| julie
brock
Scribbling the Cat.
Alexandra Fuller Penguin, 2005. 272 pp. $15.00
Paperback
Everyone has a life story,
but not every life story inspires readers to keep turning
pages. The mark of a good memoir is its relevance. By attaching
the details of their lives to the broader framework of humanity,
writers tell readers something about what it means to be human.
Good writers understand that the most important questions
rarely have clear answers. Rather, the exploration of possibilities
fuels their curiosity and informs the universality of their
conclusions.
In her first book, the 2001 best-seller Don’t Let’s
Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller plunges readers into
her youth in the turbulent world of Sub-Saharan Africa. White
colonists fought for decades to keep power out of native hands
in countries like Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Mozambique. Fuller
explains that the whites saw their presence as a moral necessity.
They were “saving their munts [blacks] from themselves.”
Since black Africans were restored to power in the region,
ideological clashes have inspired intermittent civil wars
between guerilla forces. Ongoing government instability, the
rampant spread of HIV/AIDS, the poor quality of health care,
and floundering economies have rendered these countries some
of the poorest and least stable in the world.
Born in England to British parents, Fuller was three years
old in 1972 when her family moved to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe,
in eastern Africa. The Fullers are dysfunctional in all the
usual ways, and Don’t Let’s Go rarely shifts its
view far from the family drama. Fuller captures the story
matter-of-factly and intersperses historical and political
background deftly alongside the narrative.
Nicknamed Bobo as a child, Fuller now lives in Wyoming with
her American husband and two children. Fuller writes about
herself as “Bobo” so that she seems to become
a different character. In a sense, Bobo is Fuller’s
African identity.
Fuller pays careful attention to description and employs onomatopoeia
to appeal to a multitude of senses. Torrential rains form
wild rivers that dry into mud puddles, oozing primordial life
in the mud. Sirens go “bee-ba, bee-ba.” Cheetahs
cry at night. Guinea fowl call “nkanga, nkanga!”
A train climbs a hill going “chaka-chaka.” She
recalls her first encounter with Africa as “raw onions
and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat,
and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound
maize into meal and who work out-of-doors.”
Don’t Let’s Go is a different flavor of the standard
coming-of-age memoir, in which Africa is the background. But
in her second book, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African
Soldier, Fuller brings Africa on stage as a character and
takes her writing beyond the confines of remembered angst.
The book begins with a cryptic note advising readers to keep
a certain perspective as they read. “What is important
is the story,” she writes. This book is a “sliver
of a sliver of a much greater story.” This warning echoes
the humility with which Fuller ends her first book. There,
she defends her “Africanness” but also acknowledges
her “Anglocentricity,” saying that her ancestry
were the “sort of European stock who brandished their
culture before them like some devastating scythe.”
Fuller is clear that she claims no special insight, nor does
she wish to speak for any other African, black or white. These
are the stories of her life, no more and no less, though she
rightly hopes that her story will inform readers about the
impact of generations of war on the Sub-Saharan people.
Scribbling the Cat focuses on Bobo and the man she calls K,
whom she meets during a trip home. She is infatuated from
the start. “Even at first glance, K was more than ordinarily
beautiful, but in a careless, superior way, like a dominant
lion or an ancient fortress.” Throughout the many conversations
that follow, K speaks so often that Fuller seems absent at
times. While he talks at length and shares candid emotions,
Bobo’s own contributions are usually brief and unrevealing.
The narrative often reveals Bobo’s thoughts, but she
seems to purposely keep her thoughts out of the story when
the thoughts in question involve K and herself. Fuller never
mentions her feelings toward K, and this raises questions
about what Fuller is leaving out.
The intense focus on K seems to be Fuller’s way
of showing readers all the evidence so they can search for
their own answers. She sees her own involvement in the story
as secondary in importance to K’s, and she often functions
in conversations to ask questions.
Her reserved nature seems to be one of the qualities Fuller
labels “very African,” like K’s habit of
wiping his nose with the back of his hand. Perhaps an African
would no more spill her guts than she would use a Kleenex.
Or perhaps, as Fuller’s mother says, people “with
breeding” — meaning European ancestry —
do not share their most private thoughts.
Fuller writes sparingly about her life in America, which she
says is a “push-button life,” where she tries
to “join the innocent, deluded self-congratulation that
goes with living in such a fat, sweet country.” She
finds the task more difficult than it should be for a woman
whose childhood memories are sharp with hunger and the threat
of terrorists lurking in the dark. Despite her father’s
warning that “curiosity scribbled the cat,” Fuller
travels with K because she wants answers. She wants an explanation
for the region’s never-ending trouble. She also thinks
the journey, and the explanation she seeks, will help K “get
over [his] spooks.”
What Fuller seems to overlook, or fails to recognize, is that
K is as much over his spooks as he ever expects to be. He
sees them as the cost of living the soldier’s life.
Now he has one concern: Discovering whether Bobo is the woman
sent by God to be with him.
Since the war ended, K transferred his fierce devotion to
the war effort into devotion to God. He admits he is haunted
by war memories, but brushes away Bobo’s attempts to
dig for deeper meaning. “I was good at what I did…It
was my job. I did it.” With his first-hand knowledge
of the cruelty of war, K’s attitude has changed. “Without
Jesus as your Lord and Savior,” he says, “doing
everything you can to forget that you’re going to snuff
it soon is your single mission in life.” K goes on because
he can. For him there are no more questions to ask.
For Fuller this is not the case. Scribbling is her attempt
to see Africa outside the narrow lens of her childhood experience.
Her adult life abroad likely fuels her questions. “It
should be impossible,” she says, to travel from Africa
to Wyoming in less than two days. By comparison, the “land
of the Free and the Brave” seems “insultingly
frivolous.” She wonders how one country can be filthy
rich while others continually border on starvation. She wonders
whether former soldiers like her father and K regret having
fought for land they ended up losing anyway. She wonders,
“Is it possible from the perspective of this quickly
spinning Earth and one speedy journey from crib to coffin
— to know the difference between right, wrong, good,
and evil?”
In the end, Fuller suggests that her quest for answers may
be more of an end in itself than a means. She discovers the
answer to an unasked question. Seeking to find out what war
did to the soldiers, she discovers instead what it has done
to her: “Those of us who grow in war are like clay pots
fired in an oven that is overhot. Confusingly shaped like
the rest of humanity, we nevertheless contain fatal cracks
that we spend the rest of our lives itching to fill.”
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