Still Healing in Liberia

I'm sure many of our Loyal Readers thought of Helene Cooper, New York Times reporter and author of a memoir, The House at Sugar Beach, about growing up in Liberia when they heard the news about conviction of Charles Taylor, ex-President of Liberia for war crimes. In today's paper she relates the stories of how Taylor's trail of brutality tore apart the lives of her sisters Eunice and Janice and the reactions of her relatives upon hearing of Taylor's fate. The conviction was for Taylor's actions in Sierra Leone and Cooper remarks,

It was in Liberia that Mr. Taylor campaigned for president using the slogan “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him anyway,” in a telling acknowledgment of the psychological damage a pointless war can inflict on a country. It is in Liberia that, almost a decade after Mr. Taylor was driven from the country, men and women today are trying to turn former child soldiers into functional people.

There are dizzyingly complex reasons Mr. Taylor was tried for what he did in Sierra Leone, instead of Liberia, many of them involving the effort to keep the hard-won peace that now exists between factions in Liberia. I know this. I just hope that when history books recount this first head of state to be convicted by an international court since Nuremberg, they remember Liberia.

Amnesty International has issued a press release calling for additional prosecutions, reparations and more attention to war crimes in Liberia.

By the way, Janice Cooper, a physician was featured by PBS Newshour in a report last year. She returned to Liberia as project lead for a mental health initiative supported by the Atlanta-based Carter Center and Liberia Ministry’s of Health and Social Welfare,

Cooper recently paid one of her weekly visits to Monrovia Central Prison, where the mental health program has launched a groundbreaking initiative to support prisoners. The prison was so overcrowded and dirty it was singled out by Amnesty International [see report] for human rights violations. Cooper and her staff have converted a cinder block building there into a small, modest mental health facility where prisoners can now attend psychotherapy sessions and meet with family members.

Read the article to learn more about why mental health is such an urgent need in this struggling nation. Let's hope bringing Charles Taylor to justice will help heal a few more scars.

Round-Up: Familiar Authors in Unfamiliar Places

In our latest round-up, we find many of our authors stretching their wings in new genres and finding new audiences:

• Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is to be a movie directed by Wayne Wang.

• Film critic Roger Ebert is a fan of W.G. Sebald and shares some video tributes on his blog. Check out the one from the architecture students for an Austerlitz flashback.

• John Conroy (Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People) has converted his investigation of allegations of the use of torture by Chicago police officers into a play.  He described it for the NYT, “I wanted to indict the whole city of Chicago.”

• Meanwhile, Lone Star Opera (Fort Worth) has made Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls into an opera.

• Louise Erdrich (Tracks) will participate in the PBS series Faces of America which explores the genealogical histories of a dozen prominent Americans.

• Helene Cooper (The House at Sugar Beach) takes time off from the White House beat to report on surfing in Liberia.
  

• Will Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children) pen a graphic novel?

• Ann Cummins (Yellowcake) reviews books for the Arizona NPR affiliate and she's got some interesting regional picks!

• Walter Mosley (Little Scarlet) and Roberto Bolaño (Amulet) show up on LA Laker coach Phil Jackson's gift list to players.

• At the New Yorker, you can hear Junot Diaz read and discuss Edwidge Danticat's story "Water Child" and Danticat discuss Diaz' "The Dating Game."
  

• The photographer Pieter Hugo has published a collection of photographs, Nollywood, about the Nigerian film industry.  Chris Abani (Graceland) and Zina Saro-Wiwa, daughter of Ken Saro-Wiwa supply the text.  Preview this striking collection here.
  

• Orhan Pamuk (Snow) explains how his latest book, The Museum of Innocence, lead him to curate an actual museum and the NYT provides a slideshow of some of its holdings.  Want more Pamuk? How about a stroll with him through downtown LA?: "I like it when there is history, when there is decay. I'm very much impressed that this city has a decaying face. I identify it with my own." And then compare that to Istanbul.  Not juicy enough?  How about this literary match: ‘No secret, Kiran’s my girlfriend’. 

• Finally, remember our exploration of afropop legend Fela Kuti when we discussed Uzondinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation?  Kevin Mambo, star of the Broadway musical "Fela!" and Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA's Executive Director discuss the musician's commitment to human rights (and Obama's Nobel speech) on WNYC. More from NPR here.

Our November Author: Helene Cooper

Helene Cooper introduces herself and our November book, The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood:




I listened to this book in audiobook format, read by Helene Cooper, which gave me the opportunity to hear her Liberian English. In this NPR interview, the author reads briefly from the book including a passage in Liberian English. Here's a little more on the subject: Dictionary for Liberian English. Another interview with Tavis Smiley is available here and the Q&A section of this ForaTV presentation contains some interesting responses to questions about the book including the response to the book from Liberians and Liberian-Americans.

You can read Helene Cooper nearly every day in the New York Times, but of course, little of that writing reflects on her biography. This piece from last summer about the new African-Americans elite is of a more personal nature. She shares a recipe for Liberian Peanut Soup with the NYT's food blog.

The NYT showcases a new collection of photographs from the civil war and its aftermath.

The Library of Congress has a collection of American Colonization Society documents. Highlights here. Handy timeline here. More multimedia history and background on the civil war available from PBS here and here.

For more on Liberia I'm looking forward to the release of Pray the Devil Back to Hell on PBS next year as part of a series on women and war. Bill Moyers interview about the film here.

For November: The House at Sugar Beach

For November, we have selected The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper:

Helene Cooper is "Congo," a descendant of two Liberian dynasties -- traced back to the first ship of freemen that set sail from New York in 1820 to found Monrovia. Helene grew up at Sugar Beach, a twenty-two-room mansion by the sea. Her childhood was filled with servants, flashy cars, a villa in Spain, and a farmhouse up-country. It was also an African childhood, filled with knock foot games and hot pepper soup, heartmen and neegee. When Helene was eight, the Coopers took in a foster child -- a common custom among the Liberian elite. Eunice, a Bassa girl, suddenly became known as "Mrs. Cooper's daughter."

For years the Cooper daughters -- Helene, her sister Marlene, and Eunice -- blissfully enjoyed the trappings of wealth and advantage. But Liberia was like an unwatched pot of water left boiling on the stove. And on April 12, 1980, a group of soldiers staged a coup d'état, assassinating President William Tolbert and executing his cabinet. The Coopers and the entire Congo class were now the hunted, being imprisoned, shot, tortured, and raped. After a brutal daylight attack by a ragtag crew of soldiers, Helene, Marlene, and their mother fled Sugar Beach, and then Liberia, for America. They left Eunice behind.

A world away, Helene tried to assimilate as an American teenager. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill she found her passion in journalism, eventually becoming a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. She reported from every part of the globe -- except Africa -- as Liberia descended into war-torn, third-world hell.

In 2003, a near-death experience in Iraq convinced Helene that Liberia -- and Eunice -- could wait no longer. At once a deeply personal memoir and an examination of a violent and stratified country, The House at Sugar Beach tells of tragedy, forgiveness, and transcendence with unflinching honesty and a survivor's gentle humor. And at its heart, it is a story of Helene Cooper's long voyage home.

For more on Helene Cooper and The House at Sugar Beach please visit this post.