The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir

“Papa was a good man. Many people told him this. And I thought I was a good girl, and always apologized when I pinched too hard and one of my sisters cried.” 

Boy rebels confront Wayetu, her father, and her siblings. The boys yell and point guns, prompting Wayetu to cry. She recreates the thoughts of her five-year-old self who cannot understand why the boys have guns and why they point those guns at her and her family. In her young mind, being quintessentially “good” should be enough to elude harm. 

“All of them had big eyes, sharp teeth and moved like they were playing football, chasing a moving target, but nothing was on the ground.” 

Moore recalls her observations of the boy rebels. She describes them as manic and monstrous. The latter conforms to the book’s fairy-tale motif, while the former observation hints at the likelihood that the boy rebels were given drugs to make it easier for them to stalk and kill perceived enemies. 

“Perhaps this was only a long journey to market and the sounds outside were only festival drums and something bad happened at the festival and that was why everybody had to come to this place, but tomorrow we would be dancing together because maybe this was a surprise for us since they liked giving us surprises when we least expected it.” 

Wayetu, her family, Brother James, and Torma are staying at ETMI for refuge. Still not completely understanding why they are there (largely because her family shields her from the harsher truths of the civil war), Wayetu imagines that the gunshots are festival drums and that the forced gathering at ETMI is a preparation for something special.

“I leaned into Ol’ Ma and daydreamed to ease my hunger, the dryness that pained my throat, making it as hard to swallow as it now was to cry.” 

Gus has just saved a friend, Amos, from being shot by a 14-year-old rebel. The Moore family then hides out with him in a small shack that was incinerated. Once again, Wayetu uses her curiosity to escape from her present feelings of hunger and thirst. She wonders about the family that once lived in the house and what her mother’s life is like in the US.

“Men were talking plenty during this war. Men were deciding where to go and when to go and when to stop. They were deciding where to hide and what to eat and when to eat. They were deciding who would be killed and who would live. They were deciding which direction the planes would fly and when they would be removed from the sky. And they were dividing plates of not-enough food and leading the way. And those male dogs howling in the distance, bellies full of rotting male carcasses, as some rebel men decided who would cut their throats and roast them for that night’s meal. And those men at the edge of the forest, those princes and rebels who wished to kill Hawa Undu.”

Hawa Undu is what Moore calls President Samuel Doe. He’s one of the “dragons” to whom she refers in the book’s title. Her adult self reflects on what her younger self observes: the dominance of men, who kidnapped and drugged boys to do their bidding, in the civil war. Men controlled the dialogue, determined the fates of others, and supplied small rations of food. Moore underscores the sexism inherent in this control. 

“While we traveled through the checkpoints to Junde, I remembered, though he looked quite different and skinnier now than he was in Caldwell, that Papa had the incredible power to transform into a giant who could protect us and carry us away.” 

Moore alludes directly to her father as “a giant.” He serves as a protective force and a symbol of indomitable courage in this first section, and he takes on mythological proportions for her despite his feeble physical condition. 

“When we continued, I ran to Papa’s side and continued to hold on to his legs. My power was minimal, but maybe it would be what he needed, if the soldiers came for us, to gather me and the rest of his fairies, Wi and K, and Torma, too, and Ma and Brother James and Amos. Perhaps it would help him, if only small small, but still, to gather us together and hold us over his shoulder until we laughed ourselves into disappearance and rest, fufu dinner and so much Tang powder that our tongues remained orange for days after.” 

Gus is preparing to go through a checkpoint where he has come under suspicion for being a member of the “wrong” tribe. Wayetu, who longs to be near her father during this trying moment, holds on to him lest he slip from her grasp forever. She alludes to gathering strength, if only a bit, from those who love you, laugh with you, and eat with you. She intersperses her memories of happier times with her fear of nearly witnessing a horror.

“During wartime, a man will not only find the person he hates to kill him, but he will find and kill anyone whom he thinks the person he hates loves or knows or once did business with.”

Gus is in line at the checkpoint, where members of the Gola and Congo tribes also await passage. Moore describes the arbitrariness of tribal civil wars. She focuses, again, on men’s violence and their ruthlessness in going after enemies—and also anyone associated with a perceived enemy.

“While watching her, still hoping that she did not remember what I told Pa before he left us, I thought of Mam and wondered if we made her this sad. I wondered if she was walking to the edge of her America and looking across the ocean for a ship that had us in tow, if she was crying, if she wanted us as much as Ma wanted and waited for Pa.” 

Ol’ Pa has been gone too long after departing to find supplies. Ol’ Ma’s gaze in search of Ol’ Pa, in anticipation of his return, correlates in Wayetu’s mind with an image of her mother, also longing for the people she loves.

“I had heard of death in many forms. The kind where spirits joined ancestors and lingered around us. The kind where a person went to paradise and waited for God in heaven to call them up. The kind where a soul is taken by God to a life after the one on earth. None of these seemed to be ways of bringing his body back, of seeing him walk heavily through that clearing with all of us on his mind and a smile so we would know. My Ol’ Pa was gone. I would never see his body again.”

Despite the seeming indelibility of her grandfather’s presence, Moore suggests being aware of the finality of her grandfather’s death. This implies that despite her Christian upbringing, she didn’t easily embrace the idea of Heaven or an afterlife.

“The Ol’ Mas did not tell us that you could not throw away love once it was finished. That it would remain on us like blackened scars, underneath blouses and in those places only we could see. That we would reach a point where it, once solid, would melt in our hands and we would never fully wash off its residue; and that some love, the truest love, also the most dangerous, could disfigure our core.” 

Moore is recovering from heartbreak after the end of a relationship with a man—a fellow Liberian. She thinks of how no lesson can fully prepare one for the loss of love. True love, she implies, can change one permanently but not always in the best ways. 

“At those gatherings, weddings, funerals, where familiar names are stuttered through laughter, those who are old, while boasting of their meekness, will recall the steps that led them to Staten Island or Rhode Island or Minnesota or Atlanta or Maryland or Virginia or Tennessee.”

Moore describes the history of transmigration that connects many sub-Saharan immigrants to the US. They connect at places that bring families together to tell their unique immigrant stories, which are often overlooked.

“My true loves in our new country, by either inheritance or indoctrination, were taught that black women were the least among them. Loving me was an act of resistance, though many did not know it. And Mam could not understand this feeling, the heaviness of it, to be love as resistance, as an exception to the rule. To fight to be seen in love, to stay in love throughout the resistance. This was my new country.”

Moore describes feeling devalued as a Black woman in the US—that is, overlooked as someone worthy of both love and the recognition of her beauty. Due to the imposition of Eurocentric standards of beauty in the West and the belief that the white body is the default “natural” body, Moore and other Black women—especially dark-skinned Black women—feel like outliers. She thinks that Black men and some non-Black men who love them do so to show that they are not racist or have not internalized racism. As a result, she becomes first a political symbol and second (if at all) a human being in need of love. 

“And if my childhood dragons wanted me to believe that I had no home, no country, no place in this world, the monsters in my new home, in that statement, consented, complied: I could be beautiful in a place and still not enough, not because of who I was or anything I had done, but because of something as simple, and somehow as grand in this new place, as the color of my skin.” 

Moore continues to describe how her skin color alienated her in the US. At the same time, she was an exile from her true homeland due to the selfish political machinations of Liberia’s leaders. She inverts the myth of her own “ugliness” by referring to racists as “the monsters.” Their inhumanity toward her and her sisters makes them monstrous while subtly reifying her own beauty as a complex human being.

“Love gives us the coordinates to these rooms.” 

Moore continues to narrate her experience of colorism and how love or, rather, not being loved enough, is part of the trauma that led her to therapy. These feelings of alienation are inextricable from her loss of her country and her grandfather, Charles Freeman, whose love for his family cost him his life. Both loving and wanting to be loved, Moore reminds us, often require exposure to pain.

“And to maintain this blackness, this shiny, special thing that was bigger than any other part of our identity, so big that it had to go first—in order to maintain this blackness, we mimicked the only representations we saw of ourselves on those channels and in those books and in those magazines. We spoke louder, shouted even, yelled at each other in jest when we entered rooms. We created a language of gestures bigger than ourselves. We were children and how else would they see us? We performed our race, our prefix?”

Moore describes how she and a group of Black girls whom she befriended in school survived racism by using the stereotypes hurled against them in their favor, embracing them as armor, using them to embrace an aura of “cool” instead of acknowledging how ostracized they felt because of racism.

“The dragons had different mothers here, and we ran. We ran. Again. N*****, he shouted. An animal, a brute, an ignorant person, an unrighteous person. But we were little girls. N*****, from a man who probably did not see color. But how could he see color? He did not see us.”

Moore writes about being run out of a corner store by a racist white man who antagonized her, her sister, and her sister’s friends. This experience led Moore to realize that dangerous and hateful people (“dragons”) exist everywhere, though their motivations may differ. She also points out the hypocrisy of racists who claim that they’re not motivated by racial hatred when it’s clearly the main factor in their antagonism.

“It was because I was black in this kingdom where black was criminal, a stain, a deformity. A thing had happened and it reminded me of the first time—that time when I was a kid and I took too long to get my candy bar and that store owner pushed my sister and called us that word. But that was Texas, he said. But this is New York, he said. It doesn’t matter, it’s everywhere in this country, I said. I’m sorry, he said. I don’t understand some people. We are all the same, he said. Our world would be so much stronger if we stopped seeing color.” 

Moore relates an exchange she had with her boyfriend—a white man she nicknames Johnny Boy in the memoir. His reaction to her experience of racism, which underwhelms her, reduces it to a regional problem and not a national one. Ironically, like the racist man who chased her and her sister out of the corner store, he claims not to see race, not realizing that his assertion that one shouldn’t see color is a privilege that only he can have.

“I had learned Vai when I was five years old and forgotten it by the time I was six. At eight I traded fufu and soup for McDonald’s Happy Meals, although the starch had been my favorite thing to eat for years and one of my first words. At thirteen I folded the lappa suits my Ol’ Ma and aunties mailed from Logan Town and ELWA, 10 Monrovia 100 Liberia, in favor of Express and NY & Co. jeans, although they never correctly fit my too-skinny waist and hips.” 

Moore describes her process of assimilation in becoming an American. It started with her loss of her tribe’s language, then the change in her taste for foods. Fufu is one of West Africa’s most common foods, and the lappa is a common garment. Her exchange of these traditions for the commercial ones offered in the US is a sign of her embracing new values even when they don’t always align with who she is.

“You are African. You are African. You are African: together so profoundly accusatory and judgmental that I wanted to run out of the car screaming. You are African, and it made me want to clench my fists and fight. And I did not know why.” 

Moore recalls her feelings of shame after attending a parent-teacher conference with her mother. The revelation of her mother’s accent made Moore feel even more different from her peers, as the sound underscored her ethnicity. Instead of being a source of pride, her identity became a source of shame that she must resist to be accepted in her new country.

“My cousins, my friends, the boys I met in college who hid their too-long middle names with ritual emulation of their American friends, overusing ‘n****’ to camouflage the smell of okra sauce and fried fish, now changed their profile icons to West African flags and I wondered: What took us so long?” 

Moore thinks about the young West African men who embrace their identity now that Afrocentricity has again become more socially acceptable. Their overuse of “n****”—a slangy reappropriation of a racist slur—embraces a historical lineage that isn’t exactly their own but is dominant in their new country and, thus, the only accessible way to be Black. In this quote, Moore contemplates how ostracism from both African American and mainstream white identity alienated many West Africans from embracing themselves. 

“That man at the store that day, the one who said that thing, he did not see African girls or Creole girls or girls who would trace their lines to Carolina plantations. He saw us, all of us, as Blackgirls […] ‘Most people process the world not as they are, but as they are treated,’ I said to Johnny Boy.” 

In talking to her white boyfriend about race and racism, Moore tries to help him understand that her background as a West African doesn’t protect her from the racism that African Americans also face. Racism reduces people to their phenotypical features and avoids the complexity of their unique cultural and individual experiences. 

“What I saw in the eyes of those first-generation Americans and young black immigrants like myself was the stress of never arriving, the impatience, the disconnect, the madness of identity.” 

Moore describes how immigrants never quite feel accepted as American even after naturalization. The “impatience” is a desire to belong, which is hindered by “the disconnect.” The feeling of “madness” may relate to the contradiction of the US being a nation of immigrants but one that doesn’t always accept immigrants.