The Dark Child (The African Child) Lesson Plan

It is only in Chapters 8 and 9 that readers learn that Camara’s father has more than one wife and that he had more siblings other than the sister he was in school with. Why do you think Camara didn’t include more detail about those relationships and situations throughout the earlier parts of the memoir?

Strong responses will consider the memoir form as choosing specific details about your life to write about for the story of the memoir, differentiating it from an autobiography, which is the whole-life story. As such, Camara specifically chose to exclude those details for a reason. Perhaps they didn’t fit into the arc of the narrative memoir he’s telling. Likely, he...