she gives to each sentence. Travel is ubiquitous in the text. Marveling at her mother’s experiences—she “has lived in nineteen countries on five continents….In between she has visited dozens more, taking in new countries year by year”—the author can barely go a page without mentioning a vacation to Thailand, a road trip through Death Valley, a winter in Tehran, and, of course, many trips to Sierra Leone. Everything is defined by roots, from Lebanese tourists to a Sri Lankan former banker to Croatian Nikola Tesla to the Kenyan ancestry of Barack Obama. Of the migrant population in her mother’s ancestral Shetland Islands, Forna writes: “The question ‘Where do you come from?’ is not followed by the spoken or silent ‘originally,’ but the word ‘now.’ ” Caught between worlds, Forna prefers to see them all from above, no doubt while on the plane to her next destination.

A grand sweep of peoples and cultures united by a longing for what home really means.

Kirkus Reviews