To Be Amina

A debut novel from Aisha Lelouma Diallo. The story of a Guinean girl struggling to carve out her identity in a world where the modern world clashes with ancient traditions. The book follows Amina as she faces childhood family tragedy and grows up in a society where she is entrapped in socially enforced roles of womanhood. It later depicts her move to the United States from her native Guinea, raising questions about the immigrant experience in the US, arranged marriages and the traumatic practice of female excision.Amina lives an ordinary life with her family in a well-off suburb in the Guinean capital, Conakry; but when her mother unexpectedly dies, her world is turned upside down. Amina and her younger brother are sent to live temporarily with their uncle and his wife, but she never returns to her home. Amina must deal with the loss of her mother, but she must also cope with being uprooted from the home she has always known and put into a new environment that does not have the comforts she is used to, all while trying to understand why she has to be subjected to a traumatic multigenerational tradition.When she turns seventeen, Amina’s life is disrupted once again when she is pushed into an arranged marriage. Imprisoned by cultural codes, she feels her life slipping away from her, until she finds out that her suitor, Bouba, wants to take her back with him to the United States, where he lives. Though Amina resists this tradition, she agrees to meet Bouba, eyeing the possibility of going to America to fulfill her dream of studying at university.A story of resilience for this generation, follow Amina as she journeys through tumultuous years, across continents, and transforms herself by her own choices and redefines her notion of womanhood.