“Harrowing December”: A Survival Story Captured in Readable and Entertaining Style

In “Harrowing December,” Prof. Momoh Sekou Dudu’s recently published memoir, he descriptively tells a personal survival story that is super-charged with countless life’s lessons.  The author walks the reader through his life from his boyhood in Gordorlahun, his ancestral village in Lofa County, northern Liberia, to his present time in Midwestern North America.  He recounts his childhood memories of the society he was born into.  Right from the get-go, I recognized some of the book’s strong attributes: clear organization, use of appropriate language, depth of discussion of the main subject, and the skillful use of a first-person narrator.

This work, in fact, could be considered Prof. Dudu’s magnum opus for the inimitable ability he exhibited in descriptively narrating his story in a fashion that does not let go of its grip on the reader; it seizes your attention, keeps you glued to the story, and renders you powerless when you contemplate taking a breather.  The end of a chapter does not let you off the mesmerizing train either; it creates in you, instead, an unyielding hunger to read on. And on you surely will go—one chapter after the other. 

The narration in Part One lends itself successfully to the war experience of every Liberian. I thoroughly enjoyed the narration in “The Beginnings” and “The Long Goodbye” – all of Part One.  In this part of the 209-page book, the author speaks to readers, retelling his boyhood experiences in a remote African village. The narration here meshes well with the biographical narrative of every African, born and bred in a remote village. For me, [a farmer’s daughter] I was taken on a journey in history. In my mind’s eye came the image of deep yellow or golden rice fields on a steep hill or mountain; the glows of dark purple and plummy eggplants; the hot reddish and greenish looks of peppers and tomatoes as they grew on our farm in PTP (Prime Timber Product)—near Zwedru city, Grand Gedeh County, southeast Liberia. This is where my dad, Amadou Fofana, spent most of his days, cultivating a mixed farm consisting of up and lowland rice, veggies, corn, and cassava, and fishing in nearby narrow rivers---all done by hand.  The author’s account in this part of “Harrowing December” also brought a vivid picture to my mind of how my family depended solely on subsistence farming to make ends meet.

Author Dudu (photo credit: Lassana Bamba)

As in almost any work of literature, however, this book does not come without its fair share of areas upon which improvements could surely be made in future revisions: a couple of typographical errors here and there and a few instances of not entirely strong transitions.  In any case, though, these correctable lapses do not overshadow, in the least bit, the analytical, descriptive and convincing narrative “Harrowing December” offers the reader.

I would recommend, without hesitation, “Harrowing December” for reading by everyone, especially those of us that were brutally uprooted from our various communities of origin by the Liberian civil war and exposed to countless challenges in exile.