This Was The Old Chief's Country (2015) - Plot & Excerpts
Last year I met a little Afghan girl, a refugee with her family in Pakistan. She had lived in a village that had water running through it from the mountains, and it had orchards and fields, and all her family and her relatives where there. Sometimes a plane crossed the sky from one of the larger cities of Afghanistan to another. She would run to the edge of the village to get nearer to that shining thing in the sky, and stand with her hands cradling her head as she stared up … up… up… or she called to her mother “An airplane, look!”And then the Russians invaded, and one day the visiting airplane was a gunship. It thundered over her village, dropped its bombs, and flew off. The house she had lived in all her days was rubble, and her mother and her little brother were dead. So were several of her relatives. And as she walked across the mountains with her father, her uncle, her aunt, and her three surviving cousins, they were bombed by the helicopters and the planes, so that more people died. Now, living in exile in the refugee camp, when she thinks of the skies of her country she knows they are full of aircraft, day and night, and the little plane that flew over her village with the sunlight shining on its wings seems like something she once imagined, a childish dreamDoris Lessing, the British Nobel Prize winning author, passed away today at the age of 94. She was born in Kermanshah, Iran and spent her childhood in South Africa before moving to the UK. She was described by the Noble Academy as “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny”. In parallel to her writings she was an antiwar and women-right activist and did her best to improve the world she was living in by using her candid, brave and feminine mindset. This Was the Old’s Chief’s Country is a collection of astonishing short stories. All the stories happened in Africa, a beautiful and marvelous continent, with a tragic history. It is a book of ordinary people, black or white, but the color of the book is neither black nor white it has every different color you can imagine. Characters are colorful as well, and it goes deep in to African society and shows how people suffer and cope with discrepancies and prejudices in a similar way although they are different in many aspects.“When you first go down, you get paid like a prince and the world’s your oyster. Then you get married and tie yourself up with a houseful of furniture on the hire-purchase and a house under a mortgage. Your car’s your own, and you exchange it for anew one every year. It’s a hell of a life, money pouring in and money pouring out, and your wife loves you, and everything’s fine, parties and a good time for one and all. And then your best friend finds his chest is giving him trouble and he goes to the doctor, and then suddenly you find he’s dropped out of the crowd; he’s on half the money and all the bills to pay. His wife finds it no fun and off she goes with someone else. Then you discover it’s not just one of your friends, but half the men you know are in just that position,crooks at thirty and owing nothing but the car, and they soon sell that to pay alimony. You find you drink too much – there’s something on your mind, as you might say. Then, if you’ve got sense, you walk out while the going’s good. If not, you think: It can’t happen to me, and you stay on.”
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