The "White man in Africa" or the "White African"?

It's not gotten off to a fantastic start, I'll admit that. 4 months between the first and second posts isn't the greatest precedent. Unfortunately for blogging, it comes well after living, thinking, eating, working and reading in the priorities list. (Oh, and after sleeping... definitely well after sleeping.) 

One persists nonetheless.

Like blogging, reading is of course rather an egocentric pursuit; we gravitate to books that promise to illuminate aspects of what we sense is our own condition. We seek to be understood and to understand ourselves. I doubt it's anything to be ashamed of - As CS Lewis says, we're all looking for that jubilant moment of kinship; the moment of “what? You too? I thought I was the only one!”. 

So given that Aminatta Forna's most recent novel, “The Memory of Love”, paints a white man attempting to settle (in a very emotional as well as physical sense) in Africa as a central character, I read it with a predictable self-interest. But much as I am seeking the alternative ending, Adrian does not succeed in the quest to "belong". He tries and fails to mould into the life, memories and chaos of war torn Sierra Leone. Though the country does leave some mark on him, in the end he must return to Norfolk where he can find some semblance of peace and reminisce about the wretched continent;

"He sees it now. Too wrapped in love, seduced by the beauty of this broken country, this was his failure. This is not a place to live one's life."

His Sierra Leonian friend and foil, Kai, is left to truly belong to Africa, since only he seems equipped to nurse her brokenness and understand her silence.

It's a rather irritatingly familiar story. Like Adrian, Hannah Musgrave of Russel Banks fascinating Liberian novel, “The Darling” is white, naïve and looking to Africa to give her purpose and heal her wounds. Predictably, it does not. Why should it after all?

The same character takes shape in Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche's novel - "Half of a Yellow Sun" as the white British expatriate, Richard. Though Richard loves Nigeria with a child-like hope and immerses himself in Biafra's bloody story to the point where he loses everything, he is finally led to realise that “the story is not his story to tell”. Whilst I sympathise that Adiche is reacting against all the Joseph Conrad's who never let Africans speak for themselves, it is not, I confess, a message I like.

Adiche - one of Nigeria's best

These narratives are somewhat bleak for those muzungus and mukiwas amongst us who seek to knit our beings into this dusty, unforgiving soil. We do not like their excluding inferences as we do not like Mugabe's insistence that “you can never be one of us”, or that “indigenous” shall always mean black, no matter how many generations we stay. 

But perhaps to read that message into these novels is somewhat unfair. One could be accused of perceiving too much through the haze of a stale colonial guilt and a post-Mugabe reactionism...(who? me?!)

After all, those three characters are only one part of the white man in Africa's story. It is not the whole. Forna is not attempting to tell the story of the white African who does not or cannot escape back to Norfolk. Adrian calls Britain home, but what of the white man for whom Africa is the only home he knows? For this we must read Lessing, Gordimer and most of all Coetzee. Authors for another blog ;)

J.M Coetzee - definitely the subject of a future blog.

In the meantime, beyond books, I continue to work out the possibilities of belonging here in Lusaka, Zambia. One is reminded that the obstacles to this quest lie on both sides and that they each require patience. Certainly the Mugabes and Malemas of this world are in part to blame, with their polarizing insistence that “indigenous” equals “blackness” and that there lies some vast, unassailable chasm between “us” and “them”. Then there's the Adrians of course, for whom Africa is a brief and adrenaline-filled sabbatical or development project but never a "home". And then there's the man I met last week...

A white Kenyan, 4th generation. Having left that country "which was going to the dogs", he railed against “their corrupt practices” and the fact that “they are constantly at each other's throats”. And it struck me that although Africa was more home to him than any other place in the world, still he has chosen to live by an “us” and “them” which precluded the very possibility of his belongingness. His rhetoric betrayed an actual pursuit not of belonging but of separation. Thus, whenever Kenya fails it will always be because of them. 

As though his footprints upon her soil leave no marks.
He does not belong because he chooses again and again not to.

 

In the end Adiche, Forna and Banks's characters are part of the white man's story but not the full one. There is both more hope and more complexity than that. I do not think our belonging is inevitable, but neither is it impossible. In the end it shall be a matter of active choice and of patience, on all sides.

After all, one cannot forever be rushing back to Norfolk.

Reading recommendations:

In addition to the 3 superb novels mentioned above, some other (fairly unrelated) books I have read in the past weeks which it would be particularly heinous for me not to recommend:
(In a gross disservice to the authors I shall attempt to sum them up in 3 words...since one can't be sure if/ when I shall ever have time to blog about them)

Roma Tearne's "Mosquito" - SriLanka beautiful and tragic

Foster's "Howard's End" - classic classist satire

Mistry's "A fine Balance" - humanity, achingly hopeful

Meek's "Beginning our descent" - painful and piercing introspection

Mitchell's "Thousand Autumn's of Jacob de Zoet" - Empire and romance in Japan

Lola's "the Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives" - dark, beguiling and droll

Farell's "Troubles" -   charmingly inevitable ruination

From Barbara Kingsolver to John Stuart Mill: a reason to blog.

“A terrifying miracle. These words were all written in dark, quiet rooms. How can they face the bright, noisy world? You must know. You open your skin and pour yourself on a canvas. And then let the curators drape your intestines all around the halls, for the ruckus of society gossips. Can it be survived?"  - Harrison Shepherd, writing to his artist friend on the eve of his own novel's publication (The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver).

Given that this is my first ever blog post, I can identify with Harrison Shepherd; the revealing of one's thoughts for all to see is no risk-free business. Of course, unlike Harrison I am not actually about to publish a novel. Still, the thought of publishing a blog hardly fills me with less trepidation.

Despite the potential catharsis of finding an outlet for vanity, both Harrison and I find that the fear of exposure remains considerable. So why on earth are so many people doing it?? (Ours is after all THE generation of ceasless blogging, twitterering and facebook status updating.)

Perhaps simply because we are Narcissus, obsessed by our own reflection and convinced that the rest of the world would be likewise if they could only see it clearly.
No doubt vanity does have something to do with it... let's be honest Katherine. But I'm certainly not so convinced as Narcissus. It will take more than my current ego alone (well-established as it is) to make the fear of having my depths scorned by the world a risk worth taking. So given that my vanity is significant but not sufficient, why publish?

Perhaps most blogs avoid the risk by simply not sharing self. Thus the danger of exposure is neutralised. Unfortunately I have not yet discovered a sure-fire way of writing without revealing more about myself than I intended, so this one is a rather empty option.
So what's left to make the risk worth it? 2 reasons perhaps...

Firstly, the pursuit of truth.

I love John Stuart Mill and it's not unlikely that I'll quote him again in the near future. But infatuations with dead philosophers aside, I've increasingly come to appreciate as Mill did that the pursuit of truth requires dialogue. For Mill, that was a reason to allow freedom of speech;

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

John Stuart Mill

If truth is indeed refined in the battle of alternatives then a man simply cannot find the fullness of truth in isolation. We must not remain alone and safe with our soul-stained pages, unexposed to the world as we quest for depth. Man is a political animal, molded and made real in community. So perhaps we write and we publish because we have a sense that it's not simply the writing of our words that makes them live, but the reading of them by another.

Secondly, perhaps we blog to think. Certainly the pressure of an audience is a wonderful (if somewhat intimidating) stimulus to pursue knowledge. The possibility of correction forces one to do their homework I suppose. And sometimes just writing a thought down refines and clarifies it. I think this is what I miss about university; the pressure to form coherent, readable thoughts. As another blogger once said  “Because I blog about my thoughts, I have more of them. I blog, therefore I think.” Taking this a step further, I'm blogging about books I've read because the blogging enforces reflection. And as Edmund Burke puts it (and I agree) "Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting".

Of course, no doubt much of what I think and write will still be half-formed and ill-thought. Blogging is not some sort of miracle cure after all.

To truth and growth then; A sufficient reason for exposing our souls in the blogosphere?

I'll let you know how it pans out...