Book Review
Oseloka Obaze*
Saturday, September 30, 2006
For the Love of Anthony
A mother's search for peace after the London Bombings
Marie Fatayi-Williams
ISBN: 0340910186;
Hodder And Stoughton, London, 2006, pp212; Price £12.99
Available at:
www.Madaboutbook.com
Marie Fatayi-Williams’ For the Love of Anthony -A mother's search for peace after the London Bombings, a biographical elegy for her son begins inoffensively and innocently too, on the note of a commonplace assumption made daily by many people. Such assumption is based on faith, but also on our general acceptance as normal, our unawareness of what a blessed and nondescript day may have in stock for us. So innocuously, she states: “Thursday 7 July 2005. None of us knows what a new day will bring.”
Yet, as the book’s storyline unfolds into its graphic fullness, one becomes aware that this is a soul-searing chronicle of innocent lives that were wasted when they unwittingly intersect at a tragic junction with the lethal intent and impact of terrorism. The outcome only speaks to our irreversibly altered world, in which seeking political ends through terrorism has become a constant.
As in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “all hell broke loose” in London on the morning of 7 July 2005 when calculated mayhem was visited on innocent and unsuspecting commuters. Many lives were lost. Many people were injured. And many more lives were perpetually scared and altered, including that of Marie Fatayi-Williams, which in turn triggered this book of grief-stricken recount.
For the Love of Anthony, is without doubt, an instinctive response and reverberation of an act of terrorism that took place on a mid-summer morning that will for eternity be commonly referred to as the London bombings. But it is more than the customary painful expressions of a grieving parent. Doubtlessly, personal tragedy impacts on individuals in different ways. But the death of an offspring is unimaginable, certainly for those who have never had the misfortune of experiencing it. However, the death of a lone male child in the African context is a family tragedy of epic proportion. And that was the fate of the Fatayi-Williams family.
Also, as the great novelist Ernest Hemingway once advised, “Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.” It seems that Marie Fatayi-Williams did exactly that, in translating her pain to the book, For the Love of Anthony.
Writing about a tragedy and death is meant to bring closure, especially where other alternatives seem farfetched. Furthermore, the Dickensonian notion that “after great pain, a formal feeling comes”, may also be pertinent here, as this book fits well into that customary form as well as into Daniel Gabriel Rosseti’s enduring question: “What shall assuage the unforgotten pain and teach the unforgetful to forget?” Clearly, baring one’s soul is a panacea of sorts.
The death of 26-year Anthony Fatayi-Williams in the bombings of 7th July 2005, while not unique in anyway, is one of those mysteries of life, in which fate is blamed or alternatively, we conclude that it was the inexplicable act of bad luck and being at the wrong place at the wrong time. But this does not in anyway mitigate the pain or the senselessness that terrorist-induced violence can heap on an innocent and unsuspecting bystander.
Mrs. Fatayi-Williams recounts with great pain and glaring candor, her ordeal and her personal struggle to come to grips with the confounding realities of the horrendous, tragic, and senseless death of her son. Experiencing the death of a child is like no other feeling. But it is the warmth and compassion with she is embraced, by family, friends and strangers alike, as well as the cold, slow reticence and near-indifference of those in the London halls of bureaucracy, including a two-paragraph letter from Prime Minster Blair that gives balance and flourish to her story. The bringing together in common grief, by a twist cruel fate and inconsiderate violence, a bunch of disparate strangers offer an added foundation on which she has based many of her yet unanswered questions.
Despite her obviously profound pain, Mrs. Fatayi-Williams renders in a extremely elegant, flowing and riveting style the unfolding saga; her trepidation about her son who was in London on that fateful day and whom she could not reach from faraway Nigeria. Her mother’s instinct and ESP –extra sensory perception—kicks in well before she has any indication there was something unwell with her son. Ultimately, her son, Anthony, becomes a missing person until he is eventually confirmed dead. If the death of her son tore at her heart, the callous and frustrating way, which as she recalls, UK bureaucrats handled her anguish and problems of the other afflicted families figuratively shredded her heart. She recounts it all in vivid and picturesque details, but with gut-wrenching pain so palpable that this reader could equally feel his stomach tightening in formed knots. Such is the raw and engrossing power of her recount of events and even timelines before, during, and after the bombings.
One other eminent strand that is stark in this book is the author’s religiosity and spirituality. Her fate in God comes across fully and indeed, might have been at such a trying moment her only true solace. But then, such callous terrorist bombings, which are frequently predicated on the contentious notion that they form part of a religiously sanctioned jihad, begs the question as to whether they really serve the cause of God. Mrs. Fatayi-Williams herself phrased it poignantly in her remarkable and momentous speech on 11 July 2005 in Tavistock Square, London:
Now New York, now Madrid, now London. There has been a widespread slaughter of innocent people. There have been streams of tears, innocent tears. There have been rivers of blood, innocent blood. Death in the morning, people going to find their livelihood: death in the noontime on the highways and streets. . They are not warriors. Which cause has been served? Certainly not the cause of God, not the cause of Allah because God Almighty only gives life and is full of mercy….
For the Love of Anthony is not perchance a happenstance. Though brought about by an accident, it is a story that needed to be told, which Fatayi-Williams had indeed prefaced when she went public at Tavistock Square four days after the London bombings. It is a moving, yet enervating story that will enfold any reader, especially those who might have under any circumstance lost a child. But this book is equally; venerating of the elusive peace we seek daily, healing for those in anguish, and would be enriching for any reader regardless of their doctrinal or religious beliefs.
Anthony Fatayi-Williams could have been anyone’s son. But to his mother, he was special; “Anthony had always been ‘my gift of Gold’”. He was also special as one of fifty-two persons so senselessly, tragically and against all odds, plucked by violent death, in London - a city that was conceivably, the most guarded, policed, monitored and protected city in the world. In London, Anthony was the proverbial “needle in a haystack”. The odds should have been in his favor, but there were not. Such disconcerting reality juxtaposed with other elements to advance her anguish. She admits that in those capping and maddening moments, the kind that follows every terrorist attack, she was hardly aware “that those seconds were the very last of an era?” And they were, for her and her dear Anthony.
For the Love of Anthony is a book one is compelled to read, if for nothing else, then for its reaffirmation that we live in an increasingly dangerous and unsheltered world; that we are all at risk and potentially victims, who like Anthony, could be gobbled into the unpredictable maelstrom of politically motivated and religiously induced violence. The benumbing reality, is that what happened to Anthony could happen to us and ours, anytime, anywhere, while attending to our daily chores and earthly concerns. But Mrs. Fatayi-Williams actuality, which could be applicable to anyone in her circumstance, is perhaps best captured by a line in the letter of condolence she received from Prince Charles and his wife Camilla;
[I] can begin to understand something of the emptiness and confusion that invades one’s whole being when our entire world is shattered in such a cruel and ugly and devastating way….
Other letters from far and near also speaks to the shared pain and the anguish of not just one family, but of our humanity, especially when bound by common pain.
Reading trough this book, one senses that Mrs. Fatayi-Williams might not have been so incensed by the loss on her son as she was by the bureaucratic efforts to create a sense of normality in Britain after the event. She devotes the entire Chapter 13 to recognizing the other innocent and diverse lives wasted along with Anthony’s. She opens that chapter by noting, “there will be no public inquiry into the terrorist atrocity that claimed Anthony’s life, killed fifty-one other innocent people, wounded 700 more and left London in paralysis and shock”.
In response, she states categorically:
To me, this simply is not fair. It’s playing politics with people’s lives. Put plainly, that is wrong... We cannot bring our loved ones back, and that hurts us dreadfully. Let no others hurt like us. Let London learn. Let’s make sure that there is change. Let’s know that after these lives that have been lost, there will not be others.
To drive home the frustration and contradictions foisted on the families of the bereaved by London bureaucrats, Mrs. Fatayi-Williams draws on two parallel acts by the bureaucrats, which in the face of everything seems most heinous and inhumane. When her daughter Lauretta asked London officials what was going to become of the wreckage of Number 30 Bus in which her brother died, she was told, “It will be crushed”. Mrs. Fatayi-Williams noted that “the bus could have been put in the British Museum, where people could gaze at it an say, ‘Ah… There’s 7/7.” She notes also, quite in contrast to the fate of Number 30 Bus, that when in January 2006, a whale beached and eventually died after swimming up the Thames, “its carcass went to the Natural History Museum.
Of these disparate treatments and line of action she remarked:
The whale is going to be immortalized. The bus is going to be crushed. It is symbolic, but maybe the government does not want us to be reminded of what it symbolizes. Maybe its being crushed for the same reason that there will be no full scale inquiry.
Despite the sadness that led to this book and the sadness that is well documented throughout, the book ends on an uplifting note. Three points emanate from Chapter 17 that are noteworthy. From the spiritual angle, Mrs. Fatayi-Williams concludes that “God did hear my prayers, and answered them in his way. He allowed Anthony to go in this way to show the world the futility of terrorism.”
The futility of terrorism accepted, a key point this book seemed unwilling to contemplate, and understandably so, is why people still engage or resort to terrorism -- the sort that rocked London in July 2005. Is it a matter of those who make peaceful change impossible making violent change inevitable, or is there more to it? Clearly, terrorism has its root causes and it seems clear that so long as they are unaddressed, we will have to contend with terrorist acts.
In closing, Marie Fatayi-Williams notes that despite the lure towards negative thoughts, “slowly I feel the coolness of joyful recollections and cherished memories of good times... Grief gives way to faith, hope and love.” She gives the final noteworthy points to her dear Anthony. As if speaking from beyond, Anthony had presciently posted a trailer to his personal resume on the Internet. It speaks volumes: “Our greatest glory consists not, in never failing, but in rising every time we fall”.
This reviewer is reminded of President Theodore Roosevelt’s observation, that “death is always and under all circumstances a tragedy, for if it is not, then it means that life itself has become one”. Yes indeed, with For the Love of Anthony, Marie Fatayi-Williams has elected not to make life itself a tragedy. She has risen above the fray of her son’s tragic death, and emerged from her valley of despair to climb to the mountaintop, with love and forgiveness in her heart. Such rare human qualities are truly ennobling. It also foretells that there is still a modicum of hope for our humanity!
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*Mr. Oseloka Obaze, an aspiring writer, is a founding member of the Kwenu.com Book Review Forum, which is dedicated to the promotion of books with Igbo and Afrocentric themes. He is also a supporting Member of the African Writers Endowment (AWE). From 1999 to 2005 he served on the editorial board of INYEAKA, the journal of Songhai Charities, Inc., a New Jersey community-based charity founded and run by Nigerians based in New York Tri-state area in the United States, first as its founding Publisher and later as the Editor-At-Large. He is also on the editorial board of The Amaka Gazette, the journal of the Christ the King College, Onitsha Alumni Association in America. His collection of poems, “Regarscent Past: A Collection of Poems” was among the top three finalists in the poetry category in the African Writers Endowment Publishing Grant Program for 2004. His novel, “Happy Eulogy” will be published in the spring of 2007. He reviews books and arts strictly as a hobby.