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

Hope Wabuke
| Reviews

 

Moore chooses to construct her childhood understanding of the memoir’s opening violence and escape as her eight-year-old self would: in terms of the mythic, the fairy tale. This productive use of the imaginative space of the point of view of a child-as-narrator allows a subjective focus of the wide historical plot and creates a surreal, at times dreamlike, at times nightmarish, tone to the narrative. For example, Moore characterizes how she understood the loud noises around them not as the sound of guns but as the sound of drums:

 

“What is that?” I asked Papa, the popping still around us. We were walking so quickly and his skin was wet with sweat. He moved branches out of the way so that Ol’ Ma’s path would be clear. He moved branches that made the faces of grieving men.
“Drums,” Papa said. “That’s a drum.” And Torma and Ol' Ma glanced at him then looked away, and I felt like I had learned something I was not supposed to know, like that the drums were secret or magic.
“I hear another one,” K said and Papa was shaking as we ran. In the distance we heard yelling each time we heard the drum, and the air became smoky, as if something was burning on the stove, and the cars were honking, and in the distance people were shouting and the sound of those drums came nearer.

 

In Moore’s portrayal of her eight-year-old self, it is not just that the gunfire becomes drums; the fighting leaders are dragons and monsters. The woods are full of ghosts. Writes Moore:

 

The man she spoke of was the prince. He was the prince who had come to kill Hawa Undu. He came back with boys from Burkina Faso and Guinea, the rebels, and now he would force the dragon out of the forest.

 

This first section, titled “Rainy Season,” is followed by four other parts—with a clear and specific focus embedded within each division of the memoir, resonant with meaning. “Dry Season,” the following second section, is focused on present day life in America—grounded in reflections on past war and trauma. Here, however, are also new traumas in America, such as Moore’s first experience with the violence of American racism as a child: being called “nigger” and chased out of the store by a white man who had followed her the whole time she was shopping. Writes Moore: “In this new place that Mam and Pap had told us was home, skin color was king—king above nationality, king above life stories, and, yes, even king above Christ.”
Reflections on the experience of race and gender lived as a Black woman in America form the subject of the third section, titled “Aside: When the Therapist Suggests I Begin Dating Again.” Here, Moore explores how her mother, having grown up with her Blackness affirmed in Liberia, could not understand Moore’s experience of the intersection of racism, colorism, and gender in America where, Moore writes, “my true loves in our new country, by either inheritance or indoctrination, were taught that black women were the least among them.”
This section turns, somewhere in the middle, when Moore returns to Liberia, where her parents are now living. Moore has crystallized the fix for difficulties in her life into the understanding that she must get the answers to two things that have haunted her for years: she must find Satta, the rebel woman who led them to safety, and she must ask her mother what was so important as to take her away from her family before that. “Why did you leave?” Moore asks her mother at the end of this section.

 

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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