The Dragons, The Giant, The Women
Wayétu Moore’s stunning memoir begins with an epigraph from the one and only Carrie Fisher: “Take your broken heart, make it into art.” And that’s exactly what Moore does over the next 250-odd pages. Wayétu was born and raised in Liberia; when she was only 5 years old, her family fled from their home to her grandmother’s rural village. Eventually, Wayétu and her family flee to Sierra Leone — her mother had been studying at Columbia in New York City, and pays a rebel fighter to get them across the border — and then they end up in Houston, Texas. Moore’s first book (which I loved), She Would Be King, came out in September 2019 — it retells Liberia’s origin story through a magical realism lens. Now, Moore is telling her own story.
I loved this bit, about how Wayétu is changing migrant literature, from The New York Times Book Review:
This memoir adds an essential voice to the genre of migrant literature, challenging false popular narratives that migration is optional, permanent and always results in a better life, as described in Dohra Ahmad’s “The Penguin Book of Migration Literature.” The Moore family lived a good life before the war, and after raising their children in America, in 2012 Tutu’s parents return to Liberia to resume it. “Honestly, I had an experience in Texas that was more traumatic than the war,” an adult Moore tells her therapist, who balks in response. In America — where she sits at “the Blackgirl table” at school, where once “I took too long to get my candy bar and that store owner pushed my sister and called us that word” — even the “giant” cannot shield her family from the injuries of white supremacy. “In this new place,” Moore writes, “skin color was king — king above nationality, king above life stories, and, yes, even king above Christ.”
Split into three sections, the first is Moore’s childhood fleeing during the Liberian Civil War; the second, her adult life trying to understand what being Black in America means, and dealing with the trauma of her childhood; and third, her mother’s story on how she went to New York and got her family across the border. A gripping, powerful memoir you won’t want to miss.
Rating: ★★★★★
