BEFORE THE KNIFE

A novelist (Dreams of the Kalahari, 1981, not reviewed) recalls the difficulties of her African girlhood, including a series of brutal rapes by her father, beginning when she was six.

Slaughter offers a stark account of her life in Africa with a dour, brutal father and manic mother. Her father, a British foreign-service officer who was around for the fall of the Raj in India, moves thereafter to Africa, where he accepts one dreary posting after another at the time that many countries on the continent were emerging from generations of colonial control. Slaughter begins with her early childhood on the journey from England to Africa and ends with her return a dozen or so years later. In between, she documents all sorts of unpleasantness(from having to drink her own urine (a punishment for wetting herself at school), to seeing her father’s testicles dangle outside his shorts, to hearing of children eaten by crocodiles, to plotting (and very nearly executing) the murder of her father. “I should have known that he’d be unkillable,” she sighs. She eventually goes off to boarding school, where she shocks the nuns with her intransigence and ignorance, falls in love with a fellow student named Virginia (they become fast friends and do not, Slaughter declares, become physically intimate), and eventually(with the older Virginia as her mentor(begins to gain some control of her life. What Slaughter does not take control of here is her language. At even the most poignant moments, she cannot resist the fatal allure of cliché (people go ballistic, have steady streams of conversation, and wash their hands of each other) and at other times she cannot manage more than the banal: “Only in poetry,” she writes, “could I find a mirror for the innermost life of the mind.” She asserts that she did not remember the rapes until ten years ago, when shards of memories began to slice at her.

Undeniable horror, unremarkable writing.