Customer Reviews

Before the Knife

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If you've read that this is a book about a child raped by her father, you may well want to give it a miss. But you shouldn't, because although the horror of this event (which Slaughter, unlike most, finds corroboration for)frames her narrative it is also a remarkable story of an African childhood.
Her father, having bullied his way through the dying days of British colonial rule in India, found he couldn't settle in England, so set off with wife and two daughters for Africa. This is far from being the 'White Mischief' kind of existence, especially as the family wound up in the Kalahari desert. The bleakness and hash beauty of the landscape are what saves Carolyn - alongside discovering one true friend at school.
Slaughter is an excellent novelist who mysteriously fell silent many years ago. This is the reason why, and every pages rings with a sort of piercing truthfulness and pain. It's a story of great courage which must have taken greater courage to write.

This is a fabulous book, and one can't help but compare it to Alexandra Fuller's "Don't Let's Go to The Dogs Tonight".

The difference is that although Fuller's parents were hard-drinking and unconventional, they loved their children enormously. Carolyn Slaughter had such toxic parents that it is amazing she has become an accomplished, funtioning person. Horribly abused by her father, physically as well as the sexual abuse, she was totally abandoned emotionally by her mother. I almost hated her mother more than the father, as she seemed to have no maternal feelings whatsoever.

My only complaint is that she ended the book when she left Africa as a teenager. She tells us in the epilogue that her parents and one of her sisters have all died, but doesen't say anything about their years back in England and whether she continued to have any relationship with her parents and what finally resulted in her having any self-esteem at all. I hope she is busy writing a follow-up. I highly recommend this book as well as Fuller's book.

When Freud's female patients complained of forced sex with their fathers at the ages of three, four, five, etc., at first he was incredulous. How could this be? These were not people from the gutter. He treated refined Vienesse burgers, not slum vermin. He knew some were pure fantasy. That many good girls wanted to marry daddy, and as neurotic adults have sex with daddy. But they couldn't ALL be fantasies. However, even trailblazers like Freud have their limits, and he relegated his"Seduction Theory" to fantasy, and dropped it like a hot potato. With him being Jewish in pre Holocaust Vienna, and his enemies castigating him as the Jew doctor who thinks everything has a sexual meaning, can you blame him? In her disturbing book, "Before the Knife", Carolyn Slaughter states on page four,"....the night that my father first raped me. I was six years old." That's the last we hear of this horror untill the final pages of the book. Many of us, as troubled children are convinced we are crazy, born to suffer, and are "total losers", but can't pinpoint a trauma to explain the feeling. Recent reasons such as "chemical imbalance" have helped to explain some mental illness. It seems that Carolyn Slaughter had proof of what turned her into a crazy person, and the one person who could have given her comfort and a safe haven was another crazy person, her mother, who refused to believe such "nonsense". In between the first statement of her rape, and it's final statemet at the end of the book is of a child growing up in that land of incredible human suffering, and incredible beauties of nature, Africa. It's another one of the Creator's jokes. The scenery is lovely, but you'll probably die of famine, plague, tribal war, or the master's whip. Dying of old age is granted to very few. This is not a beach book, and it's pages must have been stained with a lot of tears during it's creation.

The saga by Ms. Slaughter is a touching tale of courage, and determination ... a tragedy using the failed British Empire rape of India and Africa as a backdrop to to the personal rape and subsequent journey of this brave Lady. She emerged triumphant... the Empire failed.

Ms. Slaughter. Well Done.

I picked this book up because it takes place in Africa - one of my interests. But it's so much more.

At the age of 6, Carolyn Slaughter's life changed. Her mother had another baby - a girl - and all of a sudden for some reason Carolyn's behavior drastically changes. She has violent nightmares of being suffocated, she becomes a bully, a poor learner and a big problem at school. She even tries to kill her father with a knife.

Her only time free of this behavior is the summer she spends with an Afrikiaans family while her mother and father go home for a visit. Her time with them is blissful but can't last.

It's only when she's grown with a family of her own that unexpectedly one day she has a frightening revelation which explains everything.

A remarkable important book about survival.

This gorgeously, generously written memoir by the novelist, Carolyn Slaughter, is certain to be on my list of Best Books at year's end. These are Slaughter's young years from birth in India to age 14. She moved with her parents from India to England to Africa where she spent most of her childhood, or what should have been her childhood. A brilliant, affecting, important book. Slaughter has been one of my favorite writers since I read her Africa novels (highly recommended!) years ago: Dreams of the Kalahari and The Innocents.

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.

Captivating, , honest, searing, this is a beautifully rendered story of a painfully difficult childhood. Carolyn Slaughter made me fall in love with the Africa of her childhood while wanting to whisk her away from that very childhood.

So I confess to having not done so (finishing the book.) I am a mere 25 pages from the ending, and I am left feeling not more than a little perplexed. There is the niggling sense that the author is not playing fair. She describes a childhood rife with neglect and pain, but increasingly she is starring in her memories in a sort of grandiose, romantic way. I find myself not trusting the narrator's voice. It has become besot with victimization, so that her memories begin to all sound the same: poor, poor me. Horrid parents. Boarding schools and hand-me-downs, cruel nuns, lost love, nothing going right! Which is sad, don't get me wrong. But other authors can write about such heartache without seeming to "star" themselves in such a superlative way.
I read on, because the author is a gifted writer, and she can describe the African bush with much eloquence. She refuses to tell the American reader the difference between "African", "Afrikan" and "Afrikaan," along with what the various native foods and phrases might translate for us in the United States. For some reason, this lack of explanation begins to feel like condenscension, and coupled with the author's ascending view of herself and her suffering, so does the whole book. Interesting read. I would like to finish it, if for no other reason than to see if the author revisits the bomb she dropped in the introduction. Will she? Won't she? I don't think she's been entirely fair by dragging it out this long.