I read a book this weekend, ‘Scribbling the Cat, A Journey with and African Soldier’ by Alexandra Fuller and it rocked my world on several different levels.
This is not the quintessential white African novel that has become so common - a quirky volume of anecdotes, harking after an Africa of the ‘old days’ that is both irrational and loveable. Scribbling is quite different, it is unforgiving and terrible and funny. In my constant search for personal identity I have found some understanding in Scribbling.
The story is about Alexandra Fuller and her writer’s relationship with a divorced veteran of the Rhodesian war, known only as K, living alone with his demons in a cement bedroom on the bank of a remote river. He is battered and scarred from the experiences of his national service during the Rhodesian war. K is like many other veterans who have similar life patterns: divorced, practising or ex-alcoholics whose war experiences have impressioned their lives (he has his blood group tattooed into his right forearm). Yet K is singular in that he talks about what he did during the war when a generation of men have remained silent.
Scribbling for me was a journey of the language of my childhood: what words mean, and what people do with them.
For instance, what it means to be an African? - Alexandra talks about K as a ‘true African’ - “. . . He looked bulletproof . . . his own self-sufficient, debt-free, little nation—a living, walking, African Vatican City." I previously criticized ‘Don’t lets go to the dogs tonight’ for its lack of self-reflection as an African novel. In particular, that black Africans rarely appear in Alexandra Fuller’s spaces except as servants or shooting targets. But in Scribbling she has become aware of this reality. The division between white Africans and black Africans is often blurred; K himself is a mass of familiar contradictions. He speaks fluent Shona, builds houses and schools for his farm staff and yet he makes comments like "I'll get my electric fence and then hokoyo! Zap! One time, fried gondie."
Most poignantly, she comments that what was particular about the Rhodesian war was that it was fought between sides who each thought themselves indigenous. She quotes Graca Machel’s impassioned plea ‘that the worst of everything that is evil and inhuman is to be found in Africa? What is wrong with us Africans?'
In Zimbabwe, people have words for murder in the way that Eskimos have words for snow, and her book is a list of the many euphemisms for killing that are so familiar to me: "scribbled, culled, plugged, slotted, taken out, drilled, wasted, stonked, hammered, wiped out, snuffed".
''I own this now,'' she writes after hearing K's worst war crime ''This was my war too. I had been a small, smug white girl shouting, 'We are all Rhodesians and we'll fight through thickanthin.' To her eternal credit, she is unflinching with herself and with the stories the K has to tell.
But the irony of why Scribbled is so important is that it is unintentional by the author. At the climax of the book, the contrast between K’s reaction and Alexandra’s reaction is the most important. K prays, cries, rages and Alexandra Fuller…..shuts down. This emotional disconnect becomes the book's liability. Alexandra Fuller funnels feeling into the landscape —Mozambique lies "bleeding flatly into the lake"—but when she and K reach an emotional impasse, she declares she has nothing to say, no grand truths about war. K's shards don't satisfy her. There is no simple answer and the scars remain.
