When Halla Njoke decides to write a biography of her Aunt Roz, the admired old woman tells her to write her own life first. Halla eventually embarks on a personal narrative linked to other
generations and multiple female ancestors. Provocatively, there are three Aunts Roz and two Mothers Naja in this panorama of women's lives encompassing rural village life and its traditions,
the anticolonial struggle against the French in the 1950s, and the increasingly "globalized" culture and society in a chaotic West African city in the decades after independence.
A contemporary Things Fall Apart, The Amputated Memory is a multilayered epic on history lost and reclaimed. Werewere Liking traces the saga of Halla as she "remembers," and also strategically
forgets, significant moments in her tumultuous past as well as the cultural past of her country.
A chant roman (literally "a song novel"), The Amputated Memory employs storytelling techniques clearly adapted from Africa's oral tradition. It is also a coming-of-age story: Self-knowledge is
at the center of Halla's quest - from the revelation of how her own fate and that of Aunt Roz are inextricably linked, to her traumatic reckoning with the legacy of her deceased father, a
lethal energy field for anyone close to him.
