- Paperback: 179 pages
- Publisher: Doubleday; Book Club Ed edition (4 Mar 2002)
- ISBN-10: 0385603460
- ISBN-13: 978-0385603461
- Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
Before The Knife: Memories of an African Childhood
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
The novelist Carolyn Slaughter digs deep into her childhood to write Before the Knife, a bleak and disturbing memoir about growing up in pre-independence Africa under the spell of parental sexual abuse. Her story appears to involve "an ordinary English family living in a very remote part of southern Africa during the lingering years of British colonial rule". However, at the age of six Slaughter was raped by her own father, which "obliterated in one moment both the innocence of my childhood and the fragile structure of our English family life. We all knew". The book proceeds to paint a desperate portrait of the increasingly unhappy child and her emotionally crippled sister, controlled by a depressive, unsympathetic mother and a terrifying, violent father, a colonial official who enjoys beating the natives almost as much as abusing his family.
Before the Knife is ostensibly about growing up in Botswana at a time when "cracks in the rigidly maintained colonial structure" began to appear, and there are deeply lyrical descriptions of the African landscape and Slaughter's identification with its inhabitants, but the horror of abuse pervades the book. Slaughter's problem is that she has tried to write two books, one about Africa, one about abuse. For her, both are inextricably connected, but her understandable hatred towards her father prevents her from speculating on the connection between colonialism and familial abuse, or explaining how she learnt to forgive, years after the death of both her parents. Some readers might find that Before the Knife is ultimately a little too personal for comfort. --Jerry Brotton --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Amanda Craig, The Times
'Written with such beauty, courage and truthfulness that it will rank with other masterpieces about life in Africa'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
If you read many of the reviews of this book (including the one on Amazon)you could well be put off by its subject. Yes, Slaughter's rape by her father at the age of six frames the beginning and end of the memoir, but it is also a remarkable account of the courage and acquistion of wisdom of a very brave girl.
As a memoir of the last days of British colonial rule in Africa, it is beautifully written, conveying the glamour of the voyage out, the grandeur - and the mean spirit of those like her father who, when Home Rule went in India, moved onto the next continent in order to bully its native people.
As a family memoir, it is harrowing. Slaughter's descriptions of her mother's vanity and depression may strike some as unforgiving, but when we learn that her mother had unmistakable proof of her daughter's rape - torrents of blood on the sheets, so bad that a doctor had to be called out - you can understand why she hates her and wanted to murder her father. Her salvation through friendship at boarding school, and her feeling for the Kalahari desert release the book from the bleakness some have detected.
If all memoirs of abuse were as sensitive and well-written as this, one wouldn't wince.
I hope having written it, Slaughter will retun to writing fiction.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In Before The Knife Carolyn Slaughter describes her childhood, a fraught, anxious prelude to an adulthood that continued to suffer from its heritage. She tells us early on in the book what caused this anguish, and what gave rise to its associated self-pity, self-abuse and anger. She was raped by her father at the age of six. But then the book unfolds almost without another mention of the trauma until its reality is finally recognized, long after the father, the self-tortured mother, and even the younger sister have gone to their graves.
Carolyn Slaughter's life, though not fully acknowledged in the book, could only have been lived in a narrow window of history. The British Empire, always eager to install a white face in a position of colonial authority where people of race might not be trusted, elevated many lower middle class émigrés to effective aristocracy. It meant that they could only feel at home, that is, only attain the status they assumed, if they lived outside of the Sceptred Isle. Carolyn's mother had been born and brought up in India. She had grown used to a life with servants, where sewing, cooking and cleaning could be delegated to the competent. This created time for the important things in life, like deciding what to wear for dinner, what would go with what, and whether the lunch invitees would gel. Not that there were many expatriates to invite in the Kalahari Desert.
Carolyn Slaughter seems to have lived an itinerant's life. More significantly she seems to have adopted an itinerant relationship with life. It happened as a result of denial, as a result of not accepting or acknowledging what happened to her. The father, a shop worker back home, was a District Commissioner in the Empire when his white face provided his main qualification. His wife, Carolyn's mother, unable to accept what the daughter had told her or, indeed what evidence proved, slumped into a private depression that never left her.
The author's African childhood was almost wholly unhappy, even depressing. Her tantrums angered others, her self-abuse threatened her own life, and yet the father who was the source of the tragedy soldiered on, apparently stoically, delivering whatever duty the assumptions of Empire might demand.
There were times when I lost touch with the sense of depression and foreboding, periods in the book when I knew things were lighter and brighter than the reminiscences suggested. Occasionally, the weight being borne got too much. But then I had a happy childhood, without abuse, indeed with love, affection, and support throughout, so who am I to criticize this insight into a world I never knew?
So, towards the end of the account, when the horror of the abuse can be re-lived in later life and thus partially expunged, we can sense the destructive havoc it has wreaked through the family's life. It's a rather one-paced account, but the seriousness of its focus justifies its form.
Carolyn Slaughter's life, though not fully acknowledged in the book, could only have been lived in a narrow window of history. The British Empire, always eager to install a white face in a position of colonial authority where people of race might not be trusted, elevated many lower middle class émigrés to effective aristocracy. It meant that they could only feel at home, that is, only attain the status they assumed, if they lived outside of the Sceptred Isle. Carolyn's mother had been born and brought up in India. She had grown used to a life with servants, where sewing, cooking and cleaning could be delegated to the competent. This created time for the important things in life, like deciding what to wear for dinner, what would go with what, and whether the lunch invitees would gel. Not that there were many expatriates to invite in the Kalahari Desert.
Carolyn Slaughter seems to have lived an itinerant's life. More significantly she seems to have adopted an itinerant relationship with life. It happened as a result of denial, as a result of not accepting or acknowledging what happened to her. The father, a shop worker back home, was a District Commissioner in the Empire when his white face provided his main qualification. His wife, Carolyn's mother, unable to accept what the daughter had told her or, indeed what evidence proved, slumped into a private depression that never left her.
The author's African childhood was almost wholly unhappy, even depressing. Her tantrums angered others, her self-abuse threatened her own life, and yet the father who was the source of the tragedy soldiered on, apparently stoically, delivering whatever duty the assumptions of Empire might demand.
There were times when I lost touch with the sense of depression and foreboding, periods in the book when I knew things were lighter and brighter than the reminiscences suggested. Occasionally, the weight being borne got too much. But then I had a happy childhood, without abuse, indeed with love, affection, and support throughout, so who am I to criticize this insight into a world I never knew?
So, towards the end of the account, when the horror of the abuse can be re-lived in later life and thus partially expunged, we can sense the destructive havoc it has wreaked through the family's life. It's a rather one-paced account, but the seriousness of its focus justifies its form.
11 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a true and tragic story, with a powerful message of survival. Carolyn has a clear readable style that does not make a melodrama out of what was undoubtedly some of the worst circumstances ever.
This book is a testimony to the human spirit, and well worth a read.
This book is a testimony to the human spirit, and well worth a read.
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