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Summary
Summary
Scribbling the Cat
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 (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Memoirist Fuller (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight) describes this book, about her friendship with a Rhodesian war veteran, as "a slither of a slither of a much greater story." This disclaimer doesn't excuse the book's thinness, as it traces Fuller's journey with the white ex-soldier, K, from his farm in Zambia through Zimbabwe and into Mozambique, to the battlefields of more than two decades ago. Fuller evokes place and character with the vivid prose that distinguished her unflinching memoir of growing up in Africa, but here she handles subject matter that warrants more than artful word painting and soul-searching. Writing about war its scarred participants, victims and territory Fuller skimps on the history and politics that have shaped her and her subjects. Her personal enmeshment with K is the story's core. She's enamored of his physical beauty and power, and transfixed by his contradictions: K's capacity for both violence and emotional vulnerability, his anger and generosity, the blood on his hands and the faith he relies on (he's a born-again Christian) to cope with his demons. Fuller becomes K's confessor, and the journey turns into a kind of penance for her complicity, as a white girl in the 1970s, in a war of white supremacy. When K recounts how he tortured an African girl, Fuller swallows nausea and thinks, "I am every bit that woman's murderer." Fuller and K embark on their road trip ostensibly for the shell-shocked man to get beyond his "spooks" and for Fuller to write about it, but this motivation makes for a rather static journey. Photos. (On sale May 10) Forecast: Don't Let's Go received rave reviews, and readers of that book will probably want to read this new one. A 10-city author tour, national review coverage and national media attention will drive interest. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Fuller, whose powerful memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2001) told the story of her family's life before and during the Rhodesian civil war, returned to Africa to follow a soldier in that war and relive the past. On a trip to the Sole Valley in Zambia, where her parents now live, Fuller met K, a white farmer who fought in the Rhodesian war. Lonely, tormented K is drawn to Fuller, and in turn Fuller is interested in the story of his life and how the war shaped him. Her fascination with him leads her to ask him to travel to Mozambique to revisit the places he fought in; his fascination with her leads him to say yes. And so begins their journey, where K's demons are indeed uncovered and Fuller learns more about him and his past than she bargained for. You can't rewind war, Fuller writes, It spools on, and on . . and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place. Fuller's unflinching look at K, war, and even herself makes for an extremely powerful book, one that takes readers into a complex, deep-seated, and ongoing conflict and sees through to its heart. Fuller is a truly gifted and insightful writer. --Kristine Huntley Copyright 2004 Booklist
Guardian Review
Look back too much and you are wiped out by the tree in front of you says Alexandra Fuller's dad, but she ignores him and heads full- throttle into the past looking for demons. She missed the tree, but the trip "bloody nearly killed me", she tells us afterwards. Dad was right, and not just about Fuller's journey. Too many Zimbabweans see the past as the key to the present and it's nearly killing them as well. For the leftovers of Ian Smith's killing machine who people Fuller's new book, the past is all there is. Yesterday's world had rules of engagement. Remaindered from the Rhodesian war, all they have now is their ghosts inadequately repressed by extreme religion, alcohol, purple pills or a penchant for tearing down bars. Don't believe these guys don't exist. Spot them at the end of a Harare Rhodie bar or even worse stumbling towards you across the terrace of a bush hotel and it's time to grab the bill. I should have stayed to listen. It might have helped me understand where President Mugabe was going when he told me (as British high commissioner), just before pulling up the drawbridge, that the winds of change were irrelevant to Zimbabwe and he would take the country back to its roots and rural strengths. For Mugabe, the past is a comfort zone, full of certainties, free of challenge. That's why he abolished the present and left his enforcers and Henry the Fourth (HIV infection to you) to take care of the generation shift. Scribbling the Cat is a grimmer title than it sounds: "scribbling" is a term current among Rhodie veterans for the act of killing. Preferred targets were fighters of the liberation movement (gooks), but nobody (gondie, munt or even honkey) could feel safe in the Rhodesia/ Mozambique border country. If the vocabulary (Fuller thoughtfully provides us with a glossary) is disturbing, try telling K, the white African veteran who, when not exchanging atrocities with the enemy, tries to scribble Father Christmas by forcing his beard down the back of his throat. For Fuller, the too-curious feline of the title, these easy pseudonyms reflect the casualness of killing in conflict and the virtual irrelevance of human life to the protagonists. But as the book progresses they increasingly come across as necessary euphemisms for former combatants trying to minimise their guilt and quiet the demons that variously bring them to tears, keep them cursing though their dreams or drive them howling into the bush. "Don't let the ghosts in Moz-ambique bite you," says one old fighter to another: some hope! Fuller's objective is to get the ghosts talking through those they possess, to make some sense of war and its impact on warriors and ultimately find the answer to the "splinters in my own psyche". She carries her own demons from schoolgirl days when she cheered on the troopers and sang the anthems of supremacy. She accordingly asks K to take her on a journey back to the zone and relive his past. It is a high-risk project. Once a silent killer, hard-drinking street fighter and bar brawler of awesome violence, now a born-again Christian with visions and a special line to God, K is Desperate Dan with an attitude. "Don't blame me if we get scribbled," he says. Most everything that could happen on their safari does happen, helped along by corrupt officials, thieves, the local fauna and forces of nature. K's on/off death wish doesn't help. With hindsight it is an ironic journey. Mount Darwin, 80 miles northeast of Harare, had K scribbling like fury in his day. It was an iconic location for Rhodies and rebels. Today it is hard-line Party country where, 22 years after the peace, Border Ghezi, my one-time lunch mate and governor of the province, led the first brutal attacks on commercial farm workers. K and a cast of crazed former hunter-killers give us a dark, often hilarious, ultimately unforgiving moral travelogue with regular sorties into politics, race and the like, but always returning to war and the perpetrator. For Fuller's chums, it's to do with self-justification and legitimacy. "We didn't choose war, war chose us," rationalises one former fighter. "No one would choose war deliberately but if it's the hand you're dealt, then . . . fuck. " Perhaps tired of the special pleading, she comes off the fence: the war hadn't created K. He was "what happened when you grew a child from the African soil, taught him an attitude of superiority, persecution and paranoia and then gave him a gun and sent him to war is a world he thought was his to defend". It's not easy to accept K's casual rationalisations without anger or at least indignation. But reading is one thing: meet the bereaved and the torture victims of present-day Zimbabwe for yourself and wonder at the shoulder- shrugs as the torturers pass themselves off as agents of freedom - don't be surprised if you wonder what it is they have won and what it was that K lost. But the biggest shiver for me comes when K describes the fear he instilled in the psychiatrists checking him out after a particularly awful act of torture against a young Shona girl. "They were so scared of me," he says. "They knew that if they had been in my position they might have done the same thing. They were so shit scared of being who I was." Maybe the demon is with us all. Peter Longworth was British high commissioner to Zimbabwe, 1998 - 2001. To order Scribbling the Cat for pounds 14.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-fuller.1 For the leftovers of Ian Smith's killing machine who people [Alexandra Fuller]'s new book, the past is all there is. Yesterday's world had rules of engagement. Remaindered from the Rhodesian war, all they have now is their ghosts inadequately repressed by extreme religion, alcohol, purple pills or a penchant for tearing down bars. Don't believe these guys don't exist. Spot them at the end of a Harare Rhodie bar or even worse stumbling towards you across the terrace of a bush hotel and it's time to grab the bill. Scribbling the Cat is a grimmer title than it sounds: "scribbling" is a term current among Rhodie veterans for the act of killing. Preferred targets were fighters of the liberation movement (gooks), but nobody (gondie, munt or even honkey) could feel safe in the Rhodesia/ Mozambique border country. If the vocabulary (Fuller thoughtfully provides us with a glossary) is disturbing, try telling K, the white African veteran who, when not exchanging atrocities with the enemy, tries to scribble Father Christmas by forcing his beard down the back of his throat. "Don't let the ghosts in Moz-ambique bite you," says one old fighter to another: some hope! Fuller's objective is to get the ghosts talking through those they possess, to make some sense of war and its impact on warriors and ultimately find the answer to the "splinters in my own psyche". She carries her own demons from schoolgirl days when she cheered on the troopers and sang the anthems of supremacy. - Peter Longworth.
Kirkus Review
The author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2002) takes a demon-haunted tour of Zimbabwe and Mozambique in the company of an ex-soldier who fought with the Rhodesian Light Infantry. Visiting her parents in Zambia, Fuller meets K, a white African banana farmer and a veteran of the Rhodesian War. She finds him both "terrifying and unattractive"--he radiates a sense of violence and unpredictability--but also fascinating for the ghosts he harbors. K's born-again Christianity temporarily keeps the specters at bay, but they will slowly be released as he and the author return to the scenes of his wartime experiences. "I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are," writes Fuller, who knows she will be capturing only one facet of K--and not a pretty one. Seen through encounters with his comrades-in-arms, K is obviously capable of the acts of terror he committed during the war. Yet he's also capable of reflecting on the crushing death of his young son: "All those people I destroyed, all those lives. . . . The Almighty was showing me what it was like to lose a child." As we tumble through K's profound misery, we ride through an equally dismal Zimbabwean landscape; Fuller is adept at painting each. Zimbabwe is deeply unromantic, a place of labor, strain, and toil in which the marginalized must be endlessly resourceful simply to survive; life expectancy is 35 years, and randomly dispersed landmines, a handful for each citizen, remain a threat. Fuller learns more than she wants to know about the brutal, indefensible war, about what happens when you give a man an attitude and a gun, and about her own willingness to lead K on to get at a story. A worried, restless, and haunted piece of work, tattooed and scarred from beginning to end. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
With Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller gave us a lacerating account of growing up in Africa at a time when black rule was replacing white rule. Here she proves that though she now lives in Wyoming, she can never really escape Africa. During a trip home to visit her parents, Fuller meets the mysterious K, a battle-scarred survivor of Rhodesia's civil war, who remains haunted by his experiences and lives alone after the departure of several wives and the death of a child. He still speaks contemptuously of black Africans but is a born-again Christian. To try to understand him-and hence Africa itself-Fuller agrees to travel with him to the area where he served as a soldier. This really is a trip into the heart of darkness, evocatively rendered in Fuller's astonishing prose. Along the way, the reader is caught wondering just what this woman thinks she's doing and whether the travelog is so artfully rendered as to be entirely real. (Will Fuller ever turn to fiction? One hopes so.) But in the end, this is a beautiful and powerfully moving account that gives us some insight into the tragedy of Africa today. If curiosity scribbled (that is, killed) the cat, then let yourself be scribbled. Highly recommended.-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Uncharacteristic Sole Flood BECAUSE IT IS THE LAND that grew me, and because they are my people, I sometimes forget to be astonished by Africans. But I was astonished, almost to death, when I met K. For a start, K was not what I expected to see here. Not here, where the elevation rises just a few feet above ennui and where even the Goba people-the people who are indigenous to this area-look displaced by their own homes, like refugees who are trying to flee their place of refuge. And where the Tonga people-the nation that was shifted here in the 1950s, when the colonial government flooded them out of their ancestral valley to create Lake Kariwa-look unrequitedly vengeful and correspondingly despondent. And where everyone else looks like a refugee worker; sweat-drained, drunk, malarial, hungover, tragic, recently assaulted. Down here, even those who don't go looking for trouble are scarred from the accidents of Life that stagger the otherwise uninterrupted tedium of heat and low-grade fever: boils, guns, bandit attacks, crocodiles, insect bites. No ripped edge of skin seems to close properly in this climate. Babies die too young and with unseemly haste. If you count my parents and K, there are maybe two dozen people-out of a total population of about sixty thousand-who have voluntarily moved to the Sole Valley from elsewhere. That's if you don't count the occasional, evaporating aid workers who slog out this far from hope and try to prevent the villagers from losing their lives with such apparent carelessness. And if you don't count the Italian nuns at the mission hospital who are here as the result of a calling from God (more like an urgent shriek, I have no doubt). Sole Valley is a V-shaped slot of goat-dusted scrub between the Chabija and Pepani Rivers in eastern Zambia. The town of Sole has metastasized off the cluster of buildings that make up the border post between Zambia and Zimbabwe. It consists of customs and immigration buildings, a (new and very smart) police station, an enormous tarmac parking lot for trucks, and a series of shabby tin and reed shacks that billow tarpaulins or plastic sheeting in a feeble protest against rain or dust and that offer for sale black market sugar, cooking oil, salt, mealie meal, and bread. welcome to sole, says the sign. speed kills, condoms save. People at the border post climb out of their cars and you see them looking around and you can hear them thinking, Save me from what? Guinea fowl destined for a torturous journey into someone's pot clatter from their bush-tambo baskets, "Nkanga, nkanga!" and the Heuglin's robins call from the dust-coated shrubs, "It's-up-to-you, it's-up-to-you, up-to-you, UP-TO-YOU." Truck drivers in diesel-stained undershirts slouch in the shade of brothels and taverns, suffocating their boredom with women, beer, and cigarettes. A sign dangling above the shelves of one tavern, whose wares include not only beer and cigarettes but also condoms and headache pills, asks, have you come to solve my problems or to multiply them? Prostitutes lounge from trucker to trucker, casually soliciting in a hip-sliding sly way that hides their urgency. It's a deadly business. Cutthroat and throat-cut. Girls as young as twelve will sell themselves to the long-haul truckers for as little as a meal or a bar of soap. In the shade of a shack that advertises max barbers arc welding and battery charge now open, a truck yawns and surveys its parts, which are vomited greasily on the ribbed earth in front of it, while a young man in a shiny nylon soccer shirt has his hair braided into porcupine spikes by a woman with deft fingers. And next to a sign that says relax & discus restarunt we sale shima & tea, two women from the Watchtower Society sit out in the sun with their legs stretched out in front of them, stern in their reproachfully white robes. They drink Coke and eat cakes of fried mealie meal. There are, in Africa, many more glamorous and inhabitable addresses than this low sink of land on the edge of perpetual malaria. Scratch the surface of anyone who has voluntarily come to this place-and who is unguardedly drunk at the time-and you will invariably uncork a wellspring of sorrow or a series of supremely unfortunate events and, very often, both. Scratch-and-sniff. Stiff upper lips crack at the edge of the bar, and tears spill and waves of unaccustomed emotion swallow whole brandy-and-Coke-smelling days. These tidal waves of sadness and hopeless nostalgia (not the hankering for a happy, irretrievable past, but the much worse sensation of regret for a past that is unbearably sad and irrevocably damaged) are more prevalent when the heat gets too much or when Christmas creeps around and soaks the senses with the memory of all that was once promising and hopeful about life. And then tight tongues grow soft with drink and the unavoidable sadness of the human condition is debated in ever decreasing circles until it sits on the shoulders of each individual in an agonizingly concentrated lump. Eventually someone drinks himself sober and declares that life is short and vicious and unveeringly cruel, and perhaps it's best not to talk about it. The hangovers from these drunken confessions of titanic misery (aborted marriages, damaging madness, dead children, lost wars, unmade fortunes) last nine or ten months, during which time no one really talks about anything , until the pressure of all the unhappiness builds up again to breaking point and there is another storm of heartbreaking confessions. But K, perfectly sober and in the bright light of morning, volunteered his demons to me, almost immediately. He hoisted them up for my inspection, like gargoyles grinning and leering from the edge of a row of pillars. And I was too curious-too amazed-to look the other way. It bloody nearly killed me. THE YEAR THAT I went home from Wyoming to Zambia for Christmas-the year I met K-it had been widely reported by the international press that there was a drought in the whole region. A drought that had started by eating the crops in Malawi and Zimbabwe and had gone on to inhale anything edible in Zambia and Mozambique. It was a drought that didn't stop gorging until it fell into the sea, bloated with the dust of a good chunk of the lower half of Africa's belly. News teams from all around the world came to take pictures of starving Africans and in the whole of central and southern Africa they couldn't find people more conveniently desperate-by which I mean desperate and close to both an international airport and a five-star hotel-than the villagers who live here. So they came with their cameras and their flak jackets and their little plastic bottles of hand sanitizer and took pictures of these villagers who were (as far as the villagers themselves were concerned) having an unusually fat year on account of unexpected and inexplicably generous local rain and the sudden, miraculous arrival of bags and bags of free food, which (in truth) they could use every year, not only when the rest of Africa suffered. The television producers had to ask the locals-unused to international attention-to stop dancing and ululating in front of the camera. Couldn't they try to look subdued? "Step away from the puddles." Rain slashed down and filming had to stop. The sun came out and the world steamed a virile, exuberant green. The Sole Valley looked disobediently-at least from the glossy distance of videotape-like the Okavango Swamps. Women and children gleamed. Goats threatened to burst their skins. Even the donkeys managed to look fortunate and plump. In a place where it is dry for nine months at a stretch, even the slightest breath of rain can be landscape-altering and can briefly transform the people into an impression of tolerable health. "Explain to them that this is for their own good. God knows, I am not doing this for my entertainment." If the television crews had wanted misery, they had only to walk a few meters off the road and into the nearest huts, where men, women, and children hang like damp chickens over long drops losing their lives through their frothing bowels. But HIV/ AIDS is its own separate documentary. Life expectancy in this dry basin of land has just been officially reduced to thirty-three. How do you film an absence? How do you express in pictures the disappearance of almost everyone over the age of forty? "Please ask those young boys to look hungry." The young boys obligingly thrust their hips at the camera and waggled pink tongues at the director. Excerpted from Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier by Fuller, 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.
