Readers who appreciate survival stories like Hatchet by Gary Paulsen will likely enjoy Flying Through Water by Mamle Wolo. Set in Tovime village in Ghana, Wolo’s novel shares the adventures of Sena who attends junior high, plays football, farms with his family, and dreams of escaping the toil and toll of poverty. He envisions “driving a sports car very day to a high school where students wore whatever they wanted, and talked to teachers however they liked, and fought and sang and shouted and danced in the corridors and flirted and kissed and played sports and never seemed to do any schoolwork” (48).
Sena’s reality living along the Volta River is a far cry from that dream. Work is unrelenting and hard, and those in power are callous and apparently without regard for what is fair. For example, teachers beat the youth for their tardiness, even though they are aware that the students aren’t “late out of laziness or what they called I-don’t-care-ism” (7). When Sena laments about unfairness and the way the world seems intent on bringing down those who least deserve it, his grandfather tells him: “You have to make you own fair in this world” (61).
Hoping to improve the conditions of his family and to lessen the burden of a third mouth to feed, Sena is lured by Jack of Diamonds into work away from his family. As it turns out, this man with flashy stories and fancy promises is a link in a human trafficking chain, and Sena’s life becomes so unthinkably cruel that he wishes for death to escape. Under the influence of his master, he is a prisoner, a member of “enslaved fisher children, stripped of our history to shells of our former selves, . . . abandoned by the rest of the world to live out a bleak existence on the water” (179).
As Wolo tells Sena’s story, she infuses her tale with the protagonist’s resilient spirit and shares various lessons. One of those imparts the importance of stories and storytelling. Togbe tells Sena: “Stories take us where our legs can’t go and show us what our eyes can’t see” (27). Stories also preserve history and share wisdom.
Likewise, animals serve as teachers. Sena learns not only that animals can lead us to magical places but that there is always a price for tampering with nature. Alone on an island, Sena realizes, “In nature’s heart, I felt liberated and endowed with a splendor beyond anything humans could ever purchase. What greater wealth was there in this world than freedom?” (218).
Related to this topic is human greed and the price of progress. So often, Sena feels trapped, “trapped by the dam, by progress, by poverty, by human selfishness. . . . Nobody had ever asked us if we wanted to pay the price for progress” (265).
Wolo’s advice about death is also poignant and powerful: “You will learn to find me in all that we have loved together. . . . The different worlds time calls us to inhabit need not keep us apart” (103).
Given his experiences, Sena reflects: “I thought of all those trapped and hunted—myself, Togbe and his family, the manatee, the trafficked fisher boys and girls. I thought of our brutal work, and of all the times I’d seen flickers of humanity, so quickly extinguished” (267). When he gets off the remote island on which he is stranded, Sena vows to do whatever it takes to get involved in whatever work helps to free trapped creatures, both human and animal.
- Donna