Book Review 2
Liberian Literary Magazine Promoting Liberian Literature, Arts and Culture
Book Review 2
The House At Sugar Beach In Search of a Lost African Childhood
By Helene Cooper Illustrated. 354 pp. Simon & Schuster. $ 25
Reviewed by CAROLINE ELKINS SEPT. 5, 2008
The skeletal remains of Africa’ s numerous civil wars litter the continent, from the easternmost reaches of Somalia to the western shores of Liberia. It is there, overlooking the picturesque beaches of the Atlantic Ocean, that unknown numbers of human remains— victims of Samuel Doe’ s reign of terror— haunt the earth. One building that serves as their communal headstone, itself a virtual skeleton, is physical testimony to the civil war that racked Liberia for nearly 25 years. This macabre marker is the house at Sugar Beach.
In her masterly memoir, Helene Cooper brings us back to the halcyon years when Sugar Beach, her family’ s home, embodied the elite privilege and discoage chic to which Liberia’ s upper class aspired. The Coopers’ mansion, 22 rooms in all, rose in solitude out of the plum trees and vines that thicketed Liberia’ s undeveloped coastline. Inside was a living homage to the 1970s, complete with velvet couches in a sunken living room, marble floors and a special nook for storing the plastic Christmas tree. Outside, where a carpet of grass stretched to the thunderous Atlantic, multiple servants made their home, and the latestmodel American cars— from a Lincoln Continental to a two-tone green Pontiac Grand Prix— awaited their next 11-mile journey into downtown Monrovia. Photo Fate, so it seemed, handed Helene Cooper a“ one-ina-million lottery ticket” when she was born into“ what passed for the landed gentry upper class of Africa’ s first independent country.” Both sides of Cooper’ s family traced their roots to Liberia’ s founding fathers— freed slaves from the United States who fought disease and the recalcitrant local population to forge a new nation. Their bravery and ingenuity were legendary, and their descendants soon formed Liberia’ s upper caste.
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Credit Julia Hoffmann
At its heart,“ The House at Sugar Beach” is a coming-of-age story told with unremitting honesty. With her pedigree and her freedom from internalized racism, Cooper is liberated to enjoy a social universe that is a fluid mix of all things American and African.“ None of that American post-Civil War / civil rights movement baggage to bog me down with any inferiority complex about whether I was as good as white people,” she declares triumphantly.“ No European garbage to have me wondering whether some British colonial master was somehow better than me. Who needs to struggle for equality? Let everybody else try to be equal to me.”
The young Helene Cooper oozes the awkward confidence of a privileged adolescent, and it is through her bespectacled eyes that we see the carefree decadence of Liberia in the years just before it descended into chaos. They are also the lenses through which we are introduced to Cooper’ s distinctly female world. Atop the matriarchy is her maternal grandmother, the unforgettable Mama Grand. Cooper’ s side-splitting portrayal of this hard-nosed, self-made landowner is nothing short of brilliant. With her gold-capped tooth glistening, Mama Grand is equally capable of dressing down a Lebanese merchant who“ thought he was going to cheat me out of my rent” and berating the entire American government on camera for“ 60 Minutes.” The women are the backbone of Liberia in its heyday, but they show their true strength when the country collapses.
A subtle, nostalgic ache for a childhood foreshortened is the watermark imprinted on every page of Cooper’ s story. The idyll at Sugar Beach, with its Michael Jackson LPs and Nancy Drew mysteries, was shattered when a ragtag group of soldiers— part of the rebel force that brought down the Tolbert government in 1980, and with it over 150 years of oldguard, one-party rule— arrived on the scene. The stench of their inebriation, of their lust for violence, overpowered the tranquility that still lingered in the