by Alexandra Fuller
Intense memoir of a young girl’s childhood in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia
Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple
Born of English parents who moved permanently to Rhodesia when she was two, Alexandra Fuller spent her childhood in Africa, moving on to Malawi and later Zambia after life became impossible in what was later Zimbabwe. In a unique memoir, she recounts what her childhood was like: the family dynamics, the politically tense situation as various countries made an uneasy transition to independence, the immediate presence of animals and fauna.
Sensual impressions of tastes and smells and sounds are very present. She describes the smell of Africa: "What I can’t know about Africa as a child ... is her smell; hot, sweet, smoky, salty, sharp-soft. It is like black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass." Though the historical excursions about relations between whites and blacks are somewhat difficult to follow in early chapters, the picture becomes clearer in the course of the book.
What is disturbing for the politically aware among us is the disdain, scorn, fear, hate, patronizing affection in which the book’s many blacks are held. Individual blacks have a certain dignity – though the kids are constantly admonished not to get too close, not to form too close a bond – but as a whole, they seem unable to help themselves. There is occasionally a sense that it was their land until the Europeans invaded, but most often a sense that the blacks cock things up – farming, governing – and that without the whites they’d be even more hopelessly stuck.
Alexandra – or Bobo, as her family calls her – is surrounded not only by African nature but by guns, violence, the threat of attack. The result is a feeling of hate towards the black Africans, or terrorists.
The roles Bobo and her older sister play in the family – trouble-maker and seemingly serene one, uproar and steely control – are not described, but rather shown. The intensity of the natural and political impressions are rivaled only by watching her mother’s alcohol problems become increasing serious as setbacks pile up in the family. It’s frightening to experience from a child’s perspective how it feels when one’s mother drinks herself into a stupor.
The intense natural backdrop fills our visceral senses but there’s a strong undercurrent of a whole panoply of emotions: sibling rivalry, sorrow about babies who passed away, desperation about mother’s drinking, instantaneous dislike of new white neighbors, fear of armed terrorists. The potential ravages of nature, e.g. the effects of drought on the land, the blistering heat of midday, the sounds of the African night and also the emotions the narrator lives through are so intense, the reader has been pulled in so intensely, that you’re left struggling a bit for breath.
The prose style in Alexandra Fuller’s memoir of an African childhood is clipped, and there are no transitions between thoughts, making it like a child’s series of impressions.
The volume is never boring, but it’s not lovely either: the anger, fear, even boredom of a life in the bush come through clearly.
Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2004
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