ACROSS THE BRIDGE; REMEMBERING AFRICA FROM THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS
Date
2014-06-05
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MFA in Creative Writing, The University of Tampa
Abstract
By the time she arrived in the United States in 1996, Cheryl had been a victim of the First Liberian Civil War which was started in 1989 as a coup attempt by rebel leader, Charles Taylor, to overthrow corrupt president, Samuel Kanyon Doe. Cheryl’s father was a member of Doe’s cabinet. The coup soon escalated into a war as Liberia unraveled and rebels fought to eliminate remnants of Doe’s government. Founded in 1847 by African American freed slaves, Liberia had undergone years of unrest because of divisions between Americo-Liberians and Native-Liberians. Once Cheryl’s father fled the country and her mother was captured and forced to live with the warlord Prince Johnson, Cheryl soon found herself in the middle of war, separated from her family, and coping with a lifestyle much different from the privileged, Americo-Liberian one she had grown accustomed to. Fifteen years later, she suddenly finds herself reliving those years from a remote town within the Appalachian Mountains.
Mirroring memory and the psychology of war trauma, this work of nonfiction uses two distinct narrative modes and voices to capture: Liberia from a child’s perspective in the early 1990s, and rural America from an adult’s contemplation in the year 2012; a Liberian girl in the middle of war, an American woman recovering from war.
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First Liberian Civil War, Creative Nonfiction, Liberia, Appalachian Mountains, War trauma, Memory