The story of the Boko Haram schoolgirls, by a reporter who takes it personally

•Isha Sesay, center, with some of the 21 schoolgirls freed by Boko Haram in 2016. Somini Sengupta BENEATH THE TAMARIND TREE A Story of Courage, Family, and the Lost Schoolgirls of Boko Haram by Isha Sesay Isha Sesay sees herself in the girls she writes about. She is a Cambridge University-educated, Peabody Award-winning former anchor…

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•Isha Sesay, center, with some of the 21 schoolgirls freed by Boko Haram in 2016.

Somini Sengupta

BENEATH THE TAMARIND TREE
A Story of Courage, Family, and the Lost Schoolgirls of Boko Haram by Isha Sesay

Isha Sesay sees herself in the girls she writes about.

She is a Cambridge University-educated, Peabody Award-winning former anchor for CNN. They — the subjects of her book, “Beneath the Tamarind Tree” — are the mostly poor girls from, in her words, “homes without distinction,” kidnapped by the jihadist group Boko Haram five years ago from their boarding school in the parched, impoverished northern Nigerian town of Chibok.

Sesay is not from Chibok. But she is, as she says, one generation and one lucky lottery-ticket-of-life removed from them. Her mother, Kadi Sesay, was born to poor, uneducated parents in a small city in Sierra Leone, not unlike Chibok. Kadi insisted on going to school. She excelled. She became a college professor, then a government minister and ultimately the shaper of Sesay’s destiny. “If not for fate, twinned with my mother’s childhood determination, I could just as easily have started off in a place not much different from Chibok,” she writes.

It is important that Sesay gets to tell this story.

If she is not of Chibok, she is not entirely of CNN headquarters either. It is something of a gut punch when she learns, two years into the Chibok girls’ ordeal, that her bosses do not remain exercised by their story. The news cycle moves on. The United States presidential election seizes the media’s attention. The hashtag that pricked our collective conscience — #BringBackOurGirls — all but melts away. Some Nigerians aren’t much interested either. They wonder aloud if the kidnapping is a “hoax,” designed to portray their country in a bad light.

Today, half of the more than 200 kidnapped Chibok girls remain in captivity. Reading Sesay’s book, it is impossible not to think of them.

The most arresting chapters are those in which Sesay takes us to the girls. We are there, with them, on that hot April night in their schoolyard. The ones who are awake shake the ones who are asleep. We hear them, agitated, confused, arguing among themselves about what to do.

“‘It’s better for us to run,’ one said.

“‘No — it’s better for us to pray,’ another answered.

“‘We should run!’ The girls continued to debate.

“‘Prayer can help. Let us wait and see what God will do for us.’”

We are with them as they are ordered to march through the bushes, then ordered to squeeze themselves into a truck, literally holding one another up, as they would for months to come, then shivering in the rain, then hiding under a tamarind tree’s overgrown limbs, moths nipping on their heels.

We get glimpses of the maddening pain of the parents who are waiting for them. At one point, a mother named Esther writes a letter to her daughter, Dorcas, in captivity. Long before your birth, Esther tells Dorcas, I wanted you to go to university. Her explanation is one you will hear from mothers all over the world: “because I have not been there.”

Sesay has reconstructed the girls’ story from interviews with a handful who have been released. Passages recounting their captivity derive from what the girls were willing and able to recall.

It is difficult to write the story of someone else’s torment. You never really know what you’re getting right, and what you’re not. Your subject may be telling the truth, but memory is a mighty trickster. What did these girls forget on purpose? I kept wondering while I read. What did they not say to the writer? Because, really, there was no reason to tell her. It wouldn’t help. It might even hurt.

“Beneath the Tamarind Tree” offers an unsatisfyingly potted history of Boko Haram. It doesn’t give you a textured view of how the group gained a foothold, or how it was persuaded to release half the kidnapped girls. The book paints a drive-by picture of Chibok.

Far too much effort is put into explaining why this story matters. This is a common pitfall for authors who are trying to chronicle the lives of others to Americans, and it’s unfortunate. Sesay pleads with her readers to pay attention because the story is about terrorism and therefore a threat to the “global strategic interests of the United States.”

There should be no such imperative. This book matters because it tells a gut-wrenching story, as relatable as a story about the deranged gunmen who come into our children’s schools in the United States again and again. It is a story that reveals our human capacity to inflict horror, and the dangers of forgetting these horrors. At its core, it is a story about mothers and daughters, and its emotional spine is the story of Sesay’s relationship to her own mother.

There is still another to be told about the kidnapping of the Chibok girls. That story should be told by a Chibok girl.

Somini Sengupta is the international climate change reporter for The Times and the author of “The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young.”

BENEATH THE TAMARIND TREE 
A Story of Courage, Family, and the Lost Schoolgirls of Boko Haram
By Isha Sesay
382 pp. Dey St./William Morrow. $27.99.

Credits| New York Times

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