REVIEW: Karina M. Szczurek
I must have been quite a disconcerting sight: weeping my eyes out in the middle of O.R. Tambo International Airport. I couldn’t help myself. That is what a good book can do to you. I was passing the wait for my flight home with the final few chapters of Alexandra Fuller’s latest memoir, Leaving Before the Rains Come, when the tears just started spilling over. It wasn’t the first time one of Fuller’s books had made me cry. But perhaps it was most fitting since this particular story feels as if it had been written through a lot of intimate pain.
Mostly known for her international bestseller, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller is the author of four other books. She is one of those writers who will either irritate the hell out of you or steal your heart. She stole mine with The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, the incredibly moving story of a young cowboy who died on the oil rigs in Wyoming, and I have been reading her work ever since. My other favourite is Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier in which Fuller captured her haunting encounter with a veteran of the Rhodesian war. In hindsight, the book can be read as a companion to Leaving Before the Rain Comes.
Readers familiar with her other memoirs will know that the Fuller family “gets over it, whatever it is, and they move on.” Accustomed to war, insanity, loss, fear, violence, grief, drinking, death, and the wonder and chaos that are Africa, the Fullers don’t do boring. When Alexandra, or rather Bobo, as she is known, meets Charlie, an American, in Zambia in 1991 and decides to settle down with him and their family in the United States, she believes that she is choosing a life of “certainties, safety nets, and assurances” which all seem terribly alluring after an existence based on “perpetual insecurity”. She is young, she thinks that “the only thing that stood between me and oblivion was love”, but, as we all find out sooner or later, love is hardly ever enough. Even if it is a love that is strong and true as theirs undoubtedly was: “The sudden shock of coming into such sharp focus – the sheer, unlikely, extraordinary luck of being loved by this man – was wonderful, but it was also confusing. The few other men I had been with had found my intensity off-putting, unseemly, alarming, but Charlie calmly, fearlessly turned toward it, as if warmed by the heat I threw off.”
When Bobo gives birth to their first child and nearly dies of malaria, the romance of adventure begins to wear off. Eventually they decide to settle in Wyoming, paying bills, bringing up their kids, and in Bobo’s case, trying to fit in. But with the looming financial crisis of recent years, Charlie’s loss of income, an engulfing silence between them, and Bobo’s ingrained ache for Africa, they begin to feel “undone from one another”.
Many years ago, a friend gave me valuable advice: When in doubt, listen to your body; it never lies. This is something Fuller discovers herself when amidst the crisis she falls seriously ill. She also understands that Africa doesn’t easily let go of her own. And no matter how hard it is to face the possibility, the idea of a divorce begins to creep into their marriage.
In most cases it takes more courage to get out of a marriage than to stay in it. Fuller is no coward; she has been inducted into ‘getting over it’. “We’d come together with too much passion to break apart gently”, she writes. There is unbearable heartache, warfare, betrayal, separation and return: “But in every real way, we steered assiduously away from one another.” Throughout it all, Fuller tries her hand at writing, one rejected novel after another, until one day someone makes clear to her that fiction might not be her métier. She also discovers what it means to be independent, financially literate, and “that for a woman to speak her mind in any clear, unassailable, unapologetic way, she must first possess it.” In the middle of it all something staggering and totally unpredictable happens. Once again it becomes obvious that it is in the face of calamity that we forge our true selves.
Fuller does not hold back. Her ability to expose the most hidden corners of the soul in a way that is respectful and kind, towards herself and others, is beautiful. Her powerful insights are clad in a language to match: “Then there was an abrupt release, and there she was: a long-limbed, waxy, blood-smeared baby unfurling on my chest, her lips a perfect rosebud of query, and everything I had ever thought I knew about pain and love and fear of death raced out of me and was replaced by a fierce, murderous adoration. I looked at Mum in astonishment. ‘I know,’ she said…” The entire book is full of such astounding scenes and observations which leave you breathless, or in tears, or roaring with laughter.
The cocktail of searing honesty, relentless humour and gorgeous storytelling Fuller serves up in Leaving Before the Rains Come is intoxicating.
