The Amputated Memory: A Song-Novel (Women Writing Africa) - Tapa dura

"A fascinating text by a major African woman writer, poet, performer, celebrating female strength, the joy and pain of being a woman. Resonantly titled, a must read for students and scholars of African and postcolonial literature, and of or general readers of classic and world fiction." --Ketu H. Katrak, University of California, Irvine, author of Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers of the Third World

"Werewere Liking's novel or 'chant-roman' is a truly remarkable achievement illustrating the potential of African literature to renew and regenerate its forms. Through innovative and fully successful use of traditional songs, praise-naming, lullaby, letters and myth, the novel is unique in its form." --The 25th Noma Award for Publishing in Africa

"Weaving together history and memory...Liking recaptures the Cameroonian anticolonial resistance movement in the late fifties. And she does so very compellingly through women who have refused to remain victims and who heal both their public and personal trauma." --Odile Cazenave, Boston University, author of A New Generation of African Writers in Paris and Rebellious Women

"Fascinating...Liking's writing can be gorgeously lyrical and full of wisdom and humor . . . evoking a musical flow from one chapter to the next." --MultiCultural Review

"Liking's grand goal--creating a literary purgative meant to heal Africa--results in an expansive, eclectic, and innovative novel." --Women's Review of Books

When Halla Njoke decides to write a biography of her Aunt Roz, the admired old woman tells her to write her own life first. Halla eventually embarks on a personal narrative linked to other generations and multiple female ancestors. Provocatively, there are three Aunts Roz and two Mothers Naja in this panorama of women's lives encompassing rural village life and its traditions, the anticolonial struggle against the French in the 1950s, and the increasingly "globalized" culture and society in a chaotic West African city in the decades after independence.
A contemporary Things Fall Apart, The Amputated Memory is a multilayered epic on history lost and reclaimed. Werewere Liking traces the saga of Halla as she "remembers," and also strategically forgets, significant moments in her tumultuous past as well as the cultural past of her country.
A chant roman (literally "a song novel"), The Amputated Memory employs storytelling techniques clearly adapted from Africa's oral tradition. It is also a coming-of-age story: Self-knowledge is at the center of Halla's quest - from the revelation of how her own fate and that of Aunt Roz are inextricably linked, to her traumatic reckoning with the legacy of her deceased father, a lethal energy field for anyone close to him.