The Haunting Absence of Wayétu Moore: The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir by Wayétu Moore

Hope Wabuke
| Reviews

 

The fourth section, repeating the first section’s title, “Rainy Season,” answers this question—but from Moore’s mother’s point of view, which takes over the narrative “I.” This is another productive choice that creates depth in the narrative: Moore’s choice to give over the telling to the person whose story it is— thus, when Moore asked her mother “Why did you leave?” at the end of section three, this ensuing section is her mother’s explanation of that question, rather than Moore’s retelling of her mother’s account.
“When I tell them the story, I tell them 1990 was the year I cried,” Moore’s mother begins in her answer to Moore’s question, before beginning the narrative of how she made the decision to accept a Fulbright Master’s program in the States; her deep missing of her husband and daughters; her terror at witnessing the civil war from overseas; her desperate determination to raise money and travel to Liberia to rescue her family; her ferreting out of networks and resources that leads her to Satta and the plan to rescue her family.
“Dry Season,” the last section and a section again written from Moore’s point of view, concludes the story of the family’s escape into Sierra Leone and reunion with Moore’s mother. Fraught with tension, here is the conclusion of the border crossing in which Moore’s father is nearly forced to remain behind until finally given the approval by the border guards to cross over and into freedom.

 

If the first section of the memoir is haunted by the mother’s abence as the family flees the violence of Liberian Civil War, the latter sections of the memoir are haunted by the figure of another woman as the narrator attempts to sort through trauma: Satta, the rebel army woman Moore’s mother paid to find her family and lead them safely through rebel army territory and into Sierra Leone. Moore’s determination to find Satta and thank this woman who saved her own life and those of her family becomes the driving engine of the second half of the memoir—a strong formal choice which embeds the narrative with a clear, propulsive motivation and emotional depth.
The cycling nature of the memoir’s sections also call attention to the way time is understood in many African contexts in contrast to the way time is understood in many Western contexts. Here, as Moore depicts, time is characterized by the alternation of the two seasons—rainy season and dry season—and how one must order one’s life to survive each season accordingly.
Moore’s poetic attention to imagistic detail and intensity of focus, often through intricately crafted metaphor, allows symbols and form to hold weight in the memoir; this is a lovely characteristic of Moore’s striking voice, first seen in her debut novel She Would Be King. Consider this passage from The Dragons, the Giant, the Women:

I stared at Pa and Ma rushing through the woods. They could not hear it, but it was there, whistling in the distance, just as I imagined it from Ma’s stories. Settled wings. They had come. A prince entered that distant forest to kill Hawa Undu. The war had just begun.

Here, this imagistic close focus creates a detailed and imaginative subjectivity organically aligned with the child’s point of view and ethical representations of trauma, which carries the reader through the narrative.

 

Hope Wabuke is a poet, writer, and assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, VONA, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers, and Cave Canem. She writes literary and cultural criticism for NPR.

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