In Africa, a Child’s Nightmare Becomes a Writer’s Dream
Ian Murphy; From “Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness”
Another new start: Tim and Nicola Fuller at home in Zambia in 2010.
By DOMINIQUE BROWNING
Published: September 2, 2011
“I’m going to write an Awful Book and this time it really will be about you,” Alexandra Fuller promises when her mother complains over a favorite walking stick’s being broken in a battle with a poisonous snake. Another Awful Book, as far as her mother is concerned. Fuller had not yet been forgiven for publishing the first one in 2001, the intoxicating “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight.”
COCKTAIL HOUR UNDER THE TREE OF FORGETFULNESS
By Alexandra Fuller
Illustrated. 235 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.
Related
Excerpt: ‘Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness’(September 2, 2011)
Books of The Times: ‘Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness’ by Alexandra Fuller (August 23, 2011)
Books of The Times: "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight" by Alexandra Fuller (December 21, 2001)
Her family may well have felt betrayed by the ruthlessly cleareyed daughter’s impression of a dangerous, unruly childhood of minefields and malaria, on a succession of impoverished tobacco and cattle farms in war-torn Kenya, Rhodesia, Botswana, Malawi and Zambia in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. Fuller’s parents are courageous, hardworking and colorfully eccentric. They are also stubbornly racist and unremittingly alcoholic; her mother suffers from brutal swings of mania and depression; her father lapses into silence. Three siblings die in infancy. If you have ever wondered what it takes to survive as a settler of inhospitable territory, meet Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she often introduces herself. She may have been a child’s nightmare — a terrifying, seductive, cruel and abandoning enchantress — but she is a writer’s dream. And she knows it. Which must make it easier to write another Awfully Fabulous Book.
Fuller has returned to the Africa of war, terror, death and her parents in her second memoir, “Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.” This time, though, she returns as an adult, with the empathy of a more mature writer. She is also the mother of children old enough to remember things. She returns with a yearning to connect with her own inaccessible mother whose disconnectedness seems only to have knifed deeper into her daughter’s soul over the years. If “Dogs” was a love story about Africa, “Cocktail Hour” is a love story — with subtle, steady-handed recrimination but without the attendant rancor — about her mother, “the broken, splendid, fierce mother I have.”
Alexandra Fuller describes herself as a “reasonably pliable witness” to her mother’s dramatic life. About her first book, she says, “I had felt more than a little encouraged to write it — directed, even — by Nicola Fuller of Central Africa herself.” Well, children are like blotting paper; the trouble is you never know what’s going to soak in, or where the stain will spread. “Dogs” was written in the throes of remembering; “Cocktail Hour” recaptures the past through reporting.
Fuller reunites with her parents for a holiday in South Africa, during which she nudges them through their histories, listening as “the doves in the tree above our heads are wing clattering into their night’s sleep.” She does not censor the sanguine, cracked perspective of the colonialist. When her mother’s father shoots a Kikuyu, he is sentenced to one day in jail. “There was an outcry from the community. ‘My father was the starter at the races. . . . He couldn’t possibly spend the day in jail. He was the only one who knew how to do the starter flags.’ ”
Fuller visits Kenya — but Nicola distances herself from the highborn, decadent Happy Valley set. She remembers Inky Porter, an English aristocrat who hired Nicola’s mother as a baby sitter, handing over a newborn infant so she could join a hunt in Uganda. The baby was born “pickled in gin and withdrawing from cocaine.” It “died in agony . . . in my mother’s arms.” Nicola is impatient with the romantic mystique of Kenya: “No one talks about the poor dead baby.”
Alexandra returns to the Burma Valley in Zimbabwe, looking for traces of her family: “Robandi is the geography of my nightmares. . . . If I peel back the corner of memories of that place, what races in is too big for any of me to feel at one sitting — no mere piece of land can be responsible for that.” Three of her siblings died in what became Zimbabwe, one a toddler who had been left in the distracted care of 8-year-old Alexandra and a neighbor.
“Cocktail Hour” is disturbing in places, funny in others. It pulses with life and love. Nicola’s voice threatens to drown out everyone else’s, but fortunately she’s hilarious, creative, opinionated, ribald and tragic. She seems to have Lived Life in Capital Letters — and at first, this contaminates Fuller’s writing. Early chapters are peppered with references to the Awful Book, which give way, for example, to “Collect Aborigines or Begin a Breed of Dogs.” I’m a reader with a High Tolerance for Capital Experiences, but these seemed gratuitous, Nancy Mitford wannabes. But Fuller quickly muffles this tic. When she is in the company of her quiet, reserved, stalwart father, her writing becomes elegiac. “Dad found comfort in the emptiness: the lonely ribs of a long, gravel road, a makeshift bed under wild stars in an insect-sung night.” Her mother gave her material, but her father allowed her to find her voice.
Nicola Fuller dragged her belongings from one farm to another; with every move a few more possessions were cast off, until just about the only thing to have survived was a set of orange Le Creuset pots, their bottoms blackened. Everything else was “lost, stolen, broken, died, left behind,” she says. Much the same could be said of her life. But it is resilience that shines through: a tender, loving, attentive marriage miraculously survives poverty and calamity. Two daughters remain connected, each in her own way. And the family’s shared love of Africa endures.
After a lifetime of loss and failure, Nicola and Tim, in their 50s, decide to try one last time to own land in Africa. “Land is Mum’s love affair and it is Dad’s religion.” They build a farm on the banks of the Zambezi River in Zambia and successfully raise bananas and fish. Nicola chooses a site for their new home under a large Tree of Forgetfulness. “They say ancestors stay inside it,” their neighbor explains. “If there is some sickness or if you are troubled by spirits, then you sit under the Tree of Forgetfulness and your ancestors will assist you with whatever is wrong. . . . All your troubles and arguments will be resolved.”
I suppose cocktail hours have a way of resolving things. Writers turn to memoir for all kinds of good (and bad) reasons — but never to forget. We compulsively revisit an episode that shattered a life, or pick at a shard of memory that demands to be prized out of the bedrock of our souls. We work memory over, perhaps hoping, subconsciously, that things will turn out differently — or more realistically, that we will discover a key that unlocks a memory’s mysterious urgency. That drive to make sense, to find a deeper meaning in the shallows of daily life, to turn splintered chaos into a coherent story, makes a memoir worth reading. And “Cocktail Hour” hits the mark. It may be regarded as a prequel, or a sequel, to “Dogs.” It hardly matters. The two memoirs form a fascinating diptych of mirrors, one the reflection of a child’s mind, the other of an adult’s. Images bounce and refract over the years; the reader catches a glimpse of the adult in the child, and the child in the adult. Taken together, as they ought to be, the books transport us to a grand landscape of love, loss, longing and reconciliation.
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