Camara Laye (1928–1980)

The Dark Child is an autobiography detailing the author’s childhood in French Guinea during the 1930’s and 40’s. Similar to Land of Childhood, which I’ve previously reviewed, this is a book that looks back fondly on a homeland that the author has left behind. In this case, the author wrote after traveling to France to continue his education, and it’s little wonder to me that he might have been homesick and experiencing culture shock.

The result is a book that provides a marvelous show more opportunity for the modern reader to learn about the customs of the time and for readers from other cultures to gain a window into this one. The author describes what his ordinary life was like, from watching his father work as a blacksmith/goldsmith to undergoing traditional coming-of-age practices. He expresses regret that there are aspects of his people’s traditions and beliefs that he does not understand because of his schooling, which was of an unusual amount compared to his peers and obviously a break from the way of life that had been traditional in his homeland up to that point. The reader is forced to wonder how much tradition has been lost.

This book is well written from beginning to end. The style is simple but powerful, and it’s clear from the beginning that the author had deep themes in mind while choosing which parts of his life to detail and in what ways.

The only thing readers may find potentially triggering is the presence of male and female circumcision. The author undergoes the former, and while the latter is mentioned so briefly it’s easy for an ignorant reader to miss it, readers who know the details from other sources may have a very different experience.

Apart from that, I was personally bothered by the description on the back of my copy, which describes French Guinea as “a place steeped in mystery”. From whose perspective? Surely not the people who lived there. And if readers such as myself are ignorant, it’s not because those native people are hiding anything. It’s likely because US schools (according to my experience) prefer to teach British literature and Greek and Roman mythology, effectively choosing which foreign countries should be familiar to us and which should seem “mysterious”.

Similarly, this back cover has a quote referring to the author as “Laye”, but after reading the book it became clear that “Laye” is his first name, while his family name is “Camara”. Unfortunately I could not find out from a web search whether the Mandinka people prefer to be referred to by their first name in cases where people with a European-style name would be referred to by their surname, but at best I find fault with the introduction that could have explained such things. After all, it was clearly setting about to provide historical and cultural context to non-African readers anyway. And that being the case, I’m not sure why this introduction was written by a man from Haiti who has no ties to or particular knowledge of French Guinea that his Wikipedia article sees fit to mention. It must have also been written quite a long time ago, since he died in 1975.

Overall, I’m glad that an English translation exists (as the original was written in French), but I’m disappointed by signs that the English-speaking world continues to showcase such little regard for the culture that Camara Laye himself celebrates. I would love to see a new edition of this classic, with an introduction by a modern author or scholar from what is now the independent country of Guinea. I’m sure such a person would have a lot of valuable things to say. In the meantime, I would advise readers to ignore everything on the back cover, skip the introduction, and simply read what the author himself wrote. You can do your own historical and cultural research if you would like.

I must say that, apart from these things, my greatest disappointment with the book was the fact that it didn’t go on to describe the author’s experiences in France and what happened after. Of course, this is an unfair criticism since it was written while the author was still in France, and the conclusion given is the surely the best he could have provided at that time of his life. But it goes to show how much I cared about him by the end that I wanted to see him build a good life for himself and be reunited with his family who were so aggrieved to part with him.

This is a good book. If you’re participating in an Around the World reading challenge or have any interest in learning about cultures you may not have been taught about at your school, I highly recommend it. Similarly, it’s a great choice if you like autobiographies portraying ordinary life with skillful writing. This one deserves more attention than it seems to have thus far received. show less

This is a fairly short and simple autobiographical account of a boy growing up in Guinea in the 1930s and 40s. Camara Laye wrote it in 1954 while studying in France, and you can feel the nostalgia for his homeland. Although the writing style is quite understated, the emotion is communicated quite effectively, and it's very moving in places.

As the title suggests, the book only deals with his childhood, and it is faithful to a child's outlook on the world. At the start, his entire world is the show more veranda around his father's hut. Then it gradually expands to the rest of the concession, then to school, the town of Kourassa, then the wider country of Guinea when he goes off to study in the capital Conakry. Finally the link with childhood is severed altogether as he gets on a plane to France.

The mixture of pain and excitement at each stage of growing up is beautifully rendered. He wants to be part of his family, to follow his father as a blacksmith or his uncle as a farmer, but always knows that his success in school is moving him further away from that. He is being marked out for a different future, his family are sacrificing to give him something better, and he wants that, but also wants to stay where he is. His parents, too, are caught in this conflict of wanting him to succeed but knowing that his success means his departure from their lives.

Quite a bit of time is spent describing the circumcision rite, which may be of anthropological interest to some, but was for me more interesting as a symbol of the other changes he goes through in the book, the pain and fear at something new, the loss of the old, but also the anticipation of being a man, the pride he feels when he is given his own hut and his own grown-up clothes.

I enjoyed this book as an insight into a life at a moment of great change, starting in a very traditional setting and moving very quickly into different worlds. A lot of the political context is absent - French colonialism, for example, is only a shadowy presence in the book - but I don't see this as a fault. This is a childhood memoir, and does no more or less than you'd expect: it gives a faithful depiction of the author's early years. I found it interesting and quite moving. show less

Kafka plus Conrad turned upside down in Africa? Yes. Camara re-writes the Heart of Darkness as if it were a Kafkan parable, and, because that wasn't enough, writes from the close third POV of a white man, whose perceptions are entirely untrustworthy. But this is no grand existential statement about subjectivism and so on. The point is quite clear, and quite terrifying for the white reader: Clarence is simply incapable of experiencing or understanding the (unnamed) West African country he show more finds himself in. What he experiences, instead, are all the usual cliches. Africa smells. Africans jump up and down a lot. Africa is full of charlatans and corruption. Africa is filthy. Africa is full of sexually available women. And so on.

Most of these "experiences" are caused by his own stupidity, whether that's an inability to understand the people around him, an inability to understand himself, or because he's doped out of his mind.

It's hard to over-state the difficulty of this novel. It's not difficult for a reader--there's a bit of surrealism, which is tough to deal with, but mostly it's funny, the set-pieces are excellent, and it's easy to follow what's going on. When one can't understand what's going on, that's because Clarence can't, either, and you just have to stick with it and wait for the one of the not-white characters to explain what Clarence's own stupidity is hiding from him (and us).

But it must have been very difficult to write such a conceptually coherent novel. To take just one small example, "an unnamed West African country" is already a whopping cliche. And yet Camara sticks to it, not because he doesn't want to set it in, e.g., Guinea, but because people like Clarence really do experience Africa as if it were one place, and so the names of nations/peoples/geographies are unimportant to them (us). Camara allows us to experience the women in the novel as sexual objects or housemaids, not because that's what he thinks women are, but because, again, that how people like Clarence (us) experience African women. That's before we get to the way he imbues Kafka's characteristic situations with a different narrative engine (the trip to the Castle/King becomes waiting for the King to come to Clarence), and incorporates Conrad (and inverts him: the King is the antithesis of Kurtz), and so on.

My only criticism is that the prose, whether it's Camara's or the translators, is utilitarian at best. I itch to edit this book. Random example: "And again he looked at the tunnel walls with an expression of terror on his face." On what else, I wonder, would the expression of terror be? Delete. show less

The African Child is Camara Laye's autobiographical account of his boyhood in (then French) Guinean small town and the countryside around it, in the 1930s and 40s, and his way to the capital and abroad for education.

The book's strenghts and weaknesses are possibly the same, depending on the viewpoint: it is quiet, slow, down to earth, the language is simple but wordy ... with a lot of words and with admirable, nearly ethnographical accuracy, the happening of nothing much is described. This show more may be interesting or boring.

Once again it is not possible to avoid the feeling this has been written for outsiders, Europeans; explanations, descriptions, repetitive use of expressions like 'our custom'.

To me, now, the most interesting aspect of the account was that it, in a way, illustrated the background of a character I've met in so many other books from the area: an intelligent young man (or woman in few cases) from French Western Africa who receives a scholarship in France--once in a lifetime chance. He leaves his homeland heart and head full of ideas and ideals. He will work hard and come back to do good for his (newly independent) country. Well, they usually do come back. But they come back changed, or to a country that has changed; unable to do the good they were thinking before, or too busy with their own good.

The colonialism is strikingly absent from the account. No comment on its goods or bads is given. The schooling is the only thing where the presense of the French shows. Everything else seems to be as it has always been. I don't know what does this indicate, but curious it was, considering the age of the book, the account ending just about 10 years before the country's independence. show less