Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
by Alexandra Fuller
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alexandra FullerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-03-11
ISBN: 0375758992
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
Book Review: Into Africa
Summary: 5 Stars
From a socio-economic vantage point, a comparison to Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa applies in that Karen Blickson's husband, the Baron, is the archetypical remnant of decaying European aristocracy; name and title, but without means. One reads the Fuller account of life in colonial Africa as a 20th century continuation of the same mind-set which caused genocide in the Americas in the 16th through 19th centuries: a Neolithic hunter-gatherer society suddenly confronted by, and welcoming of, a military-industrial-religious juggernaut, claiming everything in it's path as the divine right of acquisition.
The Fuller Family, avatars of the crumbled empire were out of time and out of place. No place but England could have produced their embodiment of resilience, arrogance and atavism. Theirs was an earlier England, a world that no longer existed. But the tropism of Africa, the lure of its sheer fecundity overcame heat, hell and hallucination. Alexandra Fuller (Bobo) writes, "The Valley represented the insanity of the tropics so precarious for the fragile European psyche. The Valley could send you into a spiral of madness overnight if you were white and high strung. And we were." What Dinesen wrote of Berkeley Cole and Denys Finch-Hutton applies to the Fullers: "In the present epoch they had no home, but had got to wander here and there... Of this they were not themselves aware. They had, on the contrary, a feeling of guilt towards their existence in England which they had left, as if, just because they were bored with it, they had been running away from a duty with which their friends had put up." Bobo writes, "My soul has no home. I am neither African nor English, nor am I of the sea."
Better than the boredom of England were the smells of Africa. "Mum caught the spicy, woody scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat, and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors. She held me up to face the earthy air so that the fingers of warmth pushed back my black curls of hair, and her pale green eyes went clear-glassy. `Smell that,' she whispered. `That's home.'" And at Bobo's whites-only school, " the playground smelled like sweat on metal from the chipped-paint swings and slides." Their home in the Burma Valley of Zimbabwe was humid, and thick with jungle and creepers, "and it was fertile-foul smelling (as if on the verge of rotting) and held a green leafy lie of prosperity in its jeweled fist."
All of which partially explains why the comfort of England held no candle to the extreme discomforture in interrelationships of black and white Africans. Blacks referred to the conflict between them as Chimuranga. Whites didn't call it that. They called it The Troubles, This Bloody Nonsense, and sometimes The War. A war instigated by "uppity blacks," "cheeky kaffirs" "bobby muntus" "restless natives," and "the houts." For the black Africans' part, "When they saw the Europeans were the kind of guests who slept with your wife, enslaved your children, and stole your cattle, they saw that they needed sharp spears and young men who knew how to use them." The land over which they fought, however, had no interest in who named it. "You can call it what you like, fight all the wars you want in its name.... The land is still unblinking under the African sky. It will absorb white man's blood and the blood of African men, it will absorb blood from slaughtered cattle and the blood from a woman's birthing with equal thirst. It doesn't care."
The Land was equally becalmed when the Fullers lost children. "Adrian dies before he is old enough to talk." Mum said, "The nurse at the hospital in Salisbury told us we could either go and get something to eat or watch our baby die." They eat, and when they return Adrian, who was very sick with meningitis an hour earlier, is now dead. The Family Story changes contingent upon what Mum's drinking. The worst in when she drinks everything she can find in the house. But another child is born, a beautiful little girl, Olivia. She grows to be a toddler when one day "it is almost lunch before anyone notices Olivia is missing. She is floating face down in the pond. The ducks are used to her body by now, paddling and waddling around it, throwing back their heads and drinking the water that is full of her last breaths."
And Africa? Africa serenely, violently breathes assaults on the senses; smells "like black tea, cut tobacco, fresh fire, old sweat, young grass," and sounds: "At dawn there is an explosion of birds, a fierce fight for territory, for females, for food." A change in the tone, an increase in the intensity of the birds' activity, break into one's everyday world, and you know that there is a snake nearby. Then there is the sound of heat; " the grasshoppers and crickets sing and whine. Drying grass crackles. Dogs pant. There is the sound of breath and breathing, of an entire world collapsed under the apathy of the tropics."
Summary of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
In Don?t Let?s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller?s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Fuller?s debut is unsentimental and unflinching but always captivating. In wry and sometimes hilarious prose, she stares down disaster and looks back with rage and love at the life of an extraordinary family in an extraordinary time.Authors Books
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