Carolyn Slaughter (1) (1946–)

I just read A Black Englishman and I think I am officially done with books about India and the Raj by white people.

Full disclosure: I am trying to whittle down some of the insane book stacks in my house and I don't know how long this book has been there. And the introductory note about how the book was based on the author's grandparent who was institutionalized both in India and in England after Independence hooked me. But it's such an icky mix of exoticism and wish fulfillment, not to mention the fact that the narrator seemed much more 1990s than 1920s. And the novel has this total happy ending where there should have been no happy ending anywhere in sight so I just felt manipulated and slightly complicit.… (mehr)

3. Before the Knife by Carolyn Slaughter

I'm not sure what Carolyn Slaughter intends us (the readers) to take away from her memoir. She tells us on page 4 that she was "first" raped by her father when she was 6 years old. Then there is no further reference to this until the epilogue, when she briefly describes how years later as an adult she remembered the incident. In between, she tells the story of her childhood, with a father who was admittedly cruel and distant, and who was a colonial administrator in what is now Botswana, and a mother who was about as emotionally distant as you can be from a child and still claim to be a mother. Definitely a dysfunctional family, but without knowledge of the rape there is not enough context to explain the author's rage and rebellion from the time she was a small child. So is this a book about incest and the damage it does? Is it meant to be about recovered memories? If so, there is little analysis or context provided for either. Maybe it's just a book about an unhappy childhood.

I've seen this book described as a brilliant evocation of a childhood in the beautiful African landscape. There may have been glimpses of that, but for the most part the evocation didn't reach me. If you're looking for evocations of African childhoods of British colonials read Doris Lessing (fiction and non fiction or Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. I really didn't like this book.

2 stars… (mehr)

Before the Knife is a very quick read. Sometimes I felt I was reading fast because I wanted to get through the truly disturbing parts. In truth they were always there, lurking behind the words Slaughter didn't say, or worse, only alluded to. Because Slaughter announces early on, in the preface, that she was raped by her father the knowledge is out. "...the moment when everything changed only really came the night that my father first raped me" (p 4). However, she promises her story is not about that horror in particular. True to her word, Before the Knife isn't about that trauma but having announced it, we readers are always aware of it. We translate innuendo to mean abuse every time. The story of an African childhood is lost to the knowledge something darker is at play. What a different book this would have been if we didn't know! As expected Slaughter comes back full circle to the first night of the rape, describing it in more detail. Why, I do not know. The entire book is a tangled and confused mess of emotions.… (mehr)