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Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller (Find this book in our catalog)

Alexandra Fuller, best known for her memoir of a childhood in Africa during the Chimurenga War in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (Find this book in our catalog), returns to Africa after a sojourn of several years in Wyoming with her American husband and their children. While visiting her parents in Zambia, she meets K., a white former Rhodesian/Zimbabwean. K. is a seasoned soldier from what might have been one of the most brutal wars in modern history, the Mozambican Civil War, lasting from 1977 until 1992. K. is a damaged man, a brute haunted by his own brutality. When Fuller meets him, he is the owner of a banana plantation near her parents’ fish farm. Despite his new profession as a farmer, he is still very much dogged by the ghosts of his past crimes and mortal sins. Even his conversion to evangelical Christianity has not soothed his tortured soul. Perhaps God has forgiven him his sins, but K. has not done so for himself, and for good reason, since it might be difficult to forgive oneself for such great evils done in the past.

When Fuller suggests that K. travel back to Mozambique, with her as company, he hesitates for only a brief time. While he revisits the country where he had committed his greatest sins, the journey could serve as a way of releasing him from the lingering guilt that consumes him. For K.’s part, he sees the possibility of Fuller’s staying with him, since he suspects God has sent her to him as a life partner. Delusion abounds.

The journey to and within Mozambique takes them not only through a land of lush beauty but also through the memories of a tortured man. As Fuller and K. get farther into Mozambique, K. reveals more and more of his actions in the war, actions that make it hard to like him or even to have sympathy for him. Yet Fuller has far more compassion for her fellow human beings, seeing the victims of war to be not just civilians or those fighting for independence or for the integrity of their new country, but also those who fought the war on the other side.

The outcome of the journey is not surprising: no real resolution follows. What is surprising is what and who Fuller and K. meet on the way, and how despite great evil, a land can still provided breathtaking beauty and serenity, while a people can still find room for forgiveness, even if that forgiveness remains hard to find.

Submitted by D. L. Sebly, staff

Labels: Africa, Alexandra Fuller, mercenaries Scribbling the Cat, Mozambique