“We must learn new ways,” she continued. “When you plant a seed, does it stay a seed? No! It grows. And if you give it water and manure, does it not grow fast? Why do you want us to stay like seeds?” (Prologue)
A calf cannot stay a calf forever, but if it sucks greedily, it will tear away its mother’s udder. Look around. See the order in Atala’s creation. Each plant and animal has its place and follows its own path. Maize grows best in the rainy season but groundnut grows during the dry season because it does not need much water. When you do not follow the path, you will end up lost in the bush.” (Prologue)
“Men are like elephant grass in a vegetable garden,” the council leader’s voice became shrill. “If you do not root it out, it will suck up all the water and sunlight and the seedlings will die.” (Prologue)
“Knowledge is like a baobab tree. No one individual can embrace it. Villagers sit under their tree according to the shade it casts. Only a fool like you cuts down the baobab in her village and replaces it with the one from a neighboring village. If the tree does not die, the shade it casts changes and the village changes forever.” (Prologue)
“What you call knowledge are things of the senses, those things which you see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. They are like the tools of the farmer. When you own a hoe, seedlings, and a plot of land, does that make you a farmer? No! It is only in the understanding of weeding, planting, watering, and harvesting, in seeing one’s hard work bear fruit and feed others that you become a farmer. Journey into the self. See what fruit it bears. Only then will you know who you are. That knowledge will be your true home.” (Prologue)
“She who has never travelled thinks that her mother is the only good cook in the world.” (Chapter 1)
“New ways are like strange food. Eat it in small doses. Otherwise, you will spend much time in the latrine.” (Chapter 1)
“A wise woman walks through the high grass where the elephant has already trod, so she does not get soaked with dew. So the path does not die, do not follow footprints in the sand.” (Chapter 1)
“Finaba ground her fists into the sun-baked earth. Now she will not belong, will not be able to dance and sing with the other initiates, will not have people in the village cheer and tell her that she is beautiful and brave. If her age mates ever allow her into their circle, she will always be the outsider, the one who will not be trusted, and the one never fully to understand what makes and binds women together.” (Chapter 1)
“You are not a drifter and troublemaker like Kumba Kargbo. The knowledge and spirit of our people lie deep inside you. The night before you were born, the ancestors appeared to me and said they were sending one of their own to show our people the way because we had strayed from the path. I told your father and mother, and 4 they agreed we should call you Finaba, the storyteller.”
(Chapter 1)
“Life is like the bird-scaring rope. The big and little ropes work together to protect the farm from the birds.” (Chapter 1)
“Life is when people work together. Alone you are just an animal. So, do not cut the rope. Do you hear me? Never cut the rope!” (Chapter 1)
“You see, even a comfortable bed hurts when you stay in it for too long. We have to get up and leave Talaba. Staying will hurt all of us.” (Chapter 1)
“No one will make you feel like an outsider because you’re not an initiate. Here, you’ll be the same as those girls. Here, you belong.” (Chapter 3)
“But Freetown took away as quickly as it gave. A little less than a year after their arrival, Amadu died of tetanus poisoning. He had sliced his heel on a rusty corrugated iron sheet on the building site.” (Chapter 3)
“That evening, Chernor, his head bandaged, accompanied his father Ali to report the incident to Pa. Heddle. He was sitting in his favorite chair by his Grundig radio and record player, pained by indigestion from hastily eating a heaping plate of rice and cassava leaves and by his indignation at having to answer to a civil service boss he described as “an illiterate nincompoop.” (Chapter 3)
“Fina was a beautiful Fulamusu the day she stepped foot on the CC campus. Hers was not the kind that stunned and made one stop, look, and go “wow”! Her beauty was courteous. It invited one to contemplate, even study, it like a work of art: the bronze skin tone, highlighted by charcoal-black, braided hair and slender, elegant neck; the smooth, broad forehead, the thick contoured eyelashes that shaded her lowered brown eyes, the pointed nose, and the fleshy round lips. A slight overbite was her only quirkiness.” (Chapter 4)
They had taken to sending Fina into “exile,” a campus euphemism for frequent and prolonged use of a room for sex by one roommate that forced the other roommate to spend extended periods either in nearby dorm rooms or in the library. The exile wreaked havoc on Fina’s study schedule. She protested the inconvenience. Memuna promised they would curtail their love-making to “just one round.” (Chapter 4)
Fina reached for the doorknob but stopped, recalling a lesson she learned as a little girl: “Mama,” she told Nabou one morning back in Talaba, “Uncle shouted and hit Aunty last night. Why was he beating her?”
“Those were not your aunt and uncle,” Nabou barked. “Those were Old Papa Wind and his one-legged wife searching for their long-lost daughter, Wohu. At night, they travel around the world, calling out her name:
“‘Wohu…., Wohu…’ old Mama Wind cries out.
“‘Wohu, Wohu,’ old Papa Wind bellows. When you hear screams at night, cover your ears and do not go outside. If you do, they will think you are their daughter and take you away from me.”
Fina remembered this story, pulled her hand back from the doorknob, and walked away, but not before she heard Memuna’s sobbing punctuated by more slaps and blows. She walked around the campus feeling guilty for not doing something—banging on the door, calling out Memuna’s name—to stop the beating. But, a few hours later, she felt a little less guilty when she opened the dorm room door and the hallway light revealed Memuna and Simeon in a naked embrace on the cot-size bed.
But this portrait of reconciliation brought her neither peace of mind nor sleep. Try as she might to rationalize her inaction, she kept returning to the conclusion that she and her mother were as much a part of the violence of the night as was the sleeping couple.
(Chapter 4)
“Tears stung her eyes, but she knew feeling sorry for herself would achieve nothing. She simply had to work hard and earn enough money to insulate her family from the discrimination and hostility she was now witnessing. The imperative to focus on her academic work, to graduate with a first-or second-division degree, to be an example to her sister and other Fula women, took center stage that night.” (Chapter 4)
“Identifying her place of birth now became fraught with anxiety.” (Chapter 6)
“Laughter, shared values and experiences are the wellspring of friendship.” (Chapter 6)
“It had the element of shock the suitors must have felt at the moment Odysseus revealed his true identity; it had the irony Ezeulu and Umuaro must have realized to learn that Oduche, the son of the Chief Priest of Ulu, had imprisoned the sacred Royal Python; but it was the realization that she could not escape what had been ordained by the Ancestors and Baramusu that reverberated through her.” (Chapter 6)
“Kunte Kinte don’t need that juju mess. He got that big stick. He works magic with it and sistas go crazy!” (Chapter 7)
“Periodically, her mind wandered back home—to Baramusu’s injunction never to cut the rope, to her father’s desecration of the fafei, and to Isa who had barely completed secondary school. Invariably, these thoughts led to resolutions—to return home and to set up Isa in business” (Chapter 7)
“And in what better country could two immigrants start a romance than in America, the land where people learn from birth that their dreams and hopes are not wild imaginings but the blueprints of their tomorrows?” (Chapter 8)
“FGM kills a woman’s sexuality,” he began. “You don’t care about that? How can a man enjoy himself if his woman does not?”
“That’s what it boils down to for you men, isn’t it?” Fina chuckled. “The ones who support circumcision do so to control women’s sexuality. The ones who oppose it do so because they want the woman to be able to give them pleasure.”
(Chapter 9)
“Holding onto the past is like walking on a treadmill.” (Chapter 9)
“After their mother died, Fina was on the verge of scaling back the size and frequency of her support when two things happened in quick succession. The civil war in the country worsened, causing the mining company at which Isa worked to shut down its operations. This left Isa without a job. She was also a new mother. Far from scaling back, Fina’s level of support increased, for she had, in fact, inherited another family: newborn Sarata, her niece and godchild, and Hassan, Isa’s live-in boyfriend.”
(Chapter 10)
“The dream of the initiation night had revived the sense of incompleteness she had felt most of her life. Its timing left her apprehensive about the future.”
(Chapter 11)
“You have to leave some things behind because there’s something new and better ahead, me! I’ve got to let go of some things because I’ve got something better too, you!” He smiled.” (Chapter 11)
“Baramusu, my grandmother, she cursed me. I can hear her voice right now.”
(Chapter 15)
“I love Baramusu, but looking back, she took advantage of my youthful desire to belong, to not be the odd one out. At your house, your parents, especially your mom, made me feel like the odd one out. And don’t deny it. At CC, the so-called citadel of learning, I was the Fula girl. Had to endure all those stupid Fulamusu jokes and comments about our teeth. Yeah, some people tried to hide their real feelings, but every so often that sense of superiority and lack of respect would slip out. I didn’t choose to be a Fula or a foster sister!”
“Oh, Fina, forget the past. It’s just upsetting you.”
“Why shouldn’t I be upset about the past? Is it because I mentioned your mom that you want me to shut up? You’re no different from white people who want to sweep slavery under the carpet. It happened in the past, so let’s leave it there. That way you and them can be comfortable and get on with your lives. Well, you don’t have to listen to me. Go away and be comfortable. I’ll talk to myself. I’ll listen to me.”
. . .
“After college, I wanted so badly to get out of Sierra Leone to come and live here, where it wouldn’t matter what ethnic group I belonged to, whether I was a foster child, or that I was a woman.”
. . .
“Boy, did I get that one wrong! I just replaced the circles on my back with ones that say black, African, and foreign—no, no alien. Black and alien. Is this what life is all about? Running away from place to place trying to fit in, to belong?”
(Chapter 15)
“Give your strength to others and draw from theirs.” (Chapter 17)
“Millions of people live every day with inconveniences. Are they any less happy? My life here is much more convenient than it could ever be back home, yet I don’t feel fulfilled. Something’s missing.” (Chapter 17)
“One’s present could begin unraveling from a stitch sewn years earlier.” (Chapter 19)
“The important thing was how one responded to changes rather than how loud one moaned about them.” (Chapter 19)
“Immediate attention to a problem, before it worsened, was just as good a remedy as time.” (Chapter 19)
“‘A bird that does not leave its nest to find food for fear it might lose its way back home will surely starve to death. The food it finds from flying into the unknown is what gives it the nourishment and strength to find its way home.’” (Chapter 20)
“It was a homecoming she needed to make, tethered as she was by the rope. This time, she walked through the front door of the house in which she grew up in Freetown; this time she stood erect in front of a stooping, graying man and woman and pressed a small envelope with cash into the woman’s hands.” (Chapter 23)
Then she had rocked and bobbed in the minivan on the potholed road to Falaba and walked, with a guide, an overgrown footpath back to the place where the little hamlet of Talaba once stood. She looked around for the compound where it had all started. But all she could see was the scorched earth—charred pieces of timber and metal; crushed and rusted aluminum cans, cooking pots and pans; torn and bloodstained clothes, odd sandals and gaping shoes; a thinned and browned forest submitting to her gaze; a rice farm disfigured by craters and trenches, yielding a harvest of skeletons, overturned trucks, their wheels in the air, and other broken and rusted machines of war. The remnants of a place where homes once stood and lives flourished.
All of a sudden the place had come alive. In the craters, trenches, and burnt-out armored personnel carriers, she heard shrieks and saw her age-mates fighting each other, child soldiers fighting adult soldiers, men fighting women, brothers fighting sisters with bayonets, machetes, knives, blades, and jagged bottles. She heard buzzsaws and saw the trees and branches of the forest being cut by men eager for profit. She saw the crushed and impaled bodies of the villagers. Then there was noiselessness, like that in cemetery.
Her heart raced and her hopes soared when she saw a segment of rope. She stooped and pulled and pulled. But with each pull, the slimy, dirt-encrusted segment disintegrated into small pieces. She could not retrieve the rope. There was no place and no one to atone to for her father’s desecration. No Talaba to come back to. But she would not give up. She decided to search for Baramusu.
(Chapter 23)
“Bravery is for the young. In an old man it is foolish pride.” (Chapter 23)
“Our people say whatever name a child is given has bearing on what the child becomes. We are not buk-buk people who pick a name like it was a pebble on the ground. To name is to be given a destiny.” (Chapter 23)
“Life is when we work together.” (Chapter 23)
“A wounded child invariably grows up to be a wounded adult.” (Chapter 23)
“Love is like a diamond. Rough and ugly when you first find it. But if you clean and polish it, you will find beauty inside.” (Chapter 24)
“When he and Glen turned back to wave one last time before they disappeared into the airplane, he saw the mother of his daughter, the woman with whom he had danced those calypso songs, and he knew he would come back, for this was a path he could not let die.” (Chapter 24)
- Chapter by Chapter Summary
- Chapter 1 to 5 Summary of Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die
- Chapter 6 to 10 Summary of Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die
- Chapter 11 to 15 Summary of Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die
- Chapter 16 to 20 Summary of Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die
- Chapter 21 to 24 Summary of Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die
- Memorable Quotes in Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die
- Themes in Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die
- Plot Summary and Setting of Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die
- Characters in Pede Hollist’s So the Path Does Not Die
