the Light of Darkness
The Light of Darkness is Alhassan’s first Memoir. It traces his journey to America as a nearly blind teenager and his trials and triumphs becoming American, while maintaining his deep African roots. This story is about family and lineage. It is about tradition and change. It is about Africa, in a sense, if there is really such a place as singular in definition as Africa. It certainly is a story about being African, particularly from the perspective of his new American homeland.
- This story is also about seeing and awareness, and conversely about blindness and ignorance. It’s about what we can see, what we are conditioned to see, and what we can learn to see.
- Finally, it is a story about the importance of storytelling, of remembrance, of the obligation to remember and to retell, and of course the warning not to forget.
- The first memoir of Alhassan Susso, an immigrant from Africa’s smallest nation, the Gambia.
- The story builds on Susso’s long family tradition of serving as griots’, the keepers and transmitters of his peoples’ history, and how he continues that tradition as a teacher to new immigrants in America today.
- The inspirational story follows his inner life and thoughts as he moves back and forth between the Old World and the New, and his personal transformation