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.

At the beginning of April, I wrote a blog about some of the stupid laws around the world. Along a similar theme, I couldn’t resist the following story on the BBC website. It seems that the Mayor of Delcambre, Louisiana is set to ban saggy trousers on the grounds that they constitute indecent exposure.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t get the whole underpants above the trouser thing. I think it just makes people look like a skinny retard, who can’t work out how to use a belt. I have to fight the urge to just walk over and pull them up! But indecent exposure? Illegal? That is dangerously skirting third-world territory. I remember the bad old days of Africa, when Mugabe wasn’t the only nut-job dictator on the continent. Banda of Malawi banned women from wearing trousers and men from wearing beards. Beards were also banned by Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, as were neckties – on the grounds that tie-wearing beardies were more likely to be anti-government intellectuals.

Is this really the face that Louisiana wants to present to the wider world?

© stevedavey.com

In the comments section to the post below, a kind Perceptive Reader sent in a link to a great site about Ethiopia and also a good little interview with author Rebecca Haile during her book tour in Washington, D.C.

(Steve Davey, fellow blogger, has a nail-biting account of his quest to visit Axum and its surroundings in the north of Ethiopia. “I also want to visit the ancient monastery of Debre Damo,” he says. “Why? Because it is on a rock plateau in the middle of nowhere and you have to climb up a rope to scale a sheer cliff face to get in.” I wanted to comment on it earlier, but found that Steve’s summary of Ethiopian history, especially as it relates to Christianity, perfectly complement this book. And it has great photos! Read it on the Perceptive Travel site here.)

In this compact book from a lawyer who has no agenda as trying to “make it” as a writer, Rebecca Haile has presented a personal and intelligent story that is refreshingly simple. While I’m as much an addict of travel literature as the next wanderlust victim, it’s good to be reminded sometimes that these stories are valuable more in their ability to force an understanding of some tiny sliver of the world, rather than to engender excitement at the traveler’s daring. Haile has accomplished this, and more, in a slim volume whose chapters are each like a breath of fresh air in their honesty and clarity.

Haile’s family was forced from their home in Addis Ababa in 1976, two years after a military coup ousted the sitting emperor. Like countless intellectuals and hopeful humanists all over the world time and again, Haile’s parents (her father a professor of Ethiopian languages and literature, her mother a secretary for the Oxford University Press in Addis Ababa) hoped that the coup would be a “catalyst for progress” — democratic, social, and economic. And like those countless idealists, they were proved wrong and eventually were forced to flee the country, having been marked as enemies of the government. They settled with Haile and her sister in, of all incongruous places, Minnesota.

In 2001, with trepidation, excitement, and a little self-doubt, Rebecca Haile returned from Ethiopia after 25 years of exile. In the first days back, she is overwhelmed by memories, memories that wash back over her as she walks through the house her parents had lovingly built in happier days, and memories that overtake her in a more Proustian fashion as she becomes reacquainted with Addis Ababa, “a city of hidden sanctuaries.”

What I loved about the Haile’s narrative was her fearless assessing of her own sense of self, of character and personhood and identity. It’s a process that many travel writers have abandoned in favor of raging adventure travel or tales in which they play the star bumbling fool in the wilderness. Haile stares in the face what it means to her to be Ethiopian, contrasted with what it means to have been Ethiopian.

Central to this question is that of religion. Ethiopian Orthodoxy is a lynchpin of the country’s identity. Not only that, but Haile’s parents are deeply rooted in the church and she attended Ethiopian Orthodox services when practical as a child in Minnesota. Being, however, as she states, a Westernized woman, she is both respectful and wary of religion.

Haile and her husband travel to many of Ethiopia’s most famous religious centers, including Axum, where the Ark of the Covenant is reputed to be guarded (by a priest raised from boyhood to the task — no other people are allowed in the church); and Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile and a heart of Ethiopian Orthodoxy. Her descriptions of these places are not those of the travel writer looking for unique language and evocative imagery, but of an open-hearted person seeking a spiritual connection to her own land and people. But in her travels, and among her family in Addis Ababa, she still feels a stranger to the religion that is so crucial to the people she knows and loves.

If there is a weakness in a book that is so highly personal, it is in Haile’s attempts to assess Ethiopia’s current problems and its possibilities for future solutions. In her critique of the seccession of Eritrea, for example, as well as of other regions that are seeking greater autonomy partly based on dominant languages, she betrays a perhaps too-Western sensibility of what it is that makes people fail to get along, to live together and work for a better future. It’s hard to tell whether Haile gets this slight idealism from her parents or from the America that is now her home. In any case, as with the rest of the story, she sets forth her own ideas and experiences of the situations honestly, without punditry or any real judgment, just a wistfulness for the potential of her rediscovered Ethiopia.

Haile ends her book on an upswing, her hopes for Ethiopia’s future. “The discovery that Ethiopia can and is changing in response to its outsiders opens the door to an entirely new and unexpected relationship with my old country. Now, I have reason to hope that the conservative, objectionable aspects of Addis Ababa culture that I can never accept might someday fade. … I have reason to think that despite a violent departure and thirty years abroad, my family can once again call Ethiopia home.”

I’ll hope with her, even though I can’t help but contrast her Addis Ababa with the slums detailed in May 2007’s issue of Harper’s (I wrote about it here.) By that account, it is certainly a city that could use some hope.

(The paperback of Held at a Distance was published in the US in May 2007, and is available through Amazon from the US, UK, and Canadian sites.)

The May issue of Harper’s has a heartbreaking essay by Toronto writer Yohannes Edemariam, “From an Ancient Cloud,” about the slums of Ethiopia, delving into the wrenched lives of the poor and “middle class” in Addis Ababa.

The piece details Edemariam’s descent into an existence that seems impossible to most of the Western world: families who live and eat (or not) solely by begging and the bare essentials they can get from NGO food programs, where the line between beggar and middle class is nonexistent. Having spent a childhood in Addis, he says, “My parents’ picture albums from … decades full of revolution, bloody purges, famine, civil war — are lined with close-up photos of us kids and family members. I had come back to Ethiopia to see the Addis that those pictures do not show.” And he does. He hangs out in the rooms of hopeless and laughing young prostitutes, and tries to untangle the stories of a woman who adapts her family size and circumstances to what she thinks will garner the most pity (her husband is in reality a quiet working man, but she initially says he died of yellow fever). It’s an excellent piece, equal amounts precision and hopelessness.

(Harper’s online articles are available to subscribers only, but you can look through it at your local bookstore. This issue also has travel-related articles about an experimental poverty program in Kenya and an eclectic library in San Francisco.)