Review by Damien Roos
Graywolf Press / June, 2020 / 264 pp
“If the war had not happened…”
This rumination, shared among characters in Wayétu Moore’s new memoir, earns answers both whimsical and contemplative of what might have been: “Liberia would be a goliath right now,” “our lives would have been better,” “my wife would have stayed.”
Liberia’s first civil war pervades The Dragons, The Giant, The Women; a compelling, sometimes amorphous antagonist. Moore, who had just turned five when the rebels invaded her village, mythologizes the meaning of the conflict she had heard discussed among the adults. She likens her country’s increasingly authoritarian president to a well-meaning prince in folklore who enters a forest to slay a dragon and save his village, only to become the dragon himself. It is an astute parable about power in a conflict with no distinctly righteous side. It is also, like much of the memoir, a glimpse into the mind of the writer-to-be as she uses story to make sense of a senseless world.
The civil war escalates rapidly, exploding the merry domesticity of Moore’s youth early on. The first section of the memoir, “Rainy Season” (the book’s four sections alternate between rainy and dry), is a riveting account of her family’s attempt to flee Liberia. Moore and her two sisters run, hand-in-hand with their father, grandmother, and cousin, along battle-ravaged roads in Liberia’s countryside, dodging the rebel army’s reckless, malicious child soldiers. Amid the terrors surrounding them, softened and recontextualized by childhood—Moore’s father tells the girls that the gunfire is drums and the dead on the ground are just people asleep—the imaginative young girl perceives fantastical threats such as odious Monkey Men, tree branches that “made the faces of grieving men,” and a storied movie character rumored to haunt the woods. Moore’s twisting of dangers both actual and imagined into a child’s composite reality conveys the push-pull between knowledge and innocence. By the end of the first section, the spellbound reader wonders if the sudden presence of a female rebel soldier who finds them in hiding is real, especially when she claims to have come on a mission to rescue them.
Similar to her debut novel, She Would Be King, Moore’s memoir migrates back and forth between her native Liberia and the United States. And while that novel parlayed an early chapter in Liberia’s history, her memoir expresses an early chapter in her own. Moore details the lingering effects of her traumatic experience in depictions of haunting nightmares, describing her sense of alienation at being pulled out of her culture at a young age and plunked into, of all places, suburban Texas:
They knew my name and found it “neat” that I was African, all smiling, all curious, especially when they saw Mam at school events wearing a traditional lappa rather than one of the many pairs of jeans she had recently purchased.
Self-identity is often a crucial question in memoir. Moore wrestles with it throughout, recounting how it feels being appropriated into a group of friends with whom she has little in common except skin color. It is through this group of lunch table pals, referred to affectionately as “the Blackgirls,” that Moore realizes something her parents had attempted to communicate about their new country: “skin color was king--king above nationality, king above life stories and, yes, even king above Christ.” The discovery has a profound impact on Moore as she experiences more racism across her young adulthood. A white boyfriend says to her, “You’re African, not really like American black. So why do you take all this race stuff so seriously?” The rub is multi-faceted. Moore explains that, in addition to being viewed as one of the Blackgirls, a group she feels she walks among as an impostor, she battles with the many preconceptions Americans hold of Africans:
We took the teasing, the name-calling, the misunderstanding, the “Didn’t you ride giraffes in Africa?” the “Did y’all have houses there?” the “Africans are too aggressive” the “Y’all Africans think you’re better” the “Well, you don’t look African” the “When I said that thing, I was talking about other Africans” the “Does anyone in your family do 409 scams?”...the “I’m not racist, but” the “damned black people” the “But why do they have nice cars and live in the projects?” the “My mom didn’t really mean that thing she said. You know how the older generation is” the “Did you get any help on this paper?”
That the Liberian civil war did happen meant a reckoning for Moore at far too young an age. Over time, her nightmares cede to dreams about that female rebel soldier who once saved her and her family. She recalls the incident and wonders about that armed woman in the camouflage vest with her bottle of palm oil, who she was and why she’d really come. The question leads Moore to the story of her mother’s experiences during that time—her mother was studying in New York on a Fulbright Scholarship when the war broke out, at first only present as a voice on the phone, a memory to be missed. Her own gripping story comprises the third section, shining a new light on the mystery of Moore’s family’s rescue.
The Dragons, The Giant, The Women is a captivating story of Moore’s struggles with trauma, racism, self-love, and self-identification. Yet her family is its beating heart, their love as present on each page as that bitter civil war. We see her father’s strength and courage in their flight early on (hint: he is neither a dragon nor a woman), and her mother’s wisdom and resolve as she determines the best way to help the others half a world away. We see the commiseration of her sympathetic sisters. Moore writes, “Suffering is a part of everyone’s story.” Fortunate for her that she had the love and support of family to get by. Fortunate are we who get to read about it.
Damien Roos is an MFA candidate in Fiction at The New School, an editorial fellow at Guernica Magazine and a reader for PANK. His work has appeared in such outlets as New South Journal, The Master's Review and Gravel. He lives in New York City with his wife and blue nose pitbull.