BEFORE THE KNIFE: Memories of an African Childhood
Carolyn Slaughter, . . Knopf, $23 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-375-41397-1
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 (
Reviewed on: 04/15/2002
Genre: Nonfiction