Rob Nixon’s new book is a memoir with a soft spot for the ostriches of Oudtshoorn – and Arizona. He spoke to Jane Rosenthal
`Hope is the thing with wings .” This quote from Emily Dickinson is how Rob Nixon begins his book, Dreambirds (Doubleday). It encapsulates perfectly the lightness, quirky humour and heart-stopping gravity of this work, which can be read as an amusing collection of anecdotes – which it is – airily woven around ostriches and other feathered things. Alternatively, with the narrative looping between three continents, it also deals with issues such as “obsession, memory, migration and deserts”, and the possibility of achieving some reconciliation, once living in another country, between one’s new identity and the person one thinks one has left behind.
At the same time it clearly aims to engage American and other transatlantic readers in a narrative so “angular” and full of “hidden histories” (for example, of Jews and coloureds in the South African ostrich business) that it must disturb the “grand Manichean vision of what apartheid was all about”.
Nixon left South Africa in 1980 and has spent the last 20-odd years mainly in the United States, pursuing the various strands of an academic career, writing and journalism. The death of his father at approximately the time of the first elections in 1994 and an encounter with ostriches in the Arizona desert, where he’d been sent to cover a story for the New Yorker, set him on a course in which he was able to meld both his old and new worlds.
In an interview in Cape Town, he talks about the “huge memoir boom”, “the literary phenomenon of the Nineties”. Many, he says, are “formulaic, with a lot of hyping of the trauma and writing from a predictable point of recovery as a kind of moral lesson of some kind”. He wanted to get beyond such writing in which the assumption is “if it’s me, it’s interesting” to “the reasons why people become obsessed and the way they hope, and to versions of calamity”.
Nixon was raised in Port Elizabeth, with Oudtshoorn and the Karoo within easy reach for the botanical pursuits of his father, who wrote the gardening column, Babiana, for the Eastern Province Herald. After his father’s death, going through drawers of photographs, Nixon says of him, “That’s where he composed himself: behind the camera, in front of foliage.” Yet Nixon, at the age of 11, deliberately took to the study of birds to escape “the overhanging foliage”, since he “loved things with wings that came and went”. That had no roots.
A moving and serendipitous moment for him was the discovery in Arizona of an arboretum in which there was a display of Karoo succulents with almost identical Arizonan twins – it would have made “perfect copy for the EP Herald on Wednesday”. This allowed him to rediscover and acknowledge in himself the passion for natural history ceded to him by his father – the same father whose rootedness he eschewed and whose personal shame after an accident in a “one-mistake town” they both avoided mentioning for close on 20 years.
The recurring motif of birds as symbols of escape includes the elusive mavis which his Scots grandmother longed to hear again (exiled as she was in Port Elizabeth, “the giddy limit of the Celtic fringe”), the arctic terns he helped to ring on the beaches of his home town and of course the ostrich, that comical and bizarre, often nasty and dangerous bird around which the hopes and dreams of farmers and traders were so curiously woven, both in South Africa and, strangely, in Arizona.
Nixon’s interest in migration is longstanding. His first two books were London Calling, on Caribbean writers in Britain, and Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood on the links between South Africa and the United States in film, literature and television. He is about to take up a post at the University of Wisconsin in an interdisciplinary environmental faculty where he will combine looking at “cultural histories of environmental impact” and “the borders between nature and culture”.
Disarmingly versatile, he is as easily able to produce, in a soft whistle, the call of an oriole as to explain Walter Benjamin’s aphorism on the Angel of Progress. All this permeates Dreambirds in such a way as to inform and delight, extend and surprise the reader.
Despite his perception of the “broader ecstasy and sense of possibilities around the first (and second) elections,” he does not feel drawn to the challenges of tertiary education here. Like the dancing cranes of Arizona which migrate annually, he has “loyalties not so much divided as rhythmically redoubled”. Like them, he can now “turn towards home in the very act of leaving it”.
Dreambirds is immensely readable and will effortlessly foster those subtle alterations of perspective needed as South Africa is drawn, willy nilly, into the global community.