The Diamonds by J. Sorie Conteh - Book Report/Review Example

Sur [Supervisor's The Diamonds Ever since their discovery over three thousand years ago diamonds have captivated men and women universally. The reasons for the fascination are embodied in the name. Diamond is a derivative of the Greek word adamant, which means to tame, to subdue. Diamonds in abundance, and just for the taking! However the diamonds are equally a nuisance and a blessing. J. Sorie Conteh's debut novel is about how the craving for great wealth can cause corruption and eventually collapse.

Particularly when it comes to focus on the ways that the diviner's role changed, the novel presents a simulating present-day appearance of Gibao, an individual who construes wealth in the fields of diamonds of Sierra Leone, West Africa. He was a thriving present cultivator, leaves his countryside for the Brave New World of diamond mining at Sewa. It is a completely different, dishonest and crooked world, where money is made promptly and then lost, theft is customary, as long as one is not caught, and prostitution is very much a component of life.

At first coy but driven by an astonishing and outstanding aspiration to get wealthy quick, Gibao gives in to the gluttony and graft of the diamond mines, and takes things further; Gibao commits ritual slaughter after being told by a sorcerer that it will facilitate him find big diamonds.The novel also investigates the diviner's role and societal meltdown reasoned by Sierra Leone's great diamond rush of the decade of 1950s. One is provided the smells and experience of the culture and civilization of West Africa, replete with divination, polygamy, astrologers, virgin sacrifices, jam-packed buses and trains, diamond settlements, delectable array of food and belief and death.

As a state Sierra Leone found itself affluent in diamonds. The Diamonds characterizes current undertakings, when Gibao, a sturdy, well built and determined individual sense forced by his position and state of affairs, his wives and his inner ravenousness to become wealthy. Conteh's novel is an archetypal illustration of diviner's role and civilization of West Africa in conflict with contemporary justice.According to the elders of village, Gibao's objective to go to the Diamond town is obsessed by greed and not aspiration.

But the diviner made the way for Gibao and warned him warned one should return to family when he gets money. This role of divine entirely changes at the end of the story. Finoh tell that Gibao will get a big diamond if he goes after Finoh's orders. Divine advised Gibao to sacrifice a virgin to become wealthier. Gibao hired murderers that ended up killing his sister in law. For this cruel action Gibao was arrested, proved guilty and hanged.As per Gibao's visit to the diviner at the beginning, the situation was rather complex as searching for the real diamond and pursuing one's dream was the real matter.

On one level, the diamonds is parable of the destruction of peasant life by encroaching modernity; it juxtaposes the pastoral, superbly ordered civilization of rural Sierra Leone with the graft ridden, vicious and aggressive world of loose capitalism, showing how a clash between the two causes to the destruction of the former. But Conteh, a scholar with the United Nations mission in Kuwait, seems resolute to make a more thoughtful declaration, and his authorial voice finishing the story may seem like a fad-driven interference to literary purists: 'what was to become a diamond boom became a curse on the nation.

Herein lies the irony. The economic benefits of diamonds, which were meant to free people from the clutches of poverty, instead enslaved them in the clutches of greed.' (Other Facets, online)Works CitedConteh, J. Sorie, The Diamonds, Lekon New Dimensions Publishing, New York, 2001, 248 pages.Other Facets, News And Views On The International Effort To End Conflict Diamonds, retrieved from http://www.pacweb.org/e/images/stories/documents/OF3.pdf on February 21, 2006.