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Guardian of the Word
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17493 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1990 |
3,171 Words |
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Charles R. Larson
Charles R. Larson is an internationally known authority on
Third World literature. He is the author of The Emergence of
African Fiction, The Novel in the Third World, and American
Indian Fiction. His novel The Insect Colony is set in West
Africa during the Nigerian civil war. He has edited several
anthologies of international writing and served as general
editor of Collier Books' African/American Library. He teaches
literature at American University in Washington, D.C. |
THE RADIANCE OF THE KING
Camara Laye
New York: Vintage International, 1989
305 pp., $9.95
“The writer is a feeble man who takes the burden of society upon his shoulders."
These words by Camara Laye (pronounced lie), an African writer who died in 1980, more than adequately describe the life on the man himself, as well as the major metaphor of his work. The poet, the artist, is someone we hardly deserve, and yet he willingly bears the burdens of his society even as they threaten to weigh him down.
Camara Laye, who was born in Guinea in 1924, never intended to become a writer or the conscience of his people. His first book, The African Child (L'enfant noir), 1954, was composed in loneliness and isolation when Laye was a student in Paris in the early 1950s. When Laye told his government that he wanted to earn a baccalaureate instead of the trade school degree that he had been sent overseas to acquire, his funds were abruptly cut off. The purity of The African Child (which includes a loving portrait of the author's mother) has usually been attributed to the accident of its origin. Laye began writing the account of his childhood because he feared he would forget the beauty of his traditional life.
When he eventually retuned to Guinea at the end of the decade, he was already heralded in Europe as an important African writer, a profession that was virtually unknown on the sub-Saharan continent. The African
... (1995 of 17347 Characters)
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