Liberian Literary Magazine January Issue 0115
bucolic air of Cooper’ s sheltered world. Her mother would try in vain to exorcise the odor— and the memories— the rebel intruders inscribed on her body and mind after they gang-raped her. Mommee sacrificed herself to protect the innocence of Helene and her other daughters, Marlene and Eunice, locking them in an upstairs room before the soldiers forced her down into the basement.
Photo CreditPhotograph by Joe Gaffney; Illustration by Julia Hoffmann
Cooper soon went into exile, joining thousands of other members of the Liberian elite who managed to escape the rebels’ murderous pillaging. Mommee and Marlene were also among them. Eunice was not. The daughter of a poor upcountry mother, she had been taken into the household at Sugar Beach when Helene was a lonely 8-year-old in need of companionship. She quickly became“ Mrs. Cooper’ s daughter” and was treated as one of Mommee’ s own. Yet over the years there were subtle reminders of Eunice’ s different status. And when it was time to flee, painful choices were made. Eunice was not a blood relation, and so she was left behind.
While Cooper’ s memoir is mesmerizing in its portrayal of a Liberia rarely witnessed, its description of the psychological devastation— and coping mechanisms— brought on by profound loss is equally captivating. The second half of the book tells the story of Helene’ s reinvention. Her aristocratic Liberian pedigree meant nothing in the hallways of her new school. She became the suspicious immigrant, spending lunchtime hiding in bathroom stalls and the recesses of the library rather than face the scrutiny and ridicule of her American classmates.
Cooper’ s perseverance and immense talent with language eventually catapulted her into a career as a journalist. Her success at The Wall Street Journal and later The New York Times is nearly as noteworthy as her ability to compartmentalize— or, some might say, dissociate. This mental sleight of hand is what affords
her the psychological space to create a new life and cultivate her writer’ s craft. It would be a mistake to see her ruminations over race and class in America as the hypocritical ranting of a once-privileged African. They are, instead, a reflection of her internalized journey, part of the process of becoming whole.
The walls holding back the guilt of her early entitlement, the destruction of her childhood, the murder of family and friends, and the abandonment of her foster sister would finally come crushing down under the literal weight of an American tank in Iraq. When the tank destroyed the Humvee in which she was riding, Cooper narrowly escaped death. But once she was extricated from the wreck, her mind traveled to a different war.“ At that moment,” she writes,“ as I lay in the sand in the desert, my chemsuit soaked with what turned out to be oil, not blood, I thought of Liberia.”
For the first time in over 20 years, she soon returned to her former homeland. There, in the ravaged streets, in the overgrown jungles of yesteryear’ s plantations, she confronted the ghosts of the dead— and encountered the living survivors. With much suffering and loss, Eunice had miraculously endured the hell of the Doe era, as well as the civil wars and deep poverty that accompanied the ascent of Charles Taylor to Liberia’ s presidency. Eventually, the two sisters were reunited and returned to the house at Sugar Beach. In the defiled shadow of onetime grandeur, Cooper embraced the enormity of her past, and finally came of age.
Caroline Elkins is an associate professor of history at Harvard and the author of“ Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’ s Gulag in Kenya,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2006.
A version of this review appears in print on, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: African Idyll.
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