I have to thank my mother for introducing me to these two books, which I somehow missed when they became New York Times bestsellers in 2001 and 2004 respectively. And I mean really thank her. It’s been a long time since I just sat down and got lost in the work of a writer whose words don’t just sear the page — they claw it into little pieces and then chew it up, all while staring you straight in the eye. As if she’s just daring you to question her guts.
Born of Scottish and English blood, Alexandra Fuller grew up surrounded by war in Zimbabwe, when it was still Rhodesia, and later in Malawi and Zambia. Her white parents hacked out livings on farms in war-ripped areas all over Africa and shot guns on the British side in Rhodesia’s war for independence. You can’t question Fuller’s rootedness in Africa, but she still has identity issues to face. In Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, her gutsy, angry, funny memoir that unreels like a movie, Fuller questions her Africanness right at the beginning: “The blacks [allowed into Fuller’s formerly all-white boarding school in Zambia when she is eleven] laugh at me when they see me stripped naked after swimming or tennis … ‘Burning piggy!’ My God, I am the wrong color. The way I am burned by the sun, scorched by flinging sand, prickled by heat. … The way I stand out against the khaki bush like a large marshmallow to a gook with a gun. White. African. White-African.”
Gook. Not a p.c. word. Not one you run into in romanticized books about Africa. But oh, so honest. Alexandra Fuller’s writing is raw power, the kind of writing that MFA programs in the US have almost completely trained out of young American writers. Nor can you get Fuller’s grasp on language if you are raised in a quiet suburban life with carefully regulated activities moderated by carefully regulated middle-class parents. Fuller’s childhood was messy, unkempt, a life of war and alcoholism and infant deaths, but was also a life of incredible richness, sweltering heat and cultural clashes, the kind of childhood that a creative mind feasts on (unless it ends up destroying itself — thankfully for her readers, Fuller had a strong enough sense of self to grab the former option). Her taciturn father’s colorful language and her mother’s colorful alcoholic episodes combine with their personal tragedies to make them exquisite characters when seen from the young Alexandra’s feisty perspective.
Scribbling the Cat, Fuller’s second book, is part memoir, part a history of her Africa’s wars, and a great deal of travel. By the time she wrote Dogs, Fuller was living in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with her American husband. In Cat, she visits her parents, only to find herself caught up in an ex-soldier’s war demons. She returns the next year to travel with him to Mozambique to face down not only his devils of war, but her own.
War is practically on the level of a character-god throughout both books. Fuller has said in an interview that much of her purpose in writing has been to dig down to the truth of war, its effects on soldiers and civilians and societies alike.
I don’t know enough about Africa, much less its conflicts, to speak with any authority about Fuller’s portrayals. But I do know writing, and it doesn’t get better than this (from Cat): “Places have their own peculiar smells, and here in Murewa the smell was sun on hot rocks; … it was the nose-stung scent of goats; … it was the smell of Africans, which is soil-on-skin, sun-on-skin, wood smoke, and the tinny smell of fresh sweat; it was the smell of home-brewed beer and burned chicken feathers and kicked-up dust. …
“It is not a romantic smell. It is not the smell of free people, living as they would choose. Rather, it is the smell of people who labor, strain, and toil for every drop of sustenance their body receives from the earth. It is the smell of people who have been marginalized and disempowered and forgotten. … It is the smell of people who are alive only because they are cunning, ingenious, and endlessly resourceful. In theory they are ‘peasants.’ In practice they are brilliantly versed in the skill of surviving.
“Dad once said to me, ‘When the world goes tits up and we’re back to square one, I’d bet my money on these buggers surviving. Your bally Wall Street fundi would last about half a day out here before he stubbed his toe and keeled over.’”
You can see where Fuller got her way with words. You can read a biography and further writing by Fuller at her Web site here. Powells (one of the US’s largest independent bookstores) has an exclusive interview with Fuller posted here.
Here’s a great idea from Lonely Planet guidebooks; you can now buy only the chapters you need for certain regions of the world, instead of buying the regional book and then ripping out certain chapters for specific countries.
