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50books_poc2010-12-27 04:19 pm
pauraque) wrote in 50books_poc2010-12-27 04:19 pm
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12. Helene Cooper - The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood
Born in Liberia and descended from the nation's founders, Helene Cooper lived there for 14 years as a member of the wealthy elite. She knew her homeland -- its unique history as a colony populated by former U.S. slaves, its sights, its tastes, its scents, its joys and its dangers. When Liberia's bloody coup d'etat finally came, Cooper had to leave a home she knew well.
But as she would come to realize, she did not know it nearly so well as she thought she did.
I knew nothing of Liberia before I started, but that's no barrier to reading this book; Cooper weaves the story of her nation together with a vivid portrait of her own socially and materially privileged childhood. Indeed, the two are inseparable. When a group of free black Americans and former slaves came to Africa in 1821 in search of a better home (with the financial and logistical support of white Americans who thought America would be better off without free blacks in it), they found to their frustration that the place was inhabited by Africans who did not want to be colonized, whether the colonists were white or black. But the Americans had superior firepower, and they took the Africans' land by force. That was the beginning of Liberia.
The descendants of those Americans came to form Liberia's upper class, the so-called "Congo people". They were a minority who owned and controlled the majority of everything, while everyone else -- the native people of the area -- lived mostly in poverty. The goal was to create a new nation similar to the U.S., and it seems that they succeeded in the saddest, most ironic way possible. The parallels are striking, especially the whitewashed propaganda that's fed to the kids about how the country came to be.
As a child, Cooper was ignorant of her privilege as a Congo girl, even though her foster sister and best friend was a native from a poor family. The second half of the book, after her flight to the U.S. (leaving her foster sister behind), is all about her struggle to understand the privilege she'd enjoyed -- and lost -- and how it was at the very root of why Liberia as she knew it could not survive.
I think the first half of the book, her experiences before and during the coup, is the strongest. Much of her life in the U.S. is skimmed over quickly; I would have been interested to hear more about what it was like adjusting to a completely different culture and social position, but it's only touched on once or twice. She makes herself seem somewhat isolated, especially by comparison to the highly interconnected world of her childhood -- and maybe she was isolated, but it's not delved into and left me still curious.
Nonetheless, it's a very good and eye-opening book. It puts a much needed human face on Liberia, highlighting how much many of us probably don't know about the conflicts around the world that we see on the news, usually with little context or explanation provided. I think there's often a racist tinge to that lack of context (oh look at those savage Africans fighting each other again), and this is a great antidote for that.
tags: a: cooper helene, genre: memoir, author: black (Liberian), setting: Liberia & United States
But as she would come to realize, she did not know it nearly so well as she thought she did.
I knew nothing of Liberia before I started, but that's no barrier to reading this book; Cooper weaves the story of her nation together with a vivid portrait of her own socially and materially privileged childhood. Indeed, the two are inseparable. When a group of free black Americans and former slaves came to Africa in 1821 in search of a better home (with the financial and logistical support of white Americans who thought America would be better off without free blacks in it), they found to their frustration that the place was inhabited by Africans who did not want to be colonized, whether the colonists were white or black. But the Americans had superior firepower, and they took the Africans' land by force. That was the beginning of Liberia.
The descendants of those Americans came to form Liberia's upper class, the so-called "Congo people". They were a minority who owned and controlled the majority of everything, while everyone else -- the native people of the area -- lived mostly in poverty. The goal was to create a new nation similar to the U.S., and it seems that they succeeded in the saddest, most ironic way possible. The parallels are striking, especially the whitewashed propaganda that's fed to the kids about how the country came to be.
As a child, Cooper was ignorant of her privilege as a Congo girl, even though her foster sister and best friend was a native from a poor family. The second half of the book, after her flight to the U.S. (leaving her foster sister behind), is all about her struggle to understand the privilege she'd enjoyed -- and lost -- and how it was at the very root of why Liberia as she knew it could not survive.
I think the first half of the book, her experiences before and during the coup, is the strongest. Much of her life in the U.S. is skimmed over quickly; I would have been interested to hear more about what it was like adjusting to a completely different culture and social position, but it's only touched on once or twice. She makes herself seem somewhat isolated, especially by comparison to the highly interconnected world of her childhood -- and maybe she was isolated, but it's not delved into and left me still curious.
Nonetheless, it's a very good and eye-opening book. It puts a much needed human face on Liberia, highlighting how much many of us probably don't know about the conflicts around the world that we see on the news, usually with little context or explanation provided. I think there's often a racist tinge to that lack of context (oh look at those savage Africans fighting each other again), and this is a great antidote for that.
tags: a: cooper helene, genre: memoir, author: black (Liberian), setting: Liberia & United States
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I have been looking for antidotes to that idea indeed, so thank you for this rec!
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