Shoshanapnw's review
The Dark Child: The Autobiography of an African Boy by Camara Laye
Shoshanapnw's review
rating:
bookshelves: 2008, africa, around-the-world, fiction-literature, memoir-biography
status: Read in September, 2008
rating:
bookshelves: 2008, africa, around-the-world, fiction-literature, memoir-biography
status: Read in September, 2008
According to some sources, this is not a memoir but a novel, or "literature," though the protagonist has the same name as the author. I will approach it as a fictionalized memoir; it is better as an autobiography than it is as a novel. This tale from 1954 fits in the "leaving for school" rather than the "leaving due to war" subgenre. For this reason, and because it stops short of Laye's experiences in France, it is more romantic and, despite the author's inner turmoil about leaving, less conflicted than many of its ilk. It tells an interesting enough story of growing to manhood, including initiation rites and adolescent circumcision that make it interesting to read in conjunction with Somé's Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman and Fadumo Korn's Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival. However, the unanswered question lingering at the edges of this narrative involves the larg...more
