book summary
September 19, 2013
Professor Owusu
Reflection Paper: “The Dark Child” In this novel, the author takes us to the African village of his childhood. The Dark Child is an autobiography from the life of Camara Laye’s youth in the village of Kouroussa, Guinea. The Dark Child was the author’s first work. The author begins the book with a very special contribute to his mother. He speaks upon his strong relationship his mother and he shared. Laye was raised by his mother so they shared a strong bond. His father on the other hand was a father to the village that Laye grew up in. In The Dark Child, Camara Laye's point is that life in Africa is neither the utopia described by Rousseau and others, nor the dystopia described by Golding, but a mixture of both good and bad. What he also seems to point out is that rural life, especially in Africa, has not lost its spirit of community contrary to life in more "civilized" societies. That sense of community has then rather unexpected result of making the individual more conscious of himself, as his passage from one stage to another in life is underlined by the entire community.
In Laye's story, that effect of a rite of passage is quite clear in his description of the circumcision ceremony. Laye's tale of his tribal initiation into manhood by enduring the circumcision ritual during his earlier teen years. He participates in a festival consisting of public and private ceremonies for "several days" and later a period of physical healing and recovery from the circumcision itself for over one month (Laye 112, 130). Laye spends his days of recovery lounging on a mat with the other young men, isolated from his family for the most part, allowed only to visit with his mother and father from a distance between the end of the ceremony and the day he is able to walk home comfortably (130-132). The disruption of family life in the push-and-pull created by Europe's French Colonial rubbing against existing culture in Guinea in 1947, is
Professor Owusu
Reflection Paper: “The Dark Child” In this novel, the author takes us to the African village of his childhood. The Dark Child is an autobiography from the life of Camara Laye’s youth in the village of Kouroussa, Guinea. The Dark Child was the author’s first work. The author begins the book with a very special contribute to his mother. He speaks upon his strong relationship his mother and he shared. Laye was raised by his mother so they shared a strong bond. His father on the other hand was a father to the village that Laye grew up in. In The Dark Child, Camara Laye's point is that life in Africa is neither the utopia described by Rousseau and others, nor the dystopia described by Golding, but a mixture of both good and bad. What he also seems to point out is that rural life, especially in Africa, has not lost its spirit of community contrary to life in more "civilized" societies. That sense of community has then rather unexpected result of making the individual more conscious of himself, as his passage from one stage to another in life is underlined by the entire community.
In Laye's story, that effect of a rite of passage is quite clear in his description of the circumcision ceremony. Laye's tale of his tribal initiation into manhood by enduring the circumcision ritual during his earlier teen years. He participates in a festival consisting of public and private ceremonies for "several days" and later a period of physical healing and recovery from the circumcision itself for over one month (Laye 112, 130). Laye spends his days of recovery lounging on a mat with the other young men, isolated from his family for the most part, allowed only to visit with his mother and father from a distance between the end of the ceremony and the day he is able to walk home comfortably (130-132). The disruption of family life in the push-and-pull created by Europe's French Colonial rubbing against existing culture in Guinea in 1947, is