The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper (2008)
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pauraque[This is a revision of a review I first posted to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
50books_poc on December 27th, 2010. It has been edited for clarity. Also interesting to note that in 2015 Cooper and her colleagues at the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Ebola epidemic.]
Born in Liberia and descended from the nation's founders, Helene Cooper lived there for 14 years as a member of the wealthy elite. She knew her homeland—its unique history, its sights, its tastes, its scents, its joys and its dangers. When Liberia's bloody revolution finally came in 1980, Cooper had to leave a home she knew well. But as she would come to realize, she did not know it nearly so well as she thought she did.
I didn't know anything about Liberia before I started reading, but that was no barrier; Cooper weaves the story of her nation together with a vivid portrait of her own privileged childhood. Indeed, the two are inseparable. When a group of freeborn and formerly-enslaved Black Americans came to west Africa in 1821 in search of a better home (with the financial and logistical support of white Americans who thought America would be better off without free Blacks in it) they found that the place was inhabited by African people who did not want to be colonized, whether the colonists were white or Black. But the Americans had superior firepower, and they took the Africans' land by force. That was the beginning of Liberia.
The descendants of those Americans came to form Liberia's upper class, the so-called "Congo people." They were a minority who owned and controlled the majority of everything, while the native people of the area lived mostly in poverty. The goal was to create a new nation similar to the US, and the parallels are certainly striking, especially the patriotic propaganda that's fed to the kids about how the country came to be. As a child, Cooper was ignorant of her privilege as a Congo girl. The second half of the book, after her flight to the US, deals with her struggle to understand the privilege she'd enjoyed—and lost—and how it was at the very root of why Liberia as she knew it could not survive.
I think the first half of the book, her experiences before and during the coup, is the strongest. Much of her life in the US is skimmed over quickly; I would have been interested to hear much more about what it was like adjusting to a completely different culture and social position. She makes herself seem somewhat isolated by comparison to the highly interconnected world of her childhood, and I would have liked to see that delved into more. Nonetheless, I found it a good and eye-opening book. It made me think about how much information I'm missing about conflicts around the world, just seeing events in the news with little context or explanation provided.
50books_poc on December 27th, 2010. It has been edited for clarity. Also interesting to note that in 2015 Cooper and her colleagues at the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on the Ebola epidemic.]Born in Liberia and descended from the nation's founders, Helene Cooper lived there for 14 years as a member of the wealthy elite. She knew her homeland—its unique history, its sights, its tastes, its scents, its joys and its dangers. When Liberia's bloody revolution finally came in 1980, Cooper had to leave a home she knew well. But as she would come to realize, she did not know it nearly so well as she thought she did.
I didn't know anything about Liberia before I started reading, but that was no barrier; Cooper weaves the story of her nation together with a vivid portrait of her own privileged childhood. Indeed, the two are inseparable. When a group of freeborn and formerly-enslaved Black Americans came to west Africa in 1821 in search of a better home (with the financial and logistical support of white Americans who thought America would be better off without free Blacks in it) they found that the place was inhabited by African people who did not want to be colonized, whether the colonists were white or Black. But the Americans had superior firepower, and they took the Africans' land by force. That was the beginning of Liberia.
The descendants of those Americans came to form Liberia's upper class, the so-called "Congo people." They were a minority who owned and controlled the majority of everything, while the native people of the area lived mostly in poverty. The goal was to create a new nation similar to the US, and the parallels are certainly striking, especially the patriotic propaganda that's fed to the kids about how the country came to be. As a child, Cooper was ignorant of her privilege as a Congo girl. The second half of the book, after her flight to the US, deals with her struggle to understand the privilege she'd enjoyed—and lost—and how it was at the very root of why Liberia as she knew it could not survive.
I think the first half of the book, her experiences before and during the coup, is the strongest. Much of her life in the US is skimmed over quickly; I would have been interested to hear much more about what it was like adjusting to a completely different culture and social position. She makes herself seem somewhat isolated by comparison to the highly interconnected world of her childhood, and I would have liked to see that delved into more. Nonetheless, I found it a good and eye-opening book. It made me think about how much information I'm missing about conflicts around the world, just seeing events in the news with little context or explanation provided.
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