Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier

Alexandra Fuller is a white woman who grew up in Rhodesia in the 1970s. Life was harsh and there was a war on. Eventually, her parents lost their farm and had to leave the country which is now called Zimbabwe. Eventually the family settled in Zambia and still live there. Alexandra, however, married and moved to Wyoming, where she lives with her husband and two children. One day, while visiting her parents, she met a man who had been a soldier in the defeated Rhodesian army. She was fascinated by him as well as the whole story of what had happened in Rhodesia during her childhood. A few months later she planned a short trip with him into the land where the fighting occurred. It was a journey of discovery for both of them. This book is the result of that journey. Let me explain the title. The word "scribbling" means "killing" in the slang of the region. And it refers to the expression "curiosity killed the cat". She decided to take this trip because she was curious. It's as simple as that. The former soldier, who she refers to as "K" is war hardened. He's now a loner, living on a farm he literally carved out of the African bush himself. Some native Africans work for him but his relationships with them are simply that aof boss and worker. His former marriage had ended in divorce and it was clear from the beginning that he was interested in Alexandra even though she was married. She wasn't interested in him in that way. And I'll say right up front there that even though towards the end of their trip there was some romantic tension between them, it never materialized. The book instead is about their relationship to Africa and the way that Africa itself has shaped their personalities. I live in New York and my whole life is one of material comfort. I turn on the water tap to get water, the air is free of insects and flies, electricity gives me light at night and cools my apartment in the summer. For Alexandra's African family and also for "K", these are luxuries. They are constantly lighting fires with a match in order to boil water for tea. Their homes have no electricity. They are always sweat soaked from the horrific humid heat. Taking a shower means pouring a bucket of water on themselves. If they have a car, gasoline is very expensive and they do not use air conditioning. All this is a given. During their trip, K told Alexandra stories. He remembered the guns and the death and the terrible fright. He admitted to atrocities with deep regret. Along the way they met some of the men he had served with. They were all hardened war veterans. One of them lived alone on an island with a lion. Another kept smoking unfiltered African cigarettes even though he obviously was suffering from lung disease. They talked about old times. And how they had to go for days without water and it would get so bad they would be willing to kill each other for just a sip of the precious liquid. They romanticized the fistfights. An

Alexandra Fuller's second narrative of Africa tells about her friendship with a former Rhodesian soldier code-named "K". After soldiering in the bloody civil conflicts in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Mozambique, K tries to start a new life of farming in Zambia, where he lives on the farm next to Ms. Fuller's parents. In a visit to her parents from her adopted American home, the author (nicknamed Bobo) meets the former soldier K, and on somewhat of a lark, gets him to agree to take her on a road trip back to Mozambique, to show her where he fought as a mercenary soldier. There are many ugly, brutal details about the African civil wars in this book. Although the reading is painful, the message is important...war creates "fatal cracks" in both the soldiers of war and civilian bystanders, cracks which take the rest of a lifetime to repair. Bobo undertakes this story thinking that she could better understand the violent man that K has become by "walking a mile in his shoes". Yet the reader comes away with the lesson that war leaves a different impression on all who are involved. Ms. Fuller's writing is beautiful and non-judgemental. The book is interspersed with amazing snapshots of the African people and countryside. I definitely recommend reading Ms. Fuller's own memoir first, "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight". And be warned that the images in "Scribbling the Cat" are quite graphic. Nonetheless, this story is a compelling look at Africa, both today and during its civil wars of the 1980s.

From reading Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight we expect excruciating honesty. We certainly get that in Scribbling the Cat but here Fuller also holds back as much as she reveals. While other reviewers find this dishonest, or even immoral, I think much of the understated tension in the story between Fuller and K provides bold richness to the narrative. It is obvious that Fuller is holding back. That this author can do this (for more often than not she uses words like a scalpel to scrape away at the layers of reality to get to the core, and can lay bare a character till we feel we are viewing an x-ray) is a testimony to her genius. We see Fuller experiencing the Africa of K, and the enigma of K himself, while holding a vital strain from the reader: why, beyond the similarities of their common heritage, is K so intriguing to her? Little hints are scattered through the book, like the bread Hansel uses to mark his way back home: on pg 137 of the hardcover K informs Fuller that his ex-wife had an affair, and says "'she was possessed. What else can make a woman do what she did?' I puffed hard on my cigarette and said nothing." Here, Fuller the writer is holding back her cards. At moments like this, Fuller saying nothing is almost as good as Fuller providing us with a thousand words. Later, K seems to get at Fuller's essential core when he says "You play with men. You know that? You play with men and you play with their feelings and you are going to destroy yourself. You are going to destroy your family." That Fuller allows K to utter this (whether she believes it or not) is gutsy and intriguing. As is the quote she puts in her own mouth "Why do I push people to destruction?" After Fuller and K argue about her brief moment of intimacy with Mapenga [which Fuller tells us was only kissing, but lasted "some minutes"] Fuller explains the reconciliation with K as "The routine of tea, the casual domesticity, the drying underwear on the fence, the unfed cat, the two-o'clock-in the morning quarrels, and the implied apology, the unwashed dishes. From a distance, whatever this was could easily be mistaken for a marriage." Fuller and K in fact become a husband and wife and their intimacy is so complete in its intensity that its physical consummation is irrelevant. We see two people, like naked souls, trying desperately, through the medium of their individual lives, to understand what it is to be alive. If this is not intimacy, what is? The theme of this book is the civil war in Rhodesia and the effect it had on K, his comrades and Fuller. But an understated element is there as well, getting dragged along like a shadow. We have a writer pushing the outer envelope of experience to get at something essential. She is fearless in pursuing K regardless of where it takes her. And the reader of this book feels almost voyeuristic as the elements put into the book (and those left out!) give the startling appearance that real life is unfold

Though she was only a child, the memory of cheering white soldiers on to victory in the Rhodesian war haunts Alexandra Fuller, and probably always will. Fuller, author of the acclaimed memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, understands that war-which ultimately led to black minority rule and democratic elections-probably as well as anyone alive today. It was a war about race, she explains in her latest book Scribbling the Cat. Minority white leaders did not want to surrender the upper hand in Rhodesia, later renamed Zimbabwe. Even so, the good guys are not always so easy to sort from the bad guys: black soldiers fought on the side of white oppression and black communities have been known to nurture their own tyrants. On a visit to her parents in Zambia, Fuller concludes that writing about the war from the point of view of "K," who fought to keep Rhodesia white, will unlock previously untold secrets. She contrives to travel with him to Mozambique, the site of many war atrocities. They travel in about the worst discomfort imaginable-unpaved roads, a dearth of modern plumbing and no refrigeration. Being on the road with a nosy journalist might try anyone's patience, and K is no exception. Adding to the tension, K has a crush on Fuller. Fuller hopes to deliver something meaningful about the nature of war and the scars it leaves on its fighters, especially those whom contemporary ethics have found to be in the wrong. K discloses gruesome memories; most shocking is his assault on a young village woman who later died-after betraying the location of Rhodesian liberation soldiers. But K's stories don't add up to much in the way of revelation or insight. "Nothing K and Mapenga had told me, or shown me-and nothing I could ever write about them-could undo the pain of their having being on the planet," she writes. Her frustration in trying to make sense of war's horror is her finest point.

What is most striking about a book that contains multitudes of gob smacking passages is Alexandra (Bobo) Fullers excruciating honesty. At every turn in this story of her return to Zimbabwe there is an opportunity for an easier and more palatable course. Bo's hard drinking hellfire willed and most definitely bigoted mother is shown in all of her grace and courage, rather than an easy stereotype of colonialism, which is an almost impossible balance to achieve with one's own parent. Ultimately Bo's decision to enter her own Heart of Darkness with K., a brutal, broken and heartbreaking former soldier of the wars for Independance makes sense if there was no other way to heal the damage and accept the beauty that being from Africa has left her with. The conditions of their travel (hellish heat, corrupt officials and the Furies that lurk at every watering hole and dune) and K.'s sudden outbursts, both intensely savage and tender by turns would make a woman less dedicated to finding the truth at whatever costs catch the first plane out of Africa. For an understanding of what war, any war, actually costs this book is unparalleled. I heard the author speak here in Wyoming recently and I can't stop thinking about what she said about her attempt to heal herself, to make whole what had been broken in herself and in K. She said that what they had done instead was to wrench those wounds open and dig their hands deep inside, gripping the most sensitive, raw depths of each others shame and hurt. By laying open these wounds and exposing their flaws without flinching or turning away they were both given a greater gift. I shrink to say that the result was acceptance or something easy. There isn't anything easy about this book but it is searingly honest and it also bears mentioning really funny in a sort of death may come soon why not crack a joke here, what have I got to lose way.