Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood
by Carolyn Slaughter
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Book Summary Information
Author: Carolyn SlaughterEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-05-07
ISBN: 0375413979
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood
Book Review: Freud knew all about it, and decided it was, "too hot to han
Summary: 5 Stars
When Freud's female patients complained of forced sex with their fathers at the ages of three, four, five, etc., at first he was incredulous. How could this be? These were not people from the gutter. He treated refined Vienesse burgers, not slum vermin. He knew some were pure fantasy. That many good girls wanted to marry daddy, and as neurotic adults have sex with daddy. But they couldn't ALL be fantasies. However, even trailblazers like Freud have their limits, and he relegated his"Seduction Theory" to fantasy, and dropped it like a hot potato. With him being Jewish in pre Holocaust Vienna, and his enemies castigating him as the Jew doctor who thinks everything has a sexual meaning, can you blame him? In her disturbing book, "Before the Knife", Carolyn Slaughter states on page four,"....the night that my father first raped me. I was six years old." That's the last we hear of this horror untill the final pages of the book. Many of us, as troubled children are convinced we are crazy, born to suffer, and are "total losers", but can't pinpoint a trauma to explain the feeling. Recent reasons such as "chemical imbalance" have helped to explain some mental illness. It seems that Carolyn Slaughter had proof of what turned her into a crazy person, and the one person who could have given her comfort and a safe haven was another crazy person, her mother, who refused to believe such "nonsense". In between the first statement of her rape, and it's final statemet at the end of the book is of a child growing up in that land of incredible human suffering, and incredible beauties of nature, Africa. It's another one of the Creator's jokes. The scenery is lovely, but you'll probably die of famine, plague, tribal war, or the master's whip. Dying of old age is granted to very few. This is not a beach book, and it's pages must have been stained with a lot of tears during it's creation.
Summary of Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood
What happened to me affected all of us?my mother, my father, my sisters, and me: we all fell apart under the horror of it, and we all tried to pretend that there was no horror.Before the Knife is an unforgettable story?a transcendent memoir?of the beauty and brutality in a young girl?s African childhood and of the ways she found to survive it.
When Carolyn Slaughter was nearly four, she and her family moved from England to a remote outpost in the Kalahari Desert. There she was surrounded by a landscape of incomparable splendor and violence. Majestic rivers formed overnight; flocks of flamingos and herds of game gathered with equal speed to partake of the sudden waters. Termite mounds grew to the height of trees. A crocodile could drag a child from the riverbank in a second. And the author herself became the victim of an unspeakable crime.
Slaughter takes us deep into her experience of Africa and of herself at a time of anguish, but also of recovery. As she has said, ?I couldn?t take my eyes off Africa. And what I saw was so beautiful that it enabled me not merely to survive, but also to find a way to save my soul.? Before the Knife is the deeply moving story of a girl who endured and transcended her family?s violence to emerge an impassioned observer and explicator of her world.
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