Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
The memoirs of the childhood of a white girl (Alexandra, known as Bobo), raised on African farms in the 1970s and 1980s, along with her sister, Van(essa). But it's not a gilded, ex-pat life: her parents lose their farm in forced land distribution, after which they are itinerant farm managers, who move where the work is, often to disease-ridden and war-torn areas. They also have their own problems with bereavement and alcohol. It is perhaps closer to misery lit, although the tone is mostly light, and the worst episodes glossed over. It is told in a chatty and slightly childish and rambling style (she is a child for most of the book), mostly in the present tense. This means the precise sequence of events is not always clear, but overall, it is an endearing insight into some troubled lives and times. It does rather fizzle out at the end, though.QUOTIDIAN DANGERThe opening is a startling demonstration of how mundane life-threatening danger can become. "Mum says, 'Don't come creeping into our room at night.' They sleep with loaded guns beside them... 'Why not?' 'We might shoot you.'" Not very reassuring to a small child who might want a parent at night. By the age of 5, all children are taught to handle a gun and shoot to kill. There are many more examples throughout the book. For instance, the parents buy a mine-proofed Land Rover with a siren "to scare terrorists", but actually its only use is "to announce their arrival at parties". At the airport, "officials wave their guns at me, casually hostile". IDENTITY AND NOT BELONGINGThe Fullers are white and apparently upper middle class, but heavily in debt (though they manage to pay school fees). Mum says "We have breeding... which is better than having money", and they're pretty bad at managing what little money they do have. Often, they live in homes that are really dilapidated and lacking basic facilities.Bobo feels neither African (where she spends most of her childhood) nor British (where she was born). At a mixed race primary school, she is teased for being sunburnt and asked "Where are you from originally?" and when at a white school that then admits African children, learns what it is like to be excluded by language (they talk Shona to each other). She is also very aware of her family's thick lips, contrasting with their pale skin and blonde hair.RACEOne aspect that some have objected to is the attitude and language relating to the Africans. However, as I read it, Fuller is merely describing how things really were: casual, and sometimes benevolent racism were the norm. As a small child, she resists punishment by saying "Then I'll fire you", which is awful, but reflects a degree of truth, and similarly, her disgust at using a cup that might have been used by an African is a learned reaction. However, as she grows older and more questioning, it's clear she is no racist. It would be very sad if fear of offence made it impossible to describe the past honestly, though the list of terms by which white Rhodesians referred to black ones might be unnecessary.I suppose you could argue she should have done more to challenge the views around her, such as when Mum is bemoaning the fact that she wants just one country in Africa to stay white-run, but she was only a child at this point.In her parents' defence, they treated their African staff pretty well, including providing free first aid help, despite the fact they were so short of money they had to pawn Mum's jewellery to buy seed each year, then claim it back if the harvest was good. "When our tobacco sells well, we are rich for a day." Only a day.What to make of an observation like this? "Africans whose hatred reflects the sun like a mirror into our faces, impossible to ignore."There is beautifully written passage describing driving through a European settlement and then Tribal Trust Lands: "there are flowering shrubs and trees... planted at picturesque intervals. The verges of the road have been mown to reveal neat, upright barbed-wire fencing and fields of army-straight tobacco... or placidly grazing cattle shiny and plump with sweet pasture. In contrast, the tribal lands "are blown clear of vegetation. Spiky euphorbia hedges which bleed poisonous, burning milk when their stems are broken poke greenly out of otherwise barren, worn soil. The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is an acne of bullet marks. The huts and small houses crouch open and vulnerable... Children and chickens and dos scratch in the red, raw soil and stare at us as we drive thought their open, eroding lives." Those are not the words of a racist.DEPRESSION, TRAUMA, ALCOHOLISMThere are some very dark episodes (including deaths), and at one point, even the dogs are depressed, and yet the book itself is not depressing. For instance, the four stages of Mum's drunken behaviour in front of visitors is treated humourously. More troublingly, a victim of a sexual assault is just told not to exaggerate, and the whole thing brushed away. There is equally casual acceptance of the children smoking and drinking from a young age.There is fun, but also a lack of overt love, particularly touching (the many dogs are far luckier in this respect!); aged only 7, Bobo notes "Mum hardly even lets me hold her hand". That is a legacy of multiple hurt and grief - and the consequent problems. Then there is a life-changing tragedy, for which Bobo feels responsible: "My life is sliced in half". Afterwards, "Mum and Dad's joyful careless embrace of life is sucked away, like water swirling down a drain."A later tragedy has more severe consequences, and these passages are described more painfully:* "In the morning, when she's just on the pills, she's very sleepy and calm and slow and deliberate, like someone who isn't sure where her body ends and the world starts."* "When Mum is drugged and sad and singing... it is a contained, soggy madness" but then "it starts to get hard for me to know mere Mum's madness ends and the world's madness begins."* "She hardly bothers to blink, it's as if she's a fish in the dry season, in the dried-up bottom of a cracking river bed, waiting for rain to come and bring her to life."* "Mum smiles, but... it's a slipping and damp thing she's doing with her lips which looks as much as if she's lost control of her mouth as anything else."* "Her sentences and thoughts are interrupted by the cries of her dead babies."* "To leave a child in an unmarked grave is asking for trouble."* She is grieving "with her mind (which is unhinged) and her body (which is alarming and leaking)".OTHER QUOTATIONS* A new home "held a green-leafy lie of prosperity in its jewelled fist".* When they stop a journey at a fancy hotels, the opulence is unfamiliar: "the chairs were swallowingly soft".* "The first rains... were still deciding what sort of season to create."* "It is so hot outside that the flamboyant tree outside cracks to itself, as if already anticipating how it will feel to be on fire... swollen clouds scrape purple fat bellies on the tops of the surrounding hills."* Captured wild cattle give "reluctant milk" and even after adding Milo milkshake powder, "nothing can disguise the taste of the reluctant milk".* A German aid worker "is keen on saving the environment, which, until then, I had not noticed needed saving".* The ex-pat lives were typically "extra-marital, almost-incestuous affairs bred from heat and boredom and drink." When they go to England for good, they remember Africa with "a fondness born of distance and the tangy reminder of a gin-and-tonic evening".
“I am African by accident, not by birth. So while soul, heart, and the bent of my mind are African, my skin blaringly begs to differ and is resolutely white. And while I insist on my Africanness (if such a singular thing can exist on such a vast and varied continent), I am forced to acknowledge that almost half my life in Africa was realized in a bubble of Anglocentricity, as if black Africans had not culture worth noticing and as if they did not exist except as servants and (more dangerously) as terrorists.”I picked up this book several years ago with the hope that it might help me make sense of my own relationship to Africa – the strong but confusing bonds that arise from childhood immersion and are easily discounted among adults but can never quite be brushed aside. At first, it seemed that the entire book and the author herself would have laughed mockingly at that quaint desire for commonality. Alexandra Fuller’s African childhood was much more eventful and harrowing than my own: growing up a desperately poor farmer’s daughter in the epicenter of the Rhodesian war for independence, with Uzis a more common accessory than handbags, and a dysfunctional, alcoholic, supremacist, emotionally remote family, before bouncing around ex-British colonial East Africa as tenant farm managers. I don’t enjoy immersing myself amid characters that are depressed, lost, or unmoored, so there were a couple of points where I might have abandoned the book had it not been for the funny, personable dialogue of the children trying to make sense of their conditions and the emotions of the adults. But then I realized that the book is a love letter. By opting not to romanticize her family life, Fuller allowed her Mum, Dad, and older sister to shine as “hard-living, glamorous, intemperate, intelligent, racist, … taciturn, capable, [and] self-reliant.” Their frequent moves and their physical and racial isolation force the family to learn to accommodate each other’s flaws/quirks, and they become very tight-knit because of (not in spite of) their individual eccentricities. They love each other not because they as individuals are sympathetic, but because together they survived both Africa and a tumultuous family life. Had Fuller chosen to whitewash or idealize her family life, she would have deprived them of this shared experience and been left with a cardboard cutout of the real thing. It’s also a love letter to the land, using words far more poignant and evocative than those that Margaret Mitchell puts in Scarlett O’Hara’s mouth. Given the surface-level dissonance of a white family claiming an African identity, Fuller works hard to demonstrate how their roots, their loyalty, even their identities are all inexorably bound to the earth. Her descriptions of sounds, smells, and miscellaneous details were truer than true and made me ache with memory. The rainy season that brought with it gray solid sheets of water which rendered roads as thick and sticky as porridge. Weekend holidays on the shores of Lake Malawi running wild with expats-like-us while burning to a crisp. The mosquito coils, the baobab trees, the explosion of day birds, the greasy fish stews over rice, the smells of black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass. Hauntingly evocative. In her epilogue (well, the “Reader’s Guide” published at the end of the Random House edition), Fuller recounts how she repeatedly tried to write a fictionalized version of her childhood, failing in part because her adult values demanded that she “write into full life the voices of the black men, women, and children who had been silenced by years of oppression,” even though her childhood had included no such voices. In the end, she opted to write her life exactly as it had been, racist elements and all, and included a suggested reading list at the end for the “powerful, beautiful, often sly and funny literature of black Africa.” Though criticized by some other reviewers, this choice to consciously stare everyday white supremacy straight in the face, instead of caricaturizing it or demonizing it, strikes me both as brave and as an important contribution to post-colonial storytelling.
What do You think about Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight (2003)?
An autobiography about growing up in colonial Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe). Two things made me curious about this book: it's from the perspective of the child of colonialists, and the events are fairly recent as it takes place in the 1970's-1990's.The voice is that of a relatively innocent young girl (as innocent as you can be in midst of war and dire economic circumstances) and she's allowed to tell her childhood as she saw it, good and bad.I've had fairly mixed feelings about this book: I would like to know how she as an adult views her racist parents, who despite poverty and alcoholism still viewed themselves as superior purely based on their race, eg that it was natural and proper for them to have servants.When did she come to realize that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily share that view? Did it ever occur to her while growing up? On the other hand, I was pleased that she allowed any afterthoughts or afterconstructions to be kept out...it is meant to be a childhood memoir. I do hope she writes another, a more reflective book later on.
—Anna
There are many reviews that summarize this book, so I won’t repeat them. I found this book slightly anti-African. It left me feeling like; couldn't the British have left Africa alone and let them have their own country? It does not seem right for there to be a British Africa. Seems unnatural. I suppose American Indians may have felt the same way about the early colonists, as well. This was no Out of Africa. Now that was a great book and memoir. Different time period and location, of course. No one reading this book is going to want to jump on a plane and travel Africa.It is an interesting read in light of the present political situation in Zimbabwe with regards to Robert Mugabe. He came into power around 1980 (?)as a hero. Now he seems like a crazy man.This family, the Fullers, live a life on the fringe of mania. So much sadness and 'unsafeness', yet there is a wild excitement of living this African life, struggling to survivewith; war, the earth, the political upheaval, and daily living.
—Sally
The tone of this memoir of "an African childhood" is set in the very first lines:Mum says, "Don't come creeping into our room at night."They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, "Don't startle us when we're sleeping.""Why not?""We might shoot you.""Oh.""By mistake.""Okay." As it is, there seems a good enough chance of getting shot on purpose. "Okay, I won't."Dangerous, slightly insane, quite funny. That's her childhood in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). My first impression of her family? Well, I thought it proof that parents are put here on Earth to completely embarrass their children. I know this. Yet I thought Alexandra Fuller's parents really took the prize and it was a good thing she had such a great sense of humor. Fuller doesn't pull any punches--not about the violence, corruption and poverty she often saw in Africa, nor her parents' racist views nor her mother's alcoholism. Yet Fuller said in an afterword that this story "unfurled as a love story about Africa and my family." And by the end I absolutely saw that. Despite mercilessly (and often hilariously) exposing her parents flaws, there's evident affection and respect there, and gradually I began to see why. At the same time, this was just a joy to read. Fuller has a sharp wit, and an eye for details that bring South Central Africa to life--the sounds, the smells, the wildlife, the clashes between her little Eurocentric colonial world and that of native Africans and the ability to reacquaint you with the mindset of childhood. Part travelogue of Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia, part history of the waning of the colonial era, part affecting coming of age tale, I was hooked from the beginning and never was there one paragraph I wanted to skip over. I was completely charmed.
—Lisa (Harmonybites)
