‘Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead or what use we will make of our own anguished searching. The most any of us can seem to do is to fashion something – an object of ourselves and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it so to speak to the life force.’ Ernest Becker.
Yesterday I finished the memoir, Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight, Alexandra Fuller’s story of her Rhodesian childhood. A South African friend suggested I read it. The story means a great deal to her, and she wondered whether a non-South African might resonate as she did.
It is one of those books that will stay with you long after you read. And reminds me in some ways of Gillian Meare’s The Grass Sister. Both books describe an inhospitable hot landscape that is also compellingly beautiful.
My memories of The Grass Sister have faded, as so many books do, but Fuller’s book is still there in my bones. She tells a story from the perspective of a white Rhodesian family and the tragedies that befall them trying to survive in an inhospitable climate, even as they are white and have an advantage over the black South Africans.
Fuller was born in 1969 and moved with her family to Rhodesia in 1972 before the end of apartheid. She therefore lived through the transition, which saw Rhodesia become Zimbabwe. A land now in trouble as those who have taken power do not have sufficient skills to farm the land, not in a way they might once have learned from their colonial masters.
This again is a story of what can happen when colonisers take over other people’s land in the belief they’re raising standards, when in fact they are enriching themselves at the expense of the indigenous people to a point of cruelty. And what gets left over in a post-colonial land, so called, is more of the destructive forces at work when autocratic groups try to take control.
A tribal society with none of the in-built checks and balances of the past. Another way for the rich to get richer on the backs of the poor and those completely disenfranchised.
I know so little of the histories of these places but can sense something of the cruelty of life there. Yet Alexandra Fuller loves her country. The smell when she arrives home after time spent in America with her new husband.
Through the story we watch Fuller’s mother develop what’s described as ‘manic depression’. Given her driven personality and all the losses she must bear. She finally gets medicated to the point of almost non recognition before she can get the balance between alcohol and drugs right.
It’s not hard to see why a woman like this might lose it. The life she led. The hardship of such a life against the backdrop of her British inheritance.
I know well what a British inheritance looks like.
The nuns taught us in schools. All the writers, with few exceptions, in our Victorian readers were white English men. And their words evoke a life long gone. Like Henry Wadswoth Longfellow’s Village Blacksmith.
Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stand
The smith a mighty man is he with large and sinewy hands
And the muscles in his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.
Or Lord Byron’s
The Destruction of Sennacherib
The Assyrian came down life a wolf on the fold
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea
When the blue wave rolled nightly on deep Galilee
Funny how these words come to me.
I once had a dream in which the word ‘cohort’ featured. At the time I had no idea what this word meant. I took it to my analysis and Mrs Milanova asked my thoughts. I was convinced I had no idea what cohort meant. So, she filled me in.
A cohort, an army of men, seemed relevant to whatever dream I brought that day and now all these decades later re-writing the words to a poem I learned as a small child without an ounce of understanding then, it comes back to me.
That’s the thing about growing up in the Melbourne suburbs of Camberwell and Cheltenham in the 1950s and ‘60s. There was so much I did not understand. And my understanding of events did not matter. Not then. I could get by learning words by rote.
So often I have wished I could go back and re-learn for the first time the meaning of these things.
I could get by then, even after I received a D in biology in my final school year. This result stunned me. That same year I managed to get an A in languages, Latin, French and English literature, enough to get me into social work at the University of Melbourne. One of the coveted courses at the time. It was difficult to get the necessary marks, even as I almost failed biology. And this despite the fact I’d spent days learning all the bits and pieces of the body and the functions they served.
I still remember little of what I learned then, even as it must be tucked away somewhere in my memory banks. Though inaccessible without the understanding necessary to make use of it.
I still don’t understand the menstrual cycle beyond a rudimentary knowledge of all things bodily, about the plumbing and pumping of a heart or the digestive system. Such understanding did not matter when I was young.
In any case, I did not feel things in my body unless I fell sick with flu or some such, which was rare. Or after I hurt myself in a fall. Otherwise, my body gave me no grief until it began to change in adolescence. Then it became a torture.
Not for its inner workings but for what was happening on the outside. How it looked to outsiders. The sheer volume of my growth, my swelling breasts and hips, the unwanted growth of hair in places previously smooth. And pimples erupting on my face. Sometimes extending to my back and between my breasts. Pimples, this great bodily scourge along with the cold sores I inherited from my mother.
The trouble with cold sores, they were red and ugly on the edge of my lips. They could pop up without notice, first a tingling then the blisters, usually when something troubled me. I only realised this fact in adulthood. Before back then as a child, cold sores were a curse as uncontrollable as my father’s drinking.
When Ernest Becker suggests the only thing we can do with our endless searching, and talks of making an offering, this is perhaps what I’m doing here. Making an offering of my memories as they evolve, first from other people inside and through the books I read and then through a rearrangement of my memories.
In one scene in Don’t let’s go to the dogs, Alexandra Fuller describes how her mother makes a fruit cake one year during the stinking heat of a Zambian December. She uses one of the few syringes they have on the property to inject the cake with brandy for weeks before the great day.
She wants to re-create an English Christmas in Zambia. The morning after the family has gone carol singing on Christmas Eve, visiting nearby homes of ex-patriots’ houses, drunk all of them, parents and young daughters as well, the cake is to triumph.
In the morning their visitors who begin the day sober also ending up drunk. It seems to be the way of life for the white people in South Africa. The water so bad they survive on alcohol.
When it comes time for the cake, Bobo, the memoir’s narrator, describes how her mother brings out the cake and adds a few extra sloshes of brandy. The cake sags under its weight. The mother goes to flame the cake as if it were a plum pudding. She can’t manage it. So, a guest helps hold the lighter steady.
A delicious blue flame lingers a moment and then somehow reaches the reservoir of brandy inside and the cake explodes. Splattered all over the floor and walls. The drunk guests eat pieces anyway lathered with the brandy butter Bobo’s mother has prepared for the occasion.
I told my husband this story. He’s been making Christmas cakes ahead of the season and he too laces them in brandy every few days.
‘That couldn’t have happened,’ he said. ‘There was not enough of a sealed section for an explosion.’ He pulled his own cake out of the oven, while trying to explain the science to me.
As a memoirist it matters not to me that this event is impossible. In Alexandra Fuller’s memory something like this happened. Her story captures the essence of the experience. The attempt to bring some of the grandeur of the good old days of a British Christmas to the heat of South Africa, a land which does not seem welcoming.
The Fuller family lose two babies and Bobo’s mother nearly loses her mind as a consequence. Too great a loss. A son who does not survive his birth.
I remember my mother also losing her last child to still birth, a daughter. The pain of this. And now when babies are re-entering my life, the babies of my children, each new birth revises that primal fear of loss. Alongside the joy of new beginnings, and I wonder what offering these tiny ones might make to the life force. Soon enough mine will be spent.
