This book is about a white veteran of Rhodesia's Chimurenga War who is haunted by the past, but it's disturbing in more ways than the author intends. It is really hard to not dislike the author intensely once you read between the lines of what went into this book. First, Fuller, raised in Africa by white settlers but now living in the U.S., publishes a memoir of her childhood in Rhodesia (which I have not read but may yet, if only out of morbid curiosity) which becomes an unexpected runaway bestseller. Then what obviously happened is her publisher said, "Write another one on a similar topic, and we'll give you an advance and money for travel!" But she'd already written up her whole life in Africa, so how can she write another book? So she uses the money to visit her parents, now farming over the border in Zambia, and scout around for a topic. It turns out there's an utterly deranged, PTSD-addled white man who came back from the Rhodesian bush wars with snakes in his brain and now lives by himself on a nearby farm. Even her parents keep a distance from this loon. So she goes over to introduce herself and what comes out very quickly is that he likes isolation because of his madness but is desperately lonely for female companionship and utterly emotionally fragile and here out of nowhere comes this cute, thin little blonde woman with dimples and cheekbones--in her author photo she is cocking her head and grinning for the camera in her blonde bob like a flirty debutante--who wants to do nothing but sit and chat with him. This is, like, the biggest thing that has happened to him in the past ten years, so of course he utterly falls in love with her. And of course, since she now spent the travel money and HAS to write her book, and quickly, she totally lets him and in fact leads him on sexually to an extent that is jaw-droppingly shameless. It is not clear at what point she reveals to him that she wants to write a book about him, perhaps it is just before or just after or just as she suggests to him that they go on a car trip to Mozambique to meet some of his old army buddies and visit some places he fought in during the war. Even though this trip is painful for him, he obliges because he's head over heels. Mind you, I don't mean horny, or at least not only horny: he's a born-again and doesn't drink or anything and seems to lead a quiet, moral lifestyle; he just wants a WIFE, and he says repeatedly that he thinks God sent her to him. (Whisper: no, her publisher did!) He opens up to her--about his only child who died as a young boy, about his failed marriage, about the people he killed in the war, including a girl from a village that died after he performed torture on her genitals to get information out of her, about his madness and loneliness and his utterly terrifying bouts of murderous rage in the years after he returned from fighting. And she lets him, and transcribes it all down to be downloaded into her book later, and when necessary she hugs him and comforts him and lets him kiss her "wetly" on the cheek and sob and babble about how wonderful she is. THEN, in Mozambique, they visit a former comrade of his, a notorious womanizer who is if anything CRAZIER, who lives on an island in a lake with only a semi-tamed LION for company, and while they're staying there one night, right after K, as she calls the subject of her book, goes off to bed, she lets the womanizing lion-owner get to second or third base with her (details murky, but not home run)--after all, she's lonely for companionship too, and it's HARD WORK to lead someone on sexually for weeks and weeks; it's a kind of self-denial too, poor girl, and if she gave K so much as a handjob it might spoil her hot streak of information-extraction--and K, who is no fool, overhears enough to figure out what happened and to assume more--and then the next morning K goes ballistic on her and screams at her that she's Evil (poor fellow only just figured that out) and he destroys all of her tapes and notes in a rage and sends her away. This is weird because all of the conversations and monologues up to this point are rendered with tape-recorder-style full-transcription verisimilitude, and this is when the reader suddenly realizes that all of that is reconstructed from memory, including all of the sobs and breakdowns and cluster-headache screams of anguish and babbling professions of feelings that punctuate his telling of his life story. Presumably, she had made him sign a release before all this happens because she goes home to Wyoming and writes the whole book without any input or further permission or contact of any kind with K until, just before the manuscript goes off to the publisher, she adds a postscript in the form of the email from him that has just arrived to break the months of silence, in which he is grudgingly but still rather pathetically forgiving of her. As an epilogue: in the book she refers to her husband and two children back home in Wyoming, but the "about the author" blurb on the jacket says she lives with her two children in Wyoming; no husband mentioned. He got wise, I guess, and so did K, at least briefly, and I hope readers get wise too as to what kind of person Alexandra Fuller is. Ick.Nonetheless, it is a damn good read. And the glossary in the back, which breaks down for us K's mixture of Anglicized Shona and Boer slang is worth the cost of the book in itself.
I've never been to Africa, if you don't count Morocco, and I don't understand the continent at all. Reading Scribbling the Cat felt like wandering around on an alien planet, where the environment, the motivations and the language are all foreign. Nevertheless, I came away from the book some hints as to why some people find Africa so compelling. There are no cats in this book. Well, actually, that's not quite true. One of the characters we meet near the end has a half-grown lion named Mambo as a pet. However, the title refers to the the negative effects of curiosity - "scribble" is Afrikaans slang for "kill". The author, who spent her childhood in Rhodesia (currently Zimbabwe), returns to visit her parents, now running a fish farm in neighboring Zambia. There she encounters their neighbor K, a charismatic white veteran of the Rhodesian civil war, a man who has killed hundreds but who is now a farmer, a teetotaler and a born-again Christian. Despite her father's warning that K is dangerous, she's fascinated by him. For some reason they set off on a cross-country odyssey, visiting locales that were important in his earlier life. It's the "for some reason" that has me stumped. Sure, Alexandra Fuller is a journalist, but her journey with K has a personal dimension that was never quite clear, at least for me. I half expected her to become lovers with K (and indeed, he believes she may be the woman he has been waiting for, sent by God), but this never happens. She's trying to exorcise her own demons, it seems, but I never understood the nature of those demons. Puzzled by her objectives, I was continually surprised by each turn of events.Despite my confusion, I found the narrative compelling, with vivid descriptions of poverty and abundance, environmental desolation and natural beauty. Whatever other message the author was trying to convey, she succeeds at least in making it clear that Africa is a place of extremes. The bewildering variety of cultures twisted together on the continent affects the language. The author, K and his former comrades-in-arms speak a kind of patois, English peppered with words from Afrikaans, Shona and Zulu. Fortunately Ms. Fuller supplies a glossary, which is a fascinating document on its own.Scribbling the Cat left me wondering why the author wrote the book - but glad that she did.
What do You think about Scribbling The Cat (2005)?
Beautifully written and much more than a memoir. Lots to think about for a very long time."I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We're incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible-from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin-to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don't know if it's even useful to try." page 142
—Jeanne
What is it about uncouth 'manly' men that attracts free spirited women? Alexandra Fuller, leaving her American husband and two children at 'home' in suburban Wyoming,makes an extended Christmas visit to her folks at 'home' on their fish farm in Zambia. In an attempt to come to terms with her past, and not completely comfortable with her new life situation, she seeks to understand the violent events that occurred in her families lifetime,growing up in Rhodesia. She is drawn to K, an ex-soldier who is a legend in the neighbourhood, who disarms her with his forthright belligerant vulnerability....that's where it usually all startsBack in sububia for new years, she can't seem to slot herself back in. Her fascination with K's story and the reality of starving Africa juxtaposed against the excess of America, challenges the authenticity of her own American existance.It's not long before she finds her way back to Africa, this time on assigment.She can't wait to see K again and devises a plan so outlandish and so offhand you can guess that it was already envisioned in minute detail. The trip into K's past is also a journey of reconciliation for AF whose passionate curiousity and intimacy with Africa must come to some kind of truce for her to feel real wherever she goes.So they are off, into real danger, and that they carry on despite volitile disagreements that do almost end in utter disaster. AF writes nimbly of their adventure and her candor is refreshingly devoid of egocentricity.Her instant rapport with people grates on K and he is especially jealous of his friends. That it is a quality that these men possess that is the source of her fascination, and not merely a mutable infatuaion, AF takes us with her into '...the great loneliness that stretched between... AF does learn more than she ever wanted to about the effects of war on the psyche. She makes an valient attempt to share her feminist values with K when he is in the grip of his fantasies and maybe some of it got through because they make it back from Mozambique alive. Did she really need to go through all that to balance something in her that could now carry on? Whattever motivated her,it worked, and she sure was glad to be heading home at last.
—Magdelanye
Fuller has taken us to Africa before. This time she takes us on a journey with a former soldier in the African wars of the late Twentieth century. From Zambia through Zimbabwe (the once upon a time Rhodesia) to Mozambique, Fuller and her ex-soldier/soul mate, K, travel. What we see, what we learn, the people, flies, food, heat, the reality of today's Africa and the reality of its recent history, remind us that our lot here in 'the West' is a soft, pleasant one, even if we are in bad straits here, we are better off than there, although strangely millions call Africa home and love it as we love our home.Fuller writes simply and honestly, telling us what we need to know, what we need to see. The prize is worth the candle. For anyone who wants an African adventure but rather not be ground down by thirst, bankrupt by the cost and smothered by flies, this is a story worth reading. For anyone wanting to understand a bit about how the world really is, truth awaits here.Recommended.
—Dan Downing
