Don’t Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight
by Alexandra Fuller
Random House, $12.95
Although a grammar teacher would balk at the title, don’t let its wordiness fool you. In her memoir Don’t Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller recounts with wonderful clarity her upbringing in Africa in the 1970s and 80s. The daughter of English expatriates, Fuller grows up with the death of colonialism and the birth of equally corrupt, independent governments. These years are ripe with political details, but she is most interested in telling her own history. With brilliant sensitivity, Fuller recounts Africa as she saw it shape her family.
In a land teeming with conflict and violence, Fuller tells the story of her childhood with alarming calmness and honesty. Unaware of what she later describes as her “bubble of Anglocentricity,” Fuller openly, but never maliciously, recounts her childhood views. Her candor lets the reader truly experience the passion, pain and chaos of Africa as vividly as Fuller lived it. Fuller never apologizes, but slowly has her own awakening about her role as a white African. Don’t Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight is her “love story for the continent.” Fuller’s deep attachment to Africa shows in her careful, honest depiction of its beauty and danger.
Fuller’s sensitivity to the unstable physical and emotional landscape brings to life the volatile heat, noise, and color of African life. Each chapter is suffused with simple yet vivid descriptions. Africa smells of “hot, sweet, smoky, salt, sharp-soft. It is like black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass.” You can feel the scorching heat as Fuller describes noontime. The meticulous attention to sensory details makes her past seem present and allows the reader to truly experience Africa’s vitality.
Through her sensitive examination of characters and settings, Fuller demonstrates the power of the often inhospitable African environment. The vibrancy of her life, more than mere survival, is inextricably linked to the war, death, and disease that she witnesses firsthand. A bloody civil (and racial) war engulfs their first home, a farm in Rhodesia, and the installation of a new Zimbabwean government forces the Fullers to leave. Throughout the book, they continue to move, replanting themselves and their crops. Don’t Lets Go To The Dogs Tonight deals very sensitively with the survival and overcoming of these external pressures and the internal turmoil that they incur. The role model for this strength is Fuller’s mother, Nicola, who has a nervous breakdown after the third time one of her children dies. A vibrant, determined woman, she instilled in her daughters fiery independence.
The most impressive aspect of the Fuller story is that, despite all the hardships the family encountered, they remain in Africa. Anywhere else was merely “flat-empty and car fumes, concrete, street wet.” Disease, death and war are not intrusions, they are integral teachers. In a society that seems bent on providing what is the fastest, easiest, safest, we could benefit from avoiding the gimmicks and embracing this type of rocky, crooked path.-Kim Rinehimer
Before the Knife
by Carolyn Slaughter
Vintage Books, $12.00
While her tiny world crumbled to bits, Carolyn Slaughter found solace in the wilds of Africa. Only in the prologue and epilogue of Before the Knife does Slaughter directly reference the source of her torment-her father raped her from age six, onwards. Her deliberate omission of the rapes in the central pages increases the poignancy of her tale; the effect of the rapes on her life is implicit in every statement.
Detached, cold, and dismissive of anything that could sully their image, her family was flimsily held together by their very British reliance on ceremony and proper appearance. Refusing to admit the rapes were real, her family decayed in tandem with British colonial rule in the region.
A ‘50s-era district commissioner of the British Empire, her father’s job required that they move frequently as the political climate of the region soured. Her mother’s depression, a type which often befalls former society wives relegated to colonial outposts, left her unable to muster any love for herself, yet alone her daughters. Carolyn’s desperate attempts to gain understanding and affection from her mother were met with hostility or more disarmingly, indifference.
Africa, a bleak prison for her mother, serves as the only source of consolation for Carolyn. Shortly after the first rape, the family moved to the isolated town of Maun, an oasis in the middle of the Kalahari. The Okavango River captivated Carolyn, who would perch in a tree all day, growing “lost and dissolved” watching the slowly moving forms of crocodiles in the river.
Growing older, Carolyn spends entire days wandering around in the bush, coming back streaked with dirt and sunburnt, angering her parents. Her mother regarded Carolyn as an impossible child, rather than admitting the untidy truth to herself. Understandably, Caroline harbors an intense completely warranted hatred for her father that intensifies with age. Though she glosses over the crumbling British hold on the region, Slaughter’s overwhelming personal tragedy carries itself. She somehow retains her sense of humor, able to make fun of the British penchant for keeping up appearances.-Sonia Smith
The Power of One
by Bryce Courtenay
Ballantine Books, $14.95
Though South Africa escaped the grasp of colonialism far earlier than its neighbors, white supremacy and prejudice tragically become official policy until almost a century later. The Power of One, Bryce Courtenay’s semi-autobiographical debut novel, chronicles the first twenty years of the life of Peekay, the illegitimate son of a detached English mother. He lives in extremes, ever oscillating between alienation and belonging, brutality and triumph.
Following his mother’s nervous breakdown, five-year old Peekay is shipped off to a boarding school comprised utterly of Afrikaners. With hatred of the English lingering from the Boer War, Peekay’s heritage and youth ensure he will be persecuted intensely. The torment awaiting him at this school is unfathomable-on his very first night, a group of older boys surround him and urinate on him.
Plagued by the horrors of school life and the strain of separation from his nanny who had nursed him from birth, Peekay quickly becomes a chronic bed wetter. While on winter break, a celebrated Zulu medicine man is summoned to cure Peekay’s “night water.” Peekay returns to school minus an embarrassing habit and with a new companion, Grandpa Chook, his “loved and faithful chicken friend” (insofar as chickens can be faithful).
Tired of persecution for his difference, Peekay (though the chicken companion did not exactly help alleviate this difference), attempts to fade into comfortable mediocrity. However, his attempts to conceal his intelligence quickly deteriorate-Peekay was not built for obscurity, however comfortable. When Grandpa Chook is violently stolen away from him, Peekay is left friendless and forlorn. The losses suffered in his youth profoundly influence Peekay-and linger on, implicit in decisions thereafter.
After the death of Grandpa Chook, Peekay must leave school and move to a new house with his rehabilitated mother and grandfather. Traveling alone on the train from school, the conductor befriends Peekay and introduces him to the world of boxing. On this introduction Peekay reminisces, “Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark.” In little more than 24 hours, Hoppie instills in this impressionable youth the desire to become welterweight champion of the world.
While exploring the bushveld surrounding his new home, Peekay meets Doc, a professor, German expatriate and cactus aficionado. They become an inseparable, until Doc is wrongfully sent to prison for allegedly being a Nazi spy. Heartbroken at losing yet another friend, Peekay is consoled when he visits Doc regularly. To his delight, Peekay discovers the Prison has a boxing squad and becomes the youngest child on the squad. Peekay pours himself into his training, running the three miles to the prison each morning before school to predawn practice. This hard work pays off, with his coaches applauding his impressive progress.
Outgrowing his rural public school, Peekay accepts a scholarship for a posh English private school in Johannesburg. Abandoning the passive existence he adopted during his previous boarding experience, Peekay “learned that survival is a matter of actively making the system work for you rather than attempting to survive it.” Peekay trains under a famous coach, and successfully competes, garnering quite the cult following for himself.
Apartheid materializes in 1948 as official government policy. From an early age Peekay had been forced to recognize the consequences of the racial inequality imbedded in his country, and he valued men on their character, not their skin color. Determined to take a stand against bigotry, Peekay makes the controversial decision to fight an African man in a black township. When he discovers that, since birth, their lives have been intimately intermeshed, he grasps for the first time the unspeakable injustices that were committed for his benefit.
Though at times Peekay appears to be an archetypal champion, his candor and sincerity redeem him. In seizing the random opportunity to avenge Grandpa Chook’s death, Peekay reveals his humanity. The lengthy fight scenes peppered with jargon and rendered in Courtenay’s sometimes unwieldy prose, while lending the novel authenticity, alienate some readers. Though heavily steeped with truths from Courtenay’s own life, The Power of One avoids self-indulgence and ostentation, and ultimately is a compelling narrative.-Sonia Smith
