The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir
SynopsisPlot
When Wayétu Moore turns five years old, her father and grandmother throw her a big birthday party at their home in Monrovia, Liberia, but all she can think about is how much she misses her mother, who is working and studying in faraway New York. Before she gets the reunion her father promised her, war breaks out in Liberia. The family is forced to flee their home on foot, walking and hiding for three weeks until they arrive in the village of Lai. Finally, a rebel soldier smuggles them across the border to Sierra Leone, reuniting the family and setting them off on yet another journey, this time to the United States.
Story
About this book
Wayétu Moore was nearly five years old and living in Monrovia, Liberia, when the First Liberian Civil War began in 1989. Her mother was abroad in New York, studying and working, while Moore remained with her father and grandmother. As fighting reached the capital, the family had no choice but to leave their home on foot. They spent three weeks walking and hiding before reaching the village of Lai. From there, a rebel soldier helped smuggle them across the border into Sierra Leone, beginning a longer path toward reuniting with her mother in the United States.
The memoir draws on Moore's childhood memories and her adult effort to reconstruct events she experienced too young to fully understand at the time. The title refers to figures from her early perception of the conflict, where real dangers took on shapes a small child could process. The book moves between her family's escape from Liberia and her later life in the United States, where questions of belonging, displacement, and identity followed her into adulthood.
Moore grew up in Texas after the family settled in the United States. Her account connects a specific family story to the wider displacement caused by the Liberian civil war, which lasted from 1989 to 1997 and forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.
