Product Description

In this unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Carolyn Slaughter recalls her childhood in Africa and how the land itself released her from a rage that threatened to destroy her.

For Carolyn Slaughter, who grew up in Botswana in the 1950s, it was the Kalahari Desert that made life bearable. Her father was a cruel and violent district commissioner during the last days of British colonial rule, and their family’s stiff English facade masked an unspeakable household secret. But out in the bush, the intensity of the air and the beauty of the landscape touched her with a kind of feverish grace. She would disappear for hours to watch the flat brown river with its water lilies and crocodiles; the thorn trees and the flocks of flamingos; the local women with their babies strapped to their backs. Filled with the majesty and splendor of the ever-changing desert, 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #789523 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-13
• Released on: 2003-05-13
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.02" h x .60" w x 5.17" l, .55 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
A father's rape of his six-year-old daughter, "forgotten but not forgotten, known but not known," casts its shadow over this memoir of growing up during the 1950s in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. Her father, a civil servant with a penchant for family and community violence, gives the young Slaughter "the creeps," and mother is "a bag of nerves and a basket case." Nightmares, a tendency toward accidents and an attempted suicide are Slaughter's share in this dysfunctional family, which includes two sisters. Sustenance or perhaps sanity? comes from her love affair with the "beautiful beyond words" landscape: the desert and its accompanying river. Novelist and psychotherapist Slaughter (Dreams of the Kalahari) builds her memoir around places (ships, houses, schools) delineated as visually as a photograph and objects rendered tangible, e.g., the Chevy's "voluptuous shapes and wide rumps" and the "meat knife with a beautiful, chiseled end" (which, incidentally, was the instrument of a failed attempt to kill her father). Two lives merge here, one of incredible beauty and one of incredible pain. Although the subject suggests comparison with Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Slaughter's memoir is closer, thematically, to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. "You were always willing to go down into the dark without a candle," Slaughter's older sister says when they are reconciled adults, "but I'm not." Slaughter has succeeded in penning a chilling and compelling exorcism.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This is the painful story of an anguished child and a dysfunctional family set against the social backdrop of an unraveling colonial structure. Slaughter (Dreams of the Kalahari) returns to the writing scene after years of absence to tell the story of a tortured childhood spent in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana, where her family moved from England when she was four. In plain yet piercing language, she recounts how the callous and incestuous acts of an authoritarian father, the resignation of a delusional mother, and the pretentiousness of a colonial lifestyle viciously shattered a young white girl's innocence and happiness. There are moments of beauty and redemption most notably when Slaughter writes of her infatuation with Africa's natural beauty ("I couldn't take my eyes off Africa") but it is her anger that permeates the narrative. Slaughter's intense hatred for her father and horror at her childhood are present in every recollection, constantly reverberating with a bitterness that inadvertently threatens the credibility of her story. Still, this is a candid memoir that takes the reader into the inner world of colonial functionaries, exposing their prejudices and vices and detailing their trials and fears. Recommended for public libraries. Edward K. Owusu-Ansah, CUNY Coll. of Staten Island Lib.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-As a child, Slaughter was raped repeatedly by her father, beginning when she was six years old. Born in India about the time of independence, she and her family soon traveled back to England along with the rest of the British colonialists, where her father determined he could not live without the incipient power held by minor bureaucrats in colonial service to the Queen. In short order, Slaughter, her older sister, and her mother were following him to Africa, to the Kalahari Desert and the British protectorate known today as Botswana. Her mother's recurring depressions, worsened by the birth of a third daughter, and her father's frustration and anger with the approaching end of British colonialism and his own mental illness, led to the incest and eventual violence between him and his daughter. Slaughter's style is lyrical and haunting. In beautifully painted prose, she conveys her great love for the magnificence of Africa. Readers are shown how she sought solace from her environment in an effort to blot out the pain of her father's betrayal and her mother's refusal to acknowledge the abuse. As if piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, readers come to understand the author's actions. Handled with dignity, the story tells of survival and strength in the 1950s but it is relevant today.
Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.