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Summary
Summary
In Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in a frequently inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller's endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller's story is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.
Author Notes
Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). At the end of that country's civil war, the family moved to Malawi and later Zambia. Fuller received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada after which she returned to Zambia where she worked with a safari company. In 1993, Fuller and her husband settled near Livingstone on the banks of the Zambezi River. In 1994, she left Africa and moved to Wyoming, USA In 2011, her book Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness made Publisher's Weekly Best seller list. Fuller's title, Leaving Before the Rains Come, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A classic is born in this tender, intensely moving and even delightful journey through a white African girl's childhood. Born in England and now living in Wyoming, Fuller was conceived and bred on African soil during the Rhodesian civil war (1971-1979), a world where children over five "learn[ed] how to load an FN rifle magazine, strip and clean all the guns in the house, and ultimately, shoot-to-kill." With a unique and subtle sensitivity to racial issues, Fuller describes her parents' racism and the wartime relationships between blacks and whites through a child's watchful eyes. Curfews and war, mosquitoes, land mines, ambushes and "an abundance of leopards" are the stuff of this childhood. "Dad has to go out into the bush... and find terrorists and fight them"; Mum saves the family from an Egyptian spitting cobra; they both fight "to keep one country in Africa white-run." The "A" schools ("with the best teachers and facilities") are for white children; "B" schools serve "children who are neither black nor white"; and "C" schools are for black children. Fuller's world is marked by sudden, drastic changes: the farm is taken away for "land redistribution"; one term at school, five white students are "left in the boarding house... among two hundred African students"; three of her four siblings die in infancy; the family constantly sets up house in hostile, desolate environments as they move from Rhodesia to Zambia to Malawi and back to Zambia. But Fuller's remarkable affection for her parents (who are racists) and her homeland (brutal under white and black rule) shines through. This affection, in spite of its subjects' prominent flaws, reveals their humanity and allows the reader direct entry into her world. Fuller's book has the promise of being widely read and remaining of interest for years to come. Photos not seen by PW. (On-sale Dec. 18) Forecast: Like Anne Frank's diary, this work captures the tone of a very young person caught up in her own small world as she witnesses a far larger historical event. It will appeal to those looking for a good story as well as anyone seeking firsthand reportage of white southern Africa. The quirky title and jacket will propel curious shoppers to pick it up. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Fuller, nicknamed "Bobo," grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the civil war, and she watched her parents fight against the local Africans to keep their farm. Fuller writes from a child's point of view, masking neither her family's prejudices nor their passions. Fuller's father, Tim, is a determined and strong man, married to Nicola, who is gradually cracking under the pressure of the civil war and also of the deaths of her children. The Fullers lost three children; only Alexandra and her older sister, Vanessa, survived. The losses take their toll on Nicola, who turns to alcohol to combat her overwhelming depression. After the white colonialists lose the civil war, the Fullers' farm is taken away, and they move to Malawi, where Bobo begins to get a sense of the life of an average African. But the overbearing Malawian government motivates the Fullers to move on, and they finally settle in Zambia. Fuller is a gifted writer, capable of bringing a sense of immediacy to her writing and crafting descriptions so vibrant the reader cannot only picture the stifling hot African afternoon but almost feel it as well. Writing a memoir powerful in its frank straightforwardness, Fuller neither apologizes for nor champions her family's views and actions. Instead, she gives us an honest, moving portrait of one family struggling to survive tumultuous times. --Kristine Huntley
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Pining for Africa, Fuller's parents departed England in the early '70s while she was still a toddler. They knew well that their life as white farmers living in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia at the time) would be anything but glamorous. Living a crude, rural life, the author and her older sister contended with "itchy bums and worms and bites up their arms from fleas" and losing three siblings. Mum and Dad were freewheeling, free-drinking, and often careless. Yet they were made of tough stuff and there is little doubt of the affection among family members. On top of attempting to make a living, they faced natives who were trying to free themselves of British rule, and who were understandably not thrilled to see more white bwanas settling in. Fuller portrays bigotry (her own included), segregation, and deprivation. But judging by her vivid and effortless imagery, it is clear that the rich, pungent flora and fauna of Africa have settled deeply in her bones. Snapshots scattered throughout the book enhance the feeling of intimacy and adventure. A photo of the author's first day of boarding school seems ordinary enough- she's standing in front of the family's Land Rover, smiling with her mother and sister. Then the realization strikes that young Alexandra is holding an Uzi (which she had been trained to use) and the family car had been mine-proofed. This was no ordinary childhood, and it makes a riveting story thanks to an extraordinary telling.-Sheila Shoup, Fairfax County Public Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
What happens when it's all your fault, and not your fault at all? At the centre of Alexandra Fuller's first memoir is a terrible, avoidable death for which she, as a child, feels responsible. Nothing about it makes sense, except in a magical way, and her eyes are opened by that incomprehension to see the world with the stalled, wise gaze of an eight-year-old girl. It is not a troubled gaze, though she lives through troubled times; it is just endlessly accurate. Fuller sees the adults around her with the fierce penetration of someone who has moved beyond blame. She grows up during the bush war that helped turn Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, and she survives that too, in the gung-ho colonial style. Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight (2002) is full of the sheer bloody enjoyment of being alive. It is also a triumph of proper judgment, a political comedy, an act of clarity. Fuller is completely clear about her parents' racism: the way these white farmers call the black people around them "gondies" or "wogs"; the ones who fight them are "bolshy muntus", "restless natives"; the ones who work for them are "nannies" or "boys". The family lives in a world of taboo and projected shame. Growing up, Fuller does not like drinking from the same cup as a black person. When she is obliged to wash in water a black child has used she is surprised to discover that "Nothing happens . . . I do not break out in spots or a rash. I do not turn black." The black body is contaminating and shamefully exposed, the white body forbidden. As a very young child, when she is bitten by a tick, the nanny and cook put down their tea and frown at her, but they will not look downthere. "Not there," says the cook. "I can't look there." And yet, if she falls or hurts herself, her nanny "lets me put my hand down her shirt on to her breast and I can suck my thumb and feel how soft she is". Her nanny's breasts smell of the way rain smells when it hits hot earth. "I know, without knowing why, that Mum would smack me if she saw me doing this." These are difficult things to say - get the tone wrong and you will offend almost everyone - but Fuller's gaze is equally astonishing when she directs it at the bodies of the white people around her. Her mother dances after a bath and the towel slips to expose "blood smeared" thighs; her own belly is distended by worms. A visiting missionary starts to squirm with embarrassment on the sofa, "like a dog rubbing worms out of their bum on a rug, or on the furniture, which we call sailing". These "protected" white bodies are filled with parasites, impala meat and booze. They live in houses that are eaten by termites, with taps that spurt out dead frogs. Their swimming pools are choked with algae, alive with scorpions, dotted with the small faces of monitor lizards that obscure hanging bodies, four- to six-feet long. Fuller's mother pretends to be Scottish, but her heart is African - whether Africa wants that heart, or not. Being white is a kind of construct, the continent is experienced by Fuller in a way that is overwhelmingly physical, you might even say - given the worms - visceral. First of all is the smell, which in Zambia "is strong enough to taste; bitter, burning, back-throat-coating, like the reminder of vomit". In Devuli, Zimbabwe, they drink "thin, animal-smelling milk" and go to sleep in "the kind of shattering silence that comes after a generator has been shut off". The family moves from farm to farm, so it would be easy to describe the land, in its exoticism, as endlessly various and endlessly the same, but Fuller has a talent for difference. Each servant has their own personality, each place its own character. She describes the different songs of the birds, the many kinds of African smoke (cigarette smoke, wood smoke, the smoke of mosquito coils), even the various kinds of heat. You might think it a matter of temperature, but heat, for Fuller, has its own sound, of grasshoppers and crickets that sing and whine, its own pace "a dragging, shallow, pale crawl", it even has a shape. In the Burma Valley, the cool night air sinks and the rising air contains, in a layer, the tapped scents of midday. Here it is so hot that "the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire". Everything, the beautiful and the terrible, is described with the intensity felt for something that could be lost at any moment. And indeed, the world she lives in, that of white Rhodesia, is about to be superseded and the war "lost": "Like something that falls between the crack in the sofa. Like something that drops out of your pocket." Meanwhile, her parents sleep with loaded guns by their beds, and her mother sews a camouflage band to cover her father's watch, to keep him safe. Perhaps children are the only people who can see war properly, stripped of ideological excuse. The Fullers move to a farm in the Burma Valley, "the very epicentre and birthplace of the civil war in Rhodesia", where Alexandra and her sister Vanessa, learn - or fail to learn - how to strip and reassemble a gun then shoot it. This to defend themselves from the "terrs" or terrorists, who will come "they said, to chop off the ears and lips and eyelids of little white children". These children cheer when they hear the "stomach-echoing thump" of a mine exploding in the hills, because it tells them "either an African or a baboon has been wounded or killed". The Fullers have a bomb-proofed Land Rover, called "Lucy", complete with siren - that her parents only use to announce their arrival at parties. When they drive into town they go past Africans "whose hatred reflects like sun in a mirror into our faces, impossible to ignore". Everyone, not just the Land Rover, has a nickname or a pet name, often bestowed by Fuller's father. Her mother is "Tub", she is "Chookies", her sister is "Van". To the rest of the world she is "Bobo". "Don't be touchy about being called a baboon," she wants to tell some black soldiers on the road. "I am their kid and they call me Bobo. Same thing." This playful refusal to name things properly is of a piece with their bantering racist abuse: the parents both infantilise the threat and refuse to grow up themselves. They continue, through war, drought, bad harvests, the birth of their children and the loss of their children, to have fun, to drink and party and play cards, to dance and have another drink, and then drink a whole lot more. After the central tragedy of the book, Fuller's mother goes from being a "fun drunk to a crazy sad drunk", and Fuller feels responsible for that too. Her parents' wildness is now terrifying to their children and the war seems, at times, just an extension of that fear: "then the outside world starts to join in and has a nervous breakdown all its own, so that it starts to get hard for me to know where Mum's madness ends and the world's madness begins". The constant attention Fuller pays to her mother, to her agonies and her pleasures, results in an unforgettable portrait of a dashing, horse-riding, reckless woman, a constant reader and an expert in having a terrible, good time. "I am like one of the dogs," Fuller says, "trying to read her mood, her happiness, her next move." They are separated, not just by tragedy, but also by booze; the way her drunken mother can spend, "an agreeable hour, looking in the rear-view mirror and trying out various expressions to see which most suits her lips". Fuller is also estranged, perhaps, by her mother's "icy" look, the way her eyes, in her madness, shine "like marbles, cold and hard and glittering". But when she is drunk, this fearsome, fun woman is a slow-motion thing; stymied, open to pity. She is "softly, deeply drunk", and her sobs are also "soft". It is Fuller's favourite word. She uses it again to describe the farm in Zambia where her battered family goes to mend. Here the land is "softly voluptuously fertile and sweet smelling of khaki weed, and old cow manure and thin dust and msasa leaves". The land is female, Fuller is quite clear about this. "In Rhodesia we are born and then the umbilical cord of each child is sewn straight from the mother into the ground, where it takes root and grows. Pulling away from the ground causes death by suffocation, starvation. That's what the people of this land believe." The war is fought for this - whatever it is: "mother" might be a good enough word for it. "Farmers," by which she means the Mashona people, "fight a more deadly, secret kind of war. They are fighting for land into which they have put their seed, their sweat, their hopes." Fuller is proud of her own talent as a farmer, her ability to read the land for potential yield. Her father drives her to her wedding in full rig, dress, veil, bouquet, and they talk about the fields along the road. "Wonder what he's feeding?" says her father, of another man's cattle, and Fuller says: "Cottonseed cake, I bet." It is a gallant way to live, perhaps, but Fuller is also thwarted by her parents' cheery refusal to give the events around her a proper name. "Don't exaggerate," her mother says when she sees dead men on the road, "you saw body bags, not bodies." The children are sexually assaulted by a neighbour, and the response is the same: "Don't exaggerate." In the back seat of the car, Fuller looks over to her sister and finds "she has stopped listening. Like an African." Fuller is not a participant. When Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe, her boarding school empties of white children and fills with black. She is introduced to a boy called Oliver Chiweshe, whose nanny and driver are dressed in better clothes than her own parents, and she wonders at his second name: "I have not known the full name of a single African until now." The white colonists, she says, named places after themselves, their heroes, their women. They used hopeful names and unlikely, stolen names, such as Venice or Bannockburn. They gave their servants English names that were liable to change from one day to the next. But Bobo Fuller knows the original and the restored African names for places, and she knows how little they matter too. "The land itself of course was careless of its name. It still is. You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name. Change its name altogether if you like. The land is still unblinking under the African sky." Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight appears as a Picador Classic in January. - Anne Enright Caption: Captions: Alexandra Fuller's parents with her sister Van in Kenya, 1966 Fuller is completely clear about her parents' racism: the way these white farmers call the black people around them "gondies" or "wogs"; the ones who fight them are "bolshy muntus", "restless natives"; the ones who work for them are "nannies" or "boys". The family lives in a world of taboo and projected shame. Growing up, Fuller does not like drinking from the same cup as a black person. When she is obliged to wash in water a black child has used she is surprised to discover that "Nothing happens . . . I do not break out in spots or a rash. I do not turn black." The black body is contaminating and shamefully exposed, the white body forbidden. As a very young child, when she is bitten by a tick, the nanny and cook put down their tea and frown at her, but they will not look downthere. "Not there," says the cook. "I can't look there." And yet, if she falls or hurts herself, her nanny "lets me put my hand down her shirt on to her breast and I can suck my thumb and feel how soft she is". Her nanny's breasts smell of the way rain smells when it hits hot earth. "I know, without knowing why, that Mum would smack me if she saw me doing this." Perhaps children are the only people who can see war properly, stripped of ideological excuse. The Fullers move to a farm in the Burma Valley, "the very epicentre and birthplace of the civil war in Rhodesia", where [Alexandra Fuller] and her sister Vanessa, learn - or fail to learn - how to strip and reassemble a gun then shoot it. This to defend themselves from the "terrs" or terrorists, who will come "they said, to chop off the ears and lips and eyelids of little white children". These children cheer when they hear the "stomach-echoing thump" of a mine exploding in the hills, because it tells them "either an African or a baboon has been wounded or killed". The Fullers have a bomb-proofed Land Rover, called "Lucy", complete with siren - that her parents only use to announce their arrival at parties. When they drive into town they go past Africans "whose hatred reflects like sun in a mirror into our faces, impossible to ignore". The constant attention Fuller pays to her mother, to her agonies and her pleasures, results in an unforgettable portrait of a dashing, horse-riding, reckless woman, a constant reader and an expert in having a terrible, good time. "I am like one of the dogs," Fuller says, "trying to read her mood, her happiness, her next move." They are separated, not just by tragedy, but also by booze; the way her drunken mother can spend, "an agreeable hour, looking in the rear-view mirror and trying out various expressions to see which most suits her lips". Fuller is also estranged, perhaps, by her mother's "icy" look, the way her eyes, in her madness, shine "like marbles, cold and hard and glittering". But when she is drunk, this fearsome, fun woman is a slow-motion thing; stymied, open to pity. She is "softly, deeply drunk", and her sobs are also "soft". It is Fuller's favourite word. She uses it again to describe the farm in Zambia where her battered family goes to mend. Here the land is "softly voluptuously fertile and sweet smelling of khaki weed, and old cow manure and thin dust and msasa leaves". - Anne Enright.
Kirkus Review
Fuller's debut is a keen-eyed, sharp-voiced memoir of growing up white in 1970s Africa. Born in England in 1969, the author by age three had moved to civil-war-torn Rhodesia, where her parents had lived before they lost an infant son to meningitis. Tim and Nicola Fuller ran a farm on Rhodesia's eastern edge. Mozambique, just across the border, was deep into its own civil war, and in this hostile geopolitical climate the Fullers struggled for a toehold that would keep Rhodesia white-ruled. In 1976, Nicola gave birth to a daughter who drowned in a duck puddle less than two years later. Minority rule ended in 1979; the country began its gradual, uneasy metamorphosis into independent Zimbabwe. The Fullers lost their land; Nicola bore and for the third time lost a child. To gain distance from all this failure, the family moved to dictator-controlled Malawi before ultimately settling in Zambia, where Tim and Nicola remain to this day. Fuller makes no apologies for her parents' (especially her mother's) politics. The loose structure and short takes here crystallize and polish the general subjects-race, politics, history, home, loss-into diamond-hard clarity without sacrificing the pace and intensity of the narrative or distracting the reader from the appeal of the personal. Like Dinesen, the author takes an elegiac tone, but it's balanced by a bouncy lyricism derived from compression, humor, and gimlet-eyed compassion. Fuller loved and loves her Africa; in the final analysis that passion takes a bright and vivid story to the next level, and even further. An illuminating, even thrillingly fresh perspective on the continent's much-discussed post-colonial problems. Author tour
Library Journal Review
Fuller grew up in southern Africa in the 1970s at a time of political upheaval. Her family's eccentric lifestyle, coupled with her mother's outrageous, alcohol-fueled behavior, is told from a child's wide-eyed point of view with humor and insight. South African-born narrator Lisette Lecat seamlessly creates a full cast of characters, capturing every ounce of drama and poetry in Fuller's evocative writing. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 rhodesia, 1976 Mum says, "Don't come creeping into our room at night." They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, "Don't startle us when we're sleeping." "Why not?" "We might shoot you." "Oh." "By mistake." "Okay." As it is, there seems a good enough chance of getting shot on purpose. "Okay, I won't." So if I wake in the night and need Mum and Dad, I call Vanessa, because she isn't armed. "Van! Van, hey!" I hiss across the room until she wakes up. And then Van has to light a candle and escort me to the loo, where I pee sleepily into the flickering yellow light and Van keeps the candle high, looking for snakes and scorpions and baboon spiders. Mum won't kill snakes because she says they help to keep the rats down (but she rescued a nest of baby mice from the barns and left them to grow in my cupboard, where they ate holes in the family's winter jerseys). Mum won't kill scorpions either; she catches them and lets them go free in the pool and Vanessa and I have to rake the pool before we can swim. We fling the scorps as far as we can across the brown and withering lawn, chase the ducks and geese out, and then lower ourselves gingerly into the pool, whose sides wave green and long and soft and grasping with algae. And Mum won't kill spiders because she says it will bring bad luck. I tell her, "I'd say we have pretty rotten luck as it is." "Then think how much worse it would be if we killed spiders." I have my feet off the floor when I pee. "Hurry up, man." "Okay, okay." "It's like Victoria Falls." "I really had to go." I have been holding my pee for a long, long time and staring out the window to try and guess how close it is to morning. Maybe I could hold it until morning. But then I notice that it is the deep-black-sky quiet time of night, which is the halfway time between the sun setting and the sun rising when even the night animals are quiet-as if they, like day animals, take a break in the middle of their work to rest. I can't hear Vanessa breathing; she has gone into her deep middle-of-the-night silence. Dad is not snoring nor is he shouting in his sleep. The baby is still in her crib but the smell of her is warm and animal with wet nappy. It will be a long time until morning. Then Vanessa hands me the candle-"You keep boogies for me now"-and she pees. "See, you had to go, too." "Only 'cos you had to." There is a hot breeze blowing through the window, the cold sinking night air shifting the heat of the day up. The breeze has trapped midday scents; the prevalent cloying of the leach field, the green soap which has spilled out from the laundry and landed on the patted-down red earth, the wood smoke from the fires that heat our water, the boiled-meat smell of dog food. We debate the merits of flushing the loo. "We shouldn't waste the water." Even when there isn't a drought we can't waste water, just in case one day there is a drought. Anyway, Dad has said, "Steady on with the loo paper, you kids. And don't flush the bloody loo all the time. The leach field can't handle it." "But that's two pees in there." "So? It's only pee." "Agh sis, man, but it'll be smelly by tomorrow. And you peed as much as a horse." "It's not my fault." "You can flush." "You're taller." "I'll hold the candle." Van holds the candle high. I lower the toilet lid, stand on it and lift up the block of hardwood that covers the cistern, and reach down for the chain. Mum has glued a girlie-magazine picture to this block of hardwood: a blond woman in few clothes, with breasts like naked cow udders, and she's all arched in a strange pouty contortion, like she's got backache. Which maybe she has, from the weight of the udders. The picture is from Scope magazine. We aren't allowed to look at Scope magazine. "Why?" "Because we aren't those sorts of people," says Mum. "But we have a picture from Scope magazine on the loo lid." "That's a joke." "Oh." And then, "What sort of joke?" "Stop twittering on." A pause. "What sort of people are we, then?" "We have breeding," says Mum firmly. "Oh." Like the dairy cows and our special expensive bulls (who are named Humani, Jack, and Bulawayo). "Which is better than having money," she adds. I look at her sideways, considering for a moment. "I'd rather have money than breeding," I say. Mum says, "Anyone can have money." As if it's something you might pick up from the public toilets in OK Bazaar Grocery Store in Umtali. "Ja, but we don't." Mum sighs. "I'm trying to read, Bobo." "Can you read to me?" Mum sighs again. "All right," she says, "just one chapter." But it is teatime before we look up from The Prince and the Pauper. The loo gurgles and splutters, and then a torrent of water shakes down, spilling slightly over the bowl. "Sis, man," says Vanessa. You never know what you're going to get with this loo. Sometimes it refuses to flush at all and other times it's like this, water on your feet. I follow Vanessa back to the bedroom. The way candlelight falls, we're walking into blackness, blinded by the flame of the candle, unable to see our feet. So at the same moment we get the creeps, the neck-prickling terrorist-under-the-bed creeps, and we abandon ourselves to fear. The candle blows out. We skid into our room and leap for the beds, our feet quickly tucked under us. We're both panting, feeling foolish, trying to calm our breathing as if we weren't scared at all. Vanessa says, "There's a terrorist under your bed, I can see him." "No you can't, how can you see him? The candle's out." "Struze fact." And I start to cry. "Jeez, I'm only joking." I cry harder. "Shhh, man. You'll wake up Olivia. You'll wake up Mum and Dad." Which is what I'm trying to do, without being shot. I want everyone awake and noisy to chase away the terrorist-under-my-bed. "Here," she says, "you can sleep with Fred if you stop crying." So I stop crying and Vanessa pads over the bare cement floor and brings me the cat, fast asleep in a snail-circle on her arms. She puts him on the pillow and I put an arm over the vibrating, purring body. Fred finds my earlobe and starts to suck. He's always sucked our earlobes. Our hair is sucked into thin, slimy, knotted ropes near the ears. Mum says, "No wonder you have worms all the time." I lie with my arms over the cat, awake and waiting. African dawn, noisy with animals and the servants and Dad waking up and a tractor coughing into life somewhere down at the workshop, clutters into the room. The bantam hens start to crow and stretch, tumbling out of their roosts in the tree behind the bathroom to peck at the reflection of themselves in the window. Mum comes in smelling of Vicks VapoRub and tea and warm bed and scoops the sleeping baby up to her shoulder. I can hear July setting tea on the veranda and I can smell the first, fresh singe of Dad's morning cigarette. I balance Fred on my shoulder and come out for tea: strong with no sugar, a splash of milk, the way Mum likes it. Fred has a saucer of milk. "Morning, Chookies," says Dad, not looking at me, smoking. He is looking far off into the hills, where the border between Rhodesia and Mozambique melts blue-gray, even in the pre-hazy clear of early morning. "Morning, Dad." "Sleep all right?" "Like a log," I tell him. "You?" Dad grunts, stamps out his cigarette, drains his teacup, balances his bush hat on his head, and strides out into the yard to make the most of the little chill the night has left us with which to fight the gathering soupy heat of day. getting there: zambia, 1987 To begin with, before Independence, I am at school with white children only. "A" schools, they are called: superior schools with the best teachers and facilities. The black children go to "C" schools. In-between children who are neither black nor white (Indian or a mixture of races) go to "B" schools. The Indians and coloureds (who are neither completely this nor completely that) and blacks are allowed into my school the year I turn eleven, when the war is over. The blacks laugh at me when they see me stripped naked after swimming or tennis, when my shoulders and arms are angry sunburnt red. "Argh! I smell roasting pork!" they shriek. "Who fried the bacon?" "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 my skin erupts in miniature volcanoes of protest in the presence of tsetse flies, mosquitoes, ticks. The way I stand out against the khaki bush like a large marshmallow to a gook with a gun. White. African. White-African. "But what are you?" I am asked over and over again. "Where are you from originally?" I began then, embarking from a hot, dry boat. Blinking bewildered from the sausage-gut of a train. Arriving in Rhodesia, Africa. From Derbyshire, England. I was two years old, startled and speaking toddler English. Lungs shocked by thick, hot, humid air. Senses crushed under the weight of so many stimuli. I say, "I'm African." But not black. And I say, "I was born in England," by mistake. But, "I have lived in Rhodesia (which is now Zimbabwe) and in Malawi (which used to be Nyasaland) and in Zambia (which used to be Northern Rhodesia)." And I add, "Now I live in America," through marriage. And (full disclosure), "But my parents were born of Scottish and English parents." What does that make me? Mum doesn't know who she is, either. She stayed up all night once listening to Scottish music and crying. "This music"-her nose twitches-"is so beautiful. It makes me homesick." Mum has lived in Africa all but three years of her life. "But this is your home." "But my heart"-Mum attempts to thump her chest-"is Scottish." Oh, fergodsake. "You hated England," I point out. Mum nods, her head swinging, like a chicken with a broken neck. "You're right," she says. "But I love Scotland." "What," I ask, challenging, "do you love about Scotland?" "Oh the . . . the . . ." Mum frowns at me, checks to see if I'm tricking her. "The music," she says at last, and starts to weep again. Mum hates Scotland. She hates drunk-driving laws and the cold. The cold makes her cry, and then she comes down with malaria. Her eyes are half-mast. That's what my sister and I call it when Mum is drunk and her eyelids droop. Half-mast eyes. Like the flag at the post office whenever someone important dies, which in Zambia, with one thing and another, is every other week. Mum stares out at the home paddocks where the cattle are coming in for their evening water to the trough near the stables. The sun is full and heavy over the hills that describe the Zambia-Zaire border. "Have a drink with me, Bobo," she offers. She tries to pat the chair next to hers, misses, and feebly slaps the air, her arm like a broken wing. I shake my head. Ordinarily I don't mind getting softly drunk next to the slowly collapsing heap that is Mum, but I have to go back to boarding school the next day, nine hours by pickup across the border to Zimbabwe. "I need to pack, Mum." That afternoon Mum had spent hours wrapping thirty feet of electric wire around the trees in the garden so that she could pick up the World Service of the BBC. The signature tune crackled over the syrup-yellow four o'clock light just as the sun was starting to hang above the top of the msasa trees. " 'Lillibulero,' " Mum said. "That's Irish." "You're not Irish," I pointed out. She said, "Never said I was." And then, follow-on thought, "Where's the whisky?" We must have heard "Lillibulero" thousands of times. Maybe millions. Before and after every news broadcast. At the top of every hour. Spluttering with static over the garden at home; incongruous from the branches of acacia trees in campsites we have set up in the bush across the countryside; singing from the bathroom in the evening. But you never know what will set Mum off. Maybe it was "Lillibulero" coinciding with the end of the afternoon, which is a rich, sweet, cooling, melancholy time of day. "Your Dad was English originally," I tell her, not liking the way this is going. She said, "It doesn't count. Scottish blood cancels English blood." By the time she has drunk a quarter of a bottle of whisky, we have lost reception from Bush House in London and the radio hisses to itself from under its fringe of bougainvillea. Mum has pulled out her old Scottish records. There are three of them. Three records of men in kilts playing bagpipes. The photographs show them marching blindly (how do they see under those dead-bear hats?) down misty Scottish cobbled streets, their faces completely blocked by their massive instruments. Mum turns the music up as loud as it will go, takes the whisky out to the veranda, and sits cross-legged on a picnic chair, humming and staring out at the night-blanketed farm. This cross-leggedness is a hangover from the brief period in Mum's life when she took up yoga from a book. Which was better than the brief period in her life in which she explored the possibility of converting to the Jehovah's Witnesses. And better than the time she bought a book on belly-dancing at a rummage sale and tried out her techniques on every bar north of the Limpopo River and south of the equator. The horses shuffle restlessly in their stables. The night apes scream from the tops of the shimmering-leafed msasa trees. The dogs set up in a chorus of barking and will not stop until we put them inside, all except Mum's faithful spaniel, who will not leave her side even when she's throwing what Dad calls a wobbly. Which is what this is: a wobbly. The radio hisses and occasionally, drunkenly, bursts into snatches of song (Spanish or Portuguese) or chatters in German, in Afrikaans, or in an exaggerated American accent. "This is the Voice of America." And then it swoops, "Beee-ooooeee!" Excerpted from Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
