Quarter 4 Post #1

I am reading “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller. It is a story of the author’s childhood (nicknamed Bobo), growing up in war-ravaged Rhodesia during the 1970s.  Compared to our current American childhoods, hers was not a very typical one.  She wasn’t allowed to wake her parents at night for fear that they would mistake her for a terrorist and shoot her.  Her mother was drunk so much that they had terms commonly used to convey that she had been drinking. These consisted of “mummy is half-mast” and “she’s thrown a wobbly.” This mother was always trying things out and giving them up quickly, in almost a flaky way. She tried yoga, and gave up.  She attempted a conversion to Jehovah’s witness, and gave up. She even tried to be a belly dancer in bars, but that didn’t work out either. Bobo sees her mother outside with her forehead on the table, obviously hung-over, and she and her sister shove her into the car as their father light a cigarette for her. “Mum isn’t moving”, so they stop to make sure she’s alive.

This view of a drunken mother from a child’s perspective shows the ignorance of youth extremely well. Bobo doesn’t realize that there is obviously something wrong with her mother, that she must be suffering some kind of trauma. Bobo just goes with it, observing the details of her mother’s drunkenness without making any conclusions as to what caused it. This is normal to her.  This naivety, or lack of any kind of reaction or deduction is present throughout much of the book in terms of war.  Bobo lives in a land of violence and fear, but despite that, she doesn’t look around and think “where are the terrorists??”  She pans over the land and sees it’s wildness, the freedom of the grass and the animals. She smells it’s hot, sweet, smoky, softness. She hears the “explosion of day birds, a fierce fight for territory, for females and food.”  She feels the “deep quality of the blackest time of night” pressing everyone and everything into a “profound silence.” 

Bobo can get past the anxiety of war that her parents and every other adult must go through, and she just lives her life. She lives her life making little observations about the ants on the ground and the birdcalls and the way her maid looked when she was completely covered in blood after being attacked. It’s all with the same voice.  And when she watches the culprit being beaten by her fathers “boys” as the militia purposefully looked the other way, she could hear his ribs cracking like the “branches of the frangipani tree,” and she could see his skin splitting open like a “ripe papaya.” She sees violence and gore, and she relates it to the beauty of the land around her. This is something children do. They can find beauty in almost anything merely because of their innocence, which makes innocence itself quite beautiful.