Where There's Hope

by Elizabeth A. Smart

  I’m curious to know if Diane—who is so strong herself—attributed that strength to the fact that she had a strong mother. “Do you think people are born strong,” I ask, “or do you think it’s something that develops inside them as they grow? Or do you think it’s something that they just have to develop in the moment?”

  Diane hesitates for a moment and then says thoughtfully, “I think it’s a combination. I think that a lot has to do with the way you were educated. That’s why another important thing to give your child is health, and make them understand that they have to be their own best friend, because anything can happen, and they may only have themselves.”

  I ask Diane to tell me more about a moment she mentions in her memoir. She was traveling with her son and her mother when the airplane hit some turbulence. Diane says she wasn’t really scared, but she had a momentary pang of unsettled nerves. She looked to her son and then to her mother, and the thought entered her mind: Whose hand do I hold? My big strong son’s or my frail and aged mother’s?

  “You turn to your mother’s hand instead of your son’s hand.”

  “Yes, that said it all,” she says. “I love that. I remember that, because my son was big and strong, and my mother was at her most fragile, back from the hospital, tiny and all of that, but it is her hand that gave me strength, yes. I love that too, because it was so eloquent, and it explained so much. I don’t think she knew why I held her hand at the time, but it was so clear in my mind. I remember thinking, Okay, where do I go for this strength?”

  “When your mother died, was it hard for you?”

  Diane surprises me when she answers, “No, not at all. I barely cried, because she gave me all she could give me. I don’t know. Sometimes I miss her, but she’s there—her strength, she gave it all to me. There was nothing unresolved. Although it’s after she died that I discovered how much of a huge influence she was for me and how much she was actually my role model. While she was my mother, and especially since she was so strong, you don’t accept it. Her presence and her existence gave me a lot of strength.”

  Thinking of my own mother and what she means to me and of the strength Diane’s mother instilled in her, I ask, “Have you ever been surprised by your own strength?”

  “In Belgium, in my country, when I was growing up,” says Diane, “everybody looked like you. They were pale, beautiful, with blond straight hair, and I was this little dark, curly-haired girl, and I looked like nobody. It’s not that I liked what I looked like at all. I was fascinated. My mother had a big vanity in her bedroom, and I would spend hours looking at myself and making faces to myself. Once again, it’s not that I liked what I looked like, but I liked that I had full control. Like if I would smile, she would smile. If I make a face, she would make a face. Somehow it’s from that moment on that I realized that one has control over oneself, and total control over oneself, and therefore you can make yourself do whatever you want to do. I didn’t look outside for strength. I didn’t look outside for control. Somehow I find it inside. That doesn’t mean that sometimes I don’t feel sad or I don’t feel insecure, even to this day. Now as I’m aging, it’s a different moment of my life. I’m sixty-nine, and so I have moments of Am I still relevant? and all that. Nevertheless, sometimes you indulge yourself in being insecure, but when push comes to shove, then I am in charge. When you hear news about your health or anything, when it’s a real problem, then you just say, ‘Okay, deal with it.’”

  There is so much to be said about being strong, finding your inner strength, but our time is limited, so I cut to the chase. “How do we protect and grow that inner strength?”

  “By not lying to yourself. Ever,” she says with certainty. “By not being delusional. By always saying the truth. By practicing the truth.”

  Listening to Diane speak so straightforwardly, openly, and plainly, I feel refreshed. It’s as if a bit of her bold certainty has rubbed off on me. “Do you think there is anything about society today that inhibits the development of the survivor mentality?”

  Again, her answer is brief and pointed: “Self-indulgence. I mean, people blame something for everything—their parents, the weather, something. It is never their own fault. The truth is, things happen. You can’t blame anyone else for it, it just happens. You have to accept it and deal with it.”

  When she says “accept it and deal with it,” it doesn’t strike me as harshly as it does when I see it on paper. I think I get what she’s saying: that things happen, and when they do, it’s important for us to accept the fact that we can’t change something that has already happened. So we need to move forward. That’s all we can do. And moving forward might mean many things—counseling, professional help, forgiving, exercise, self-expression—but whatever form it takes, it simply means you make the best choice for yourself and do what you need to do to successfully continue to move forward.

  “I want women not to be afraid of their own strengths,” Diane says. “I have never met a woman who is not strong. Women are stronger than men, but they hide it so well. Sometimes because of a past relationship. Or often, because they don’t want to show it because it’s not feminine. In the face of tragedy, I’m always amazed how women take over. My advice is, don’t be afraid of your own strength. Let it out. That doesn’t mean you have to be less attractive, less feminine, or less anything. I think strength is actually very becoming. Having said that, it’s not like you must feel strong all the time, but I want to be remembered as the somebody who told women, ‘You can be the woman you want to be.’”

  Diane von Furstenberg has become the woman she wanted to be. She overcame trials and setbacks and came out on top. Her strength and determination remind me of another strong determined woman who came from a background that couldn’t be any more different than that of Diane’s.

  * * *

  At a very young age, Mariatu Kamara was sent away from her parents and her village in Sierra Leone to live with her father’s sister, Marie, and Marie’s husband, Ali. It is not uncommon for men to have multiple wives in Mariatu’s culture, and when Mariatu was eleven, a man from the village approached her uncle, wanting to make Mariatu his second wife. Her aunt and uncle consented, but Mariatu was horrified at the thought. When she tried to tell her aunt that she did not want to marry this man—that he was a bad man and she hated him—her aunt slapped her and told her it was wicked to speak ill of her uncle’s friend, her future husband.

  This was during a time when civil war had broken out in Sierra Leone. Rebels would go through villages slaughtering people and destroying homes. The rebels hadn’t yet come to her village, but many nights Mariatu and her cousins would be rushed to hide in the nearby jungle. After months of this, it finally happened: The rebels came, and Mariatu and her family fled to another village. When Mariatu and a couple of her cousins were sent back to retrieve food for her family, she and everyone with her were caught by the rebels. Mariatu recalls horrors most of us can’t ever imagine seeing. People were forced into huts that were then set on fire. Little Mariatu watched as a woman and her small infant were forced into one of these huts. When the woman tried to escape out the window, she was shot in the head and fell back into the burning hut with her baby. Mariatu was petrified with fear.

  The rebels killed many people around her, but when they came to Mariatu, they didn’t shoot her. Initially, they planned on bringing her along, but ultimately they decided against it. But they said she couldn’t leave unpunished. They asked her, “Which one first?” She didn’t understand what they were asking—or that they weren’t just taunting her. They gripped her little arm, hacked off her hand, and then gripped her other arm and hacked off the other, leaving her bleeding and helpless. Miraculously, Mariatu survived, stumbling alone through the jungle to the nearest town. She made it to Port Loko, where humanitarian aid workers arranged for her to be transported to Freetown to get the medical attention she needed. When Mariatu was eventually reunited with her cousins and her aunt and uncle, she found that her cousins had
endured the same fate: They’d all lost their hands to the rebels.

  While Mariatu was in the hospital, one of the nurses who helped her bathe noticed her swollen breasts and asked her when she’d last had her period. Mariatu didn’t know. She’d started menstruating just recently. The nurse’s thorough examination revealed that Mariatu was pregnant. The nurse asked, “Who did this to you, Mariatu?” But Mariatu didn’t know how it had happened. She hadn’t learned yet how babies are made. But she told the nurse that the man who had wanted to marry her had found her home alone one day. He had pushed her to the ground, pulled up her clothes, and hurt her. Afterward, he had told Mariatu not to tell anyone what had happened.

  Mariatu was still a child herself when the baby was born, but she struggled to care for the infant, living in the refugee camp with the rest of her family, begging for food on the streets. Mariatu’s baby did not survive the harsh conditions of the refugee camp, but Mariatu was eventually able to get to London, and from there, she made it to Canada, where she built a life for herself.

  Mariatu’s circumstances and story are so compelling. She wrote about her experiences in a book called The Bite of Mango, and while her story is a world apart from the story told in The Woman I Wanted to Be—the two are polar opposites in many ways—Mariatu embodies everything Diane von Furstenberg says about survival. She has never blamed anyone else, she has never let her lack of hands stand in her way, and she has never tried to hide her unbelievable strength and courage.

  It took me a while to track her down and set up an interview, but the first time I talked to her on the phone, I was taken aback by how relaxed she was. She was happy to help and didn’t think twice about talking to me. I was thrilled. I thought so much about the questions I wanted to ask her, and I reread The Bite of Mango to prepare for the interview.

  The day of the interview, I feel like an absolute idiot, because I’ve chipped one of my front teeth and started panicking.

  “My smile isn’t even,” I moan to my friend on the phone. “My face is ruined.”

  “Can you get it fixed right away?” she asks. “What do you have going on today?”

  I tell her that I’m about to interview a remarkable woman who has survived civil war, rape, having her hands chopped off with a machete, losing a child, living in a refugee camp, and being separated from her family for the chance to seek a better life in Canada—which makes me shut up very quickly about my poor tooth. I’m thoroughly humbled, and that rapidly puts me in the mind-set of realizing how blessed and fortunate I am, and that I have nothing to complain about.

  When it’s time for the interview, I dial Mariatu’s number, but she doesn’t pick up right away. I count the rings, forcing myself to stop running my tongue over the edge of the broken tooth. The phone rings so many times that I wonder if maybe Mariatu has forgotten or perhaps changed her mind. And then I find myself wondering how she does answer the phone. It doesn’t feel like an appropriate thing to ask, but my curiosity about it lingers, as irksome and persistent as that jagged little edge so close to the tip of my tongue.

  When she answers, Mariatu is low-key and plainspoken, and I ask in the course of opening small talk what’s going on in her life now.

  “I was in school,” she says, “but I decided to put that on hold while I do some public speaking to promote my book. And I am a UNICEF special representative for children of conflict.”

  This strikes me as an important calling for a little girl who experienced so many horrors. “Do you ever have nightmares?” I ask. “Do you ever feel scared?”

  “Sometimes. Once in a while. Not all the time, but once in a while, yes.”

  “What do you do to help yourself feel better?”

  “I just think positive. Staying on the good side. I continue on my forgiving path. There’s not really anything special I do to make those memories go away. I just think positive and look forward. It will be a better road for me.”

  She goes on to tell me where this began for her: on that terrible road through the jungle when she was a little girl.

  “I was just positive and hopeful that I would find help. When they cut off my hands, I was in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t even know where I was going. With the help of God, I was able to survive that jungle and get to the hospital. My faith was very strong that I was going to survive, that I was going to live; I just didn’t know how.”

  I suppose that’s the definition of faith, in a way: to know, I’ll live through this, even if I don’t know how. So often the how comes first, and if we let it, that question can talk us out of our faith and undermine our strength. Let’s face it: Some things just don’t look good on paper. The scary statistics that confront someone diagnosed with cancer. The long odds of someone with a spinal injury ever walking again. We can’t know what the future holds, but I like how Mariatu frames how we move toward that future: on a forgiving path, a better road.

  “Do you feel that you’ve forgiven everyone who’s wronged you?” I ask.

  “Well, that’s another thing I work on every single day,” says Mariatu. “Each day, I wake up and have a second chance to see the world. There are things that can never be done in one time, in one day, one hour, or one year. It’s just that you keep on working on it until you finally can grow out of it, so that’s what I am doing. I am on the road of forgiving, I am forgiving them because there is nothing I can do about it. I mean, either I forgive them, stay positive, and have peace with myself, or still be bitter and not forgiving, leading me to become a horrible person—unhappy, unhealthy, miserable, and sad all the time. Crying over and over again. And I don’t want to be like that. I want to be positive. I want to be a good example of a true survivor. I want to be strong for myself, and my family. I want to use that to inspire other people. That is why I am on the road of forgiving.”

  “What would you say to someone who’s struggling to find that path?”

  “Keep on fighting. Use what you have. Stop complaining,” she says flatly.

  Ouch. I feel that last admonition. “Yes. But not complaining—that’s a challenge.”

  “Oh, I do complain sometimes,” she readily admits, “but not out loud. Only to myself. I just try my best. Get up and do what I can to make myself happy. Make my life worth living. I don’t give up. I learn to forgive, to be faithful to everything I do, and to stay thankful for the life I have. There’s so many worse things out there that are going on.”

  That seems like a stunning statement from someone who’s been through what she went through as a child. “When people meet you in person after they’ve learned your story, how do they react? And how do you react to them? Is there anything you want them to know?”

  “I just wish that when people meet me, they won’t feel pity for me, because I don’t feel good when people pity me. I don’t pity myself! I can do absolutely everything for myself. I live in an apartment with my four-year-old daughter. I just recently had someone join me, but I take care of my daughter, I take care of myself, I take care of the apartment, I cook, I clean—I do! You might not believe it, because you are not in my shoes. You might not understand exactly what I am capable of, or maybe you might have an idea. That’s what I’m trying to say: that some people might see you and judge you right away, like, ‘Okay, she’s now a very dependent person’—but no, I’m not. I wish people wouldn’t judge me or see me as less of a person or less of a capable person just because of my physical appearance.”

  I stand in complete awe of Mariatu. I have never met her face-to-face, but right now I can’t imagine ever thinking of her as less than the hero she is. I do not pity her. I feel sorrow for the overwhelming amount of pain that’s been heaped upon her, but I will always regard her with respect. To me, along with Diane von Furstenberg, she is the very definition of strength of spirit.

  I can feel our interview is almost at an end. In the background, I hear Mariatu’s daughter vying for her mother’s attention.

  Mariatu’s tone changes when she speaks to her litt
le girl. “Okay, pumpkin.” She’s a proud warrior on behalf of children in a terrifying world, but there in her kitchen, she’s soft-spoken and warm, a mommy, just like me. Perhaps there is time for one last question, and as I have a daughter and I can hear her daughter, I ask, “What do you want for your little girl?”

  “I wish and pray she will grow up and be the person God wants her to be,” Mariatu says. “I want her to learn to respect people, be less judgmental, and be kind, caring, and understanding.”

  I am a little surprised that her answer is so simple, though maybe I shouldn’t be, considering who Mariatu is. I guess I thought she was going to say something like, “To go to college, be successful, be happy, not have to endure the same things her mother endured.” But perhaps that’s a sign of how much I still have to learn.

  I’m reminded of something else Diane said: “At the end, my biggest source of pride is my children.”

  I believe Mariatu would agree. I certainly do.

  At the very end of our conversation, Diane said, “I’m glad you’re happy. My advice to you is to have another baby as soon as possible. My mother always said you look at the darkness—it’s so dark—but the only way you could deal with the darkness is to look for a tiny little bit of light and then build around that, and then all of a sudden, the fog lifts and the light is so magical.”

  As I’m writing this, I have followed Diane’s advice. I found my little light in the dark: Chloé. I have held on to her and loved her, and that light has grown, and now I’m pregnant with Matthew’s and my second child, and I feel and see the light that is so magical.