If you're like me you can't help reading. I've got past the cereal-box-if nothing-else-is-available stage, but I always need to have a book in progress along with a dwindling number of periodicals that I'm trying to catch up with. I wouldn't have it any other way. The problem is that from time to time, one of those books grabs a hold on my imagination and emotions and won't let go in time for me to go on to the next one.
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller is one of them. It's an autobiography about growing up in some of the most unforgiving conditions on the planet in three different countries in Africa. Fuller's parents' work ethic was phenomenal, and their capacity for endurance would have made the Oregon Trail feel like a stroll to them. Because there is nothing familiar to the ordinary American reader about places, names, people, circumstances your interest is guaranteed. The author has a unique voice. Descriptions rarely include conventional modifiers, but instead depend on hyphenated phrases that do more than a paragraph of ordinary prose could to make you aware of what Fuller wants you to understand.
There is so much horror and tragedy that the opportunities for bathos and self-pity by implication are too numerous. Not one is taken up. It's clear from the beginning that the mother is an alcoholic. Before long, it's also clear why. The entire white society seems heavily dependent on drink, and the children learn early, but the sorrows and defeats facing the Fullers would drown most people. No wonder they drink. No wonder the mother succumbs to it. Everyone smokes. Every day a new misfortune seems to befall the family. Yet you come away from the narrative with the most profound admiration for what they withstood without giving in. I have a profound admiration for someone who could tell such a story while resisting any temptation (or so it seems) to reveal how many scars she must bear.
If Sophocles was right when he proclaimed that one must know himself first, Alexandra Fuller has made it difficult to tell whether she has followed that admonishment. To have written this account with so little reference to her own feelings and that reveals almost nothing of how she now views the rest of humanity is a feat.
I can't help wondering if Wyoming (where she now lives) can possibly be wild enough for her. One thing she made no secret of in the book is her enduring affection for Africa, in spite of its frustrating failings, all of them the result of the amoral greed of Europeans. This is a memoir of a stripe as different as a zebra's from a palomino's.
Old Moon
Showing posts with label Africa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Africa. Show all posts
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
I Wish I Were Jonathan Swift...
...Because if I were, I might be able to shake up a few readers. Does anyone remember "A Modest Proposal?" Consult your handy dictionary of quotations.
In the October 26 edition of the New York Times Magazine there is an article that should shock the ethical and even the reasonable parts of any reader's brain. The title is "Once Upon a Time in Namibia" with a subhead, "Sergio Leone Meets Ralph Lauren in an African Ghost Town." The title alone takes an entire page.
The first picture is a moody low-key photo of a girl with scraggly hair seated in a window opening (sic.) with an artful lens-flare the brightest spot in the near-silhouette of the picture. She appears to be looking thoughtfully down on a completely barren landscape with a glaring white sky above. One can barely see that she is clad in a jacket with raveling hem on the three-quarter sleeve, a tight, long sleeve protrudes from that, and she seems to be wearing a necklace. The picture's caption identifies the designer of the jacket, which is priced at $2,910, pants (invisible) at $1,240, a belt (also invisible and unpriced), and a Lanvin necklace. That little price list is the only text on the page.
The next two pages are photos of respectively, a truly giraffe-like figure clad in a sort of slouch hat, two-piece tan dress, elbow-length black gloves, and stiletto-heeled shoes. She is leaning against a scabrous interior wall in a building obviously long abandoned. The facing page shows a desert landscape photographed through a ruined window and absent wall indicated by the remains of severely weathered wood that form the frame. In the near distance is what appears to be the same model in the same hat, but this time in a black evening gown accompanied by what look like long brown leather gauntlets. The left-hand page in the spread again has the only text for both pages. It consists of the clothes designer's names and the prices for the main items. They begin in excess of one thousand dollars, and the gown on the right-hand page is $10,000.
This same style (?) continues for four more pages, each as heat-drenched and arid and empty as the first. The dramatic atmosphere of once-inhabited desolation is astonishing—an effective photo essay on a recently independent and obviously nearly destitute part of Africa.
If the reader thinks that, it's only for a brief instant, before he gets to the sparse, tiny, white-ink inscriptions on the lower corners of the pages.
The model is extremely thin and extremely tall and her hair needs combing. The clothes are black or tan and without exception unflattering. The prices are staggering. The pictures are artistic, emotionally charged, and memorable.
I felt as if I'd fallen into some kind of out-of-body experience, or had misread the few words available after the whole page of elaborate fonts and background for the title. What was the editor thinking? Above all, I wondered, Why was that place used as a setting for those designers to exhibit those clothes at those prices? Above all, what was the editor thinking?
There seems to be no excuse for the callousness of the choice of such a site for the exploitation of conspicuous consumption. I thought of Swift's ability to flay human folly and wished I could somehow convey in the way he would have done the combination of fury and incredulity that assailed me as I looked at that spread in a respected, traditionally liberal medium I've known since childhood. If "the medium is the message," I tremble for us all who can accept it without question.
In the October 26 edition of the New York Times Magazine there is an article that should shock the ethical and even the reasonable parts of any reader's brain. The title is "Once Upon a Time in Namibia" with a subhead, "Sergio Leone Meets Ralph Lauren in an African Ghost Town." The title alone takes an entire page.
The first picture is a moody low-key photo of a girl with scraggly hair seated in a window opening (sic.) with an artful lens-flare the brightest spot in the near-silhouette of the picture. She appears to be looking thoughtfully down on a completely barren landscape with a glaring white sky above. One can barely see that she is clad in a jacket with raveling hem on the three-quarter sleeve, a tight, long sleeve protrudes from that, and she seems to be wearing a necklace. The picture's caption identifies the designer of the jacket, which is priced at $2,910, pants (invisible) at $1,240, a belt (also invisible and unpriced), and a Lanvin necklace. That little price list is the only text on the page.
The next two pages are photos of respectively, a truly giraffe-like figure clad in a sort of slouch hat, two-piece tan dress, elbow-length black gloves, and stiletto-heeled shoes. She is leaning against a scabrous interior wall in a building obviously long abandoned. The facing page shows a desert landscape photographed through a ruined window and absent wall indicated by the remains of severely weathered wood that form the frame. In the near distance is what appears to be the same model in the same hat, but this time in a black evening gown accompanied by what look like long brown leather gauntlets. The left-hand page in the spread again has the only text for both pages. It consists of the clothes designer's names and the prices for the main items. They begin in excess of one thousand dollars, and the gown on the right-hand page is $10,000.
This same style (?) continues for four more pages, each as heat-drenched and arid and empty as the first. The dramatic atmosphere of once-inhabited desolation is astonishing—an effective photo essay on a recently independent and obviously nearly destitute part of Africa.
If the reader thinks that, it's only for a brief instant, before he gets to the sparse, tiny, white-ink inscriptions on the lower corners of the pages.
The model is extremely thin and extremely tall and her hair needs combing. The clothes are black or tan and without exception unflattering. The prices are staggering. The pictures are artistic, emotionally charged, and memorable.
I felt as if I'd fallen into some kind of out-of-body experience, or had misread the few words available after the whole page of elaborate fonts and background for the title. What was the editor thinking? Above all, I wondered, Why was that place used as a setting for those designers to exhibit those clothes at those prices? Above all, what was the editor thinking?
There seems to be no excuse for the callousness of the choice of such a site for the exploitation of conspicuous consumption. I thought of Swift's ability to flay human folly and wished I could somehow convey in the way he would have done the combination of fury and incredulity that assailed me as I looked at that spread in a respected, traditionally liberal medium I've known since childhood. If "the medium is the message," I tremble for us all who can accept it without question.
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