The Amputated Memory

October 22, 2007
The Cameroon-born, Ivory Coast–based Liking (Love Across a Hundred Lives) centers her fifth novel on Halla Njokè, 75, who resolves to honor the women of her Bassa clan and to “convey Africa’s silences” by unearthing her memories. The result is an exhaustive, meandering bildungsroman, interspersed with chantlike songs of life in a fictionalized, strife-torn 20th-century African country recognizable as Cameroon. Largely addressed directly to Halla’s grandiose and philandering father, the first part of the novel recounts her harrowing rural childhood during which her father rapes Halla, attempts to marry her to much older men and fails to provide a promised education. Further, as the struggle for independence plays out in the background, her father collaborates with the white colonial leaders rather than supporting the local resistance. After Halla breaks with her family and moves to the city, she sings at nightclubs and begins to develop as an artist, which leads to a lot of interior monologue. The novel’s last third, full of long summaries rather than dramatized events, thwarts its promising start.

December 15, 2007
Multitalented author Liking ("It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral")also a singer, actor, painter, dancer, and community artistic director in the Ivory Coastwon the 2005 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa for this genre-defying coming-of-age story. Incorporating traditional African song and folklore and highly dramatic dialog, the work can be interpreted through performance as well as read on the page: of primary importance in a country where, as Liking notes, close to half the population is illiterate. Narrator Halla Njoké is 80 years old when she decides to delve into painful childhood memories in an unnamed country based on Cameroon, the exiled Liking's homeland. Growing up during the throes of independence, Halla encounters deplorable acts of male violence, interfamilial and otherwise. The narrative is nearly overcome by constant incursions of melodrama, and Liking's tendency to moralize does not help. But her heroine's resilience and the passion and creativity of her writing help the novel overcome its faults and leave the reader with hope that the next generation of Africans can "reinvent the world without despairing." Recommended for literary fiction collections.Forest Turner, Suffolk Cty. House of Correction Lib., Boston

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2007
Winner of UNESCOs Noma Award for publishing in Africa, this breakthrough novel draws on Likings personal experience coming-of-age in Cameroon, West Africa, in the late 1950s, caught between tradition and modernity, family and the nationalist independence movement. Growing up in an extended tribal community, Halla is close with her powerful father, and she follows him when he leaves, even though he rapes her, and she gives birth to his baby. Later, supported by her strong grandmother, she breaks free, attends a missionary school, reads about the collaboration made by Cameroon rulers, including her own father, joins the anticolonialist resistance movement, and finds independence as a writer. Translated from the French, this novel breaks what remains the near silence about women in Africa, and what is most moving is that Liking is never simplistic in her handling of the trauma and oppression she endured or in her treatment of the unreliability of memoryand the farce of the official history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)