Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood [Hardcover]

Carolyn Slaughter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 7, 2002

What happened to me affected all of us—my mother, my father, my sisters, and me: we all fell apart under the horror of it, and we all tried to pretend that there was no horror.

Before the Knife is an unforgettable story—a transcendent memoir—of the beauty and brutality in a young girl’s African childhood and of the ways she found to survive it.

When Carolyn Slaughter was nearly four, she and her family moved from England to a remote outpost in the Kalahari Desert. There she was surrounded by a landscape of incomparable splendor and violence. Majestic rivers formed overnight; flocks of flamingos and herds of game gathered with equal speed to partake of the sudden waters. Termite mounds grew to the height of trees. A crocodile could drag a child from the riverbank in a second. And the author herself became the victim of an unspeakable crime.

Slaughter takes us deep into her experience of Africa and of herself at a time of anguish, but also of recovery. As she has said, “I couldn’t take my eyes off Africa. And what I saw was so beautiful that it enabled me not merely to survive, but also to find a way to save my soul.” Before the Knife is the deeply moving story of a girl who endured and transcended her family’s violence to emerge an impassioned observer and explicator of her world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A father's rape of his six-year-old daughter, "forgotten but not forgotten, known but not known," casts its shadow over this memoir of growing up during the 1950s in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. Her father, a civil servant with a penchant for family and community violence, gives the young Slaughter "the creeps," and mother is "a bag of nerves and a basket case." Nightmares, a tendency toward accidents and an attempted suicide are Slaughter's share in this dysfunctional family, which includes two sisters. Sustenance or perhaps sanity? comes from her love affair with the "beautiful beyond words" landscape: the desert and its accompanying river. Novelist and psychotherapist Slaughter (Dreams of the Kalahari) builds her memoir around places (ships, houses, schools) delineated as visually as a photograph and objects rendered tangible, e.g., the Chevy's "voluptuous shapes and wide rumps" and the "meat knife with a beautiful, chiseled end" (which, incidentally, was the instrument of a failed attempt to kill her father). Two lives merge here, one of incredible beauty and one of incredible pain. Although the subject suggests comparison with Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Slaughter's memoir is closer, thematically, to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. "You were always willing to go down into the dark without a candle," Slaughter's older sister says when they are reconciled adults, "but I'm not." Slaughter has succeeded in penning a chilling and compelling exorcism.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-As a child, Slaughter was raped repeatedly by her father, beginning when she was six years old. Born in India about the time of independence, she and her family soon traveled back to England along with the rest of the British colonialists, where her father determined he could not live without the incipient power held by minor bureaucrats in colonial service to the Queen. In short order, Slaughter, her older sister, and her mother were following him to Africa, to the Kalahari Desert and the British protectorate known today as Botswana. Her mother's recurring depressions, worsened by the birth of a third daughter, and her father's frustration and anger with the approaching end of British colonialism and his own mental illness, led to the incest and eventual violence between him and his daughter. Slaughter's style is lyrical and haunting. In beautifully painted prose, she conveys her great love for the magnificence of Africa. Readers are shown how she sought solace from her environment in an effort to blot out the pain of her father's betrayal and her mother's refusal to acknowledge the abuse. As if piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, readers come to understand the author's actions. Handled with dignity, the story tells of survival and strength in the 1950s but it is relevant today.
Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (May 7, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375413979
• ISBN-13: 978-0375413971
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,906,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a harrowing, beautiful book about survival, February 11, 2003

By 

A. Craig "Amanda Craig" (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood (Hardcover)

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.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I NEED TO KNOW MORE!!, June 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood (Hardcover)

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.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Freud knew all about it, and decided it was, "too hot to han, October 25, 2002

By 

Stuart Hoffman "jazzman" (cheery hill, nj) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood (Hardcover)

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.