In her debut book, Alexandra Fuller writes about her childhood as the daughter of white tobacco farmers during Zimbabwe's liberation war. They lived on the edge of safety, on a plot of land right on the border of Mozambique, a plot of land also used by the guerrilla soldiers. To grow up in such a place - to live in such a place as an adult - created a toughness and resiliency of spirit, a dark humor. But along with this positive side grew the bad - her mother's alcoholism and sadness, the telling of stories that always led to the demise of white rule in Africa.
The Fullers moved from one bad situation to the next. When white-led Rhodesia "fell" to the "terrorists" (the Africans fighting for democratic rule), the Fullers moved to Malawi and then to Zambia, from one bad situation to another. With an alcoholic mother and a workaholic father, growing up white on a continent which has since excoriated the colonialists for their abuse of the continent, Fuller might have plenty to complain about - but she doesn't. Instead, as she stated in her NPR interview in February, she at first questioned whether she had a legitimate right to claim a voice "out of Africa," because she was, admittedly, a white child born of parents who still today seem not to understand why Africans would desire self-rule. But as Fuller began to realize that all she could do in life was compassionately occupy the space she had been given, and was born into, she could write "the truth" as she had seen it as a child. And so, though this is a brutal and tragic memoir, it is also humorous. Scenes such as the one where her mother spurs her horse onward to try to rid the property of squatters become tragicomic in the eyes of the young Alexandra, "Bo", who panics that she might never see her mother again.
Fuller dedicates her book, with love, to her mum and dad and sister, and to the three siblings who died as babies on the continent of Africa. But more telling is the quote from which Fuller draws her title: "Don't let's go to the dogs tonight, for mother will be there," by H.P. Herbert. The figure of her mother, luminous and bright, ever burning with sorrow and fatigue for all that she had worked for and lost, grows huge in Fuller's book. As it should be, for a memoir about a woman, Fuller's mother is the central figure around which the book is built. She is not an altogether admirable woman, but Fuller portrays her honestly, with sensitivity, as a good though brutal woman.
Go To Page: 1 2
