Hello Everyone,
I am looking for a publisher for my memoir "Child of the Grasslands". I would be grateful for any advice.
Please find below
This is the introduction
I write this introduction at my desk in Toronto. I have lived here less than a year and have begun to call it home. Yet the idea of home for me has never been rooted to one place. Nor have I always lived with the same people. The homes themselves have been of varying shapes, sizes and configurations. I have occupied different roles in each of them.
From childhood into adulthood my homes have spanned three continents. I was born in Bamunka and grew up in Foumban, Yaoundé, Mbakwa Super, Bamenda and Kumba – villages, towns and capital cities of Western and Central Cameroon - each time moving by bus with my small packet of belongings. I reached Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland by plane (my first) wearing shorts, a t-shirt and a knapsack, woefully unprepared for the chill December weather I met with upon arrival. From there to Geneva, Berlin, Bern, London and back to Geneva by train or by plane and with rolling suitcase in tow. I spoke Bamoun, then both pidgin English and English in the multi-family housing compounds of Cameroon, took up French and then German as I tried to fit into the apartments and residence rooms of Switzerland and the life that came with them. I have lived with parents and siblings, great-grandparents, uncles, great-aunts, family friends, a stepfather, fellow students and now my husband and two daughters. And I have been alternately cherished and abused in these homes while attending school and trying to carve out a childhood in this ever-changing terrain.
I wished for stability and sameness. I wanted two parents (not the polygamous household with 18 mothers in which I was born) and one home. I wanted to stay put, eat three meals a day (made by someone other than me). I wanted my life to line up with those of my classmates. The distance between what I considered normal and what I was living has long been a source of shame for me.
The task of writing this life began as a full acknowledgement of the racism, the classism, the abuse, and the poverty I have lived through in order that I might feel something other than shame about such realities, such struggles.
I have come to discover that this is also a narrative of striving. In Foumban, we children sang, “Life is no beauty, life is but duty. If you must succeed, you must work hard”. I did not know then how much these words would give structure and purpose to my young life. For me, success meant education and all its promises and potential rewards.
To the reader, I offer what I think is an interesting story, a singular story. It is my story, one peopled with the great and the good and the sometimes not so good (for me at least). Mine is a chronological account from birth to graduation from The London School of Economics. I have included a few daring adventures, a few difficult admissions and some cheer worthy triumphs. Read it as a success story if you like, or as a word of encouragement to those in similar or at least equally challenging circumstances. But I ask also that you read between the signposts for the small joys and discoveries, the everyday unruliness and the humanity therein.
Thank you in advance.