Scribbling the Cat
By Alexandra Fuller
(Picador)
Alexandra Fuller’s new book is a good deal more controversial than her first one. Whereas Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight was a moving, faithful, warts-and-all, white child’s-eye view of growing up in the middle of the Rhodesian war, her latest takes things quite a bit further. It is still the same story, but 30 years later.
On a visit to her parents’ fish farm in Zambia, Fuller comes across one of their neighbours, the madly alarming, but not entirely bad, “K”. A soldier turned banana farmer, he is emotional, violent and religious. When Fuller decides to go off to Mozambique with him — to lay some war ghosts on the battle terrain — her father, himself a tough old nut, laconically warns her: “Curiosity scribbled the cat.” “Scribble”, meaning “killed”, is one of the slangy euphemisms white Rhodesians used in the war years. If Fuller is the cat in this instance, one wonders to what extent she was “scribbled” by this journey. Did she emerge a new person, having thrown off the old baggage?
This book takes on some serious issues. On the one hand it seems an extended apologia for (mainly white) former soldiers such as K, for the many appalling things done by them in the name of “defending a lifestyle” (Fuller says this is what the whites fought the war about). She lets K relate many horrific war stories, including one in which villagers are tortured to reveal the whereabouts of fighters. Is Fuller genuinely anti-war? Or is this book a clever way of indulgently retelling all the old stories, full of bravado and machismo?
There often seems to be an undertone of admiration and celebration of the soldiers of the Rhodesian Light Infantry. Some of these are so extreme that this reader fervently hoped that some retribution was in store for K — but Fuller shows that he is continuing as before, not fighting a war, of course, but as a mazungu, festering in his own post-war trauma, neither absolved nor forgiven, despite his newfound faith in the Almighty.
But K, and his mad friends — old comrades-in-arms — are not the only ones in need of forgiveness, of understanding and absolution. Fuller makes it plain that she considers herself, and by implication all the indifferent and propaganda-fed whiteys of Rhodesia, South Africa and good old England, as guilty as the soldiers who used the guns. She is obviously still smarting under these unhealed scars herself as she spends some time pointing out the sins of others on the African continent: the Portuguese colonial administration, South Africans who stole landmine warnings to take home as trophies and Mugabe’s recent depredations.
Fuller has written mainly about whites — is it fair to note this as it is clearly her area of competence ? And she certainly reproduces the slang and style of these bush wazungu with telling accuracy.
But, somehow, in this work which holds up to scrutiny these old white soldiers, some comment from a black person, her social equal would have given some counterweight to the sense that this is just an updated version of all these propagandistic books that were produced during the war to shore up the righteousness of the Ian Smith military era. Despite this, there are obvious attempts to make the book more balanced: Fuller has included quotations from Blaine Harden (on the bizarre brutality of Africa), from Alexander Kanengoni (on the ignorance of whites) and from Graça Machel, whose despairing and negative remarks are given without any reference or context.
The writing in Scribbling the Cat lacks the economy and consistent freshness of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. The style is too studied, at times hopelssly over-written. Yet it’s a good yarn and Fuller has made the most of it. In the end, her comment on K is given obliquely in a letter he writes to her, in which he seems both pathetic and inadequate.