I am reading Out of Africa in Nepal. I realized this morning that it seems to be a habit of mine to read books about Africa while in other places, beautiful places which, were it not for the book, I would otherwise be intensely focused on.
I finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible (an excellent book) in Yosemite National Park’s Tuolomne Meadows several years back, in the days when I lived in a tent in the Sierra, and worked for the Forest Service. I remember how at the time I had to literally pull myself away from the end of the book as I sat on the bank of a little river there, separating myself from the work with a great shuddering inhalation of revival as I tried to come to terms with what the story had meant to me, and the way in which it had ended. I very clearly recall my surroundings – I had hidden myself away on the low, sandy part of the bank, so that casual viewers from the road would be unable to see my sitting along the side of the water, tucked down just low enough to become only a bump in the landscape. I recall as well exactly what the sky looked like, bright blue with low, rounded cumulus clouds as white as cotton against the sky. As I regained awareness of my own presence and geographic place in the world, I raised my head and looking around me saw that I was, in fact, still in Yosemite. I appreciated how much more clearly I saw where I was and the opportunities that lay in front of me, back then, and Out of Africa has had much of the same effect on me in Nepal.
I brought several books with me this summer, many of which spent their year in a “to read” pile on my futon in New Haven, waiting for a day that never came. A few (including Out of Africa) I went out and bought specifically for this trip, knowing and hoping that I would encounter technology-free downtime, and that when sleeping outdoors or in places of modest accommodation, they would the perfect little gift to myself, a pathway to sleep and also to distraction, if needed. Among those I’ve brought from the futon pile but not yet read were Eiger Dreams, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, and an autographed copy of Vandana Shiva’s Water Wars. Each made the cut for the trip for a different reason, each one included in order to serve a different purpose. Eiger Dreams, a collection of stories about mountain climbing was a gift from Cristi, prescient in its subject matter, which seemed an appropriate read for someone so close to the Himalaya; Pedagogy of the Oppressed was recommended and loaned by my friend Gabe from Yale after a late night of debating social change and politics over glasses of wine; Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes was assigned (whoops!) for my Social Science Theory and Methods class in the fall, but didn’t seem relevant to my own work until very recently; and Water Wars I bought from the author herself when the Progressive Student Union I worked with as an undergraduate hosted her as a speaker, but I had previously put it down after beginning to read it because I didn’t know enough about the geography and places being referenced in India. Almost five years later now, I do know them, and am perhaps incidentally very interested in the subject of water access and availability in South Asia. And so it came along too.
The books I purchased for the occasion were of the same vein, in that there was no discernable central theme. Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma was supposed to be Botany of Desire, because a friend reading it at a research site years ago (I can no longer recall whether it was in Minnesota or California) raved about its contents. But when I opened Botany of Desire in the bookstore and saw one of the first chapters was all about apples, I simply didn’t feel it was what I was looking for, on this particular trip. I remember the first time I heard about Omnivore’s Dilemma, when my friend Emily at National Geographic, who I loved to pieces for our rapid-fire intellectual give-and-take, sent me an email one morning containing only the excerpt the NYTimes published, along with her thoughts on his dietary recommendations, which went as follows: Eat Food. Not too Much. Mostly Plants.
Everything Michael Pollan has written has come highly-recommended to me, over the years, and Omnivore’s Dilemma thus seemed a nice follow-on to Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which was an incredible and thought-provoking book that I read last summer. My mother, in fact, probably still has it on her bedside table, where she left it after getting bogged down in the decidedly slow first chapter (which I warned her would happen…mom!)
Bird by Bird, which has a subtitle along the lines of Stories on Writing and Life, has come into and out of my life so many times that I considered it a matter of fate to pick it up, and laughed at the irony of it all when it came out of my backpack simply masticated by the sheer volume of things I had crammed in there with it. ‘Shitty First Drafts,’ Anne Lamott’s chapter about getting started as a writer, and the necessity of writing crap to get to the good stuff, was assigned to me in my undergraduate Writing Colleagues seminar, and five years later I’ve trucked the little paper photocopy all over the planet with me, trying to provoke myself into writing down some of the things I think as I experience the world. I brought it to Costa Rica last year hoping that I would take the opportunity to do some more substantial writing, and instead stumbled across the entire book on a bookswap shelf in a local coffeeshop, one lazy afternoon last summer in Puerto Jimenez, Costa Rica. I had no book with me I was willing to swap, however, and since the swap terms were clear and firm, I instead sat in place and read several chapters, becoming increasingly enamored with the work and the author until I left town, vowing to acquire my own copy in short order.
Out of Africa was a little bit different. I saw the end of the movie version of Out of Africa over one of the fall or winter holidays at my parents’ house this year, and was immensely moved by the story, the incredible, adventurous, determined, strong woman of whom it told, and the bittersweet ending to her experience abroad. I was moved as well by the relationships she shared in the Ngong hills of Africa, both with an array of other foreigners, and with the local tribes she comes to know, understand, protect and respect. Few movies affect me so deeply, and I found that in the weeks and months afterwards my thoughts often returned to Karen Blixen, and my desire to read her full story, in her own words. I knew the moment the movie finished that I would buy the book and read it closely, and find now that while I read it, as I did with the Poisonwood Bible, I often take leave of the book for a moment, closing its covers with a finger in place to hold the page, and clasp it unconsciously to my chest with a gasp, I am so moved by her story. The descriptiveness of the imagery, and the self-identification I feel with the narrator, rivets me, despite not being half the woman, or having half the courage, that she does.
When Blixen writes of standing and watching Denys Finch-Hatton (who I believe will become her lover, but I’m only on page 236 so don’t tell me!) in the dark after he’d shot two lions, and of how her hands had shaken while holding the torch guiding his rifle, despite her desire to be brave, and the way he gently, dryly, teased her for it later, the writing was so lucid I felt as if it were I who was in the moment, and could feel exactly the energy and affection with which she must have looked over at Denys, thrilled by the kill and the moment they shared there together, as true equals in the dark of an African night. Such gorgeous writing, and beautiful, inspirational, larger-than-life people.
It moves me too to think of how they must have felt leaving for a life in Africa, struggling to make a living and earn enough to keep their farm estates, while friends and family back home blazed forward in the comfort of the Industrial Age, never completely understanding what it was that they had experienced. Blixen writes of how her peers told her they felt a little bit like they had abandoned their country and communities at home, but were in fact fellow exiles, to her mind, and again I can relate so closely that it gives me pause, to let my mind wander a bit, and think about the choices we make in life, before returning to my reading. I think it is an important part of spending time abroad to wonder where you actually fit best, and to question whether there’s a culture or a place in the world that suits your nature more closely than the one you are born into.
Such a fantastic, thought-provoking book, and one which even as it pulls me into Africa gives me cause to think more deeply about Nepal, and about the way people of different cultures and expectations interact with one another when brought into the same small spaces. My experience in Nepal is sixteen and three quarters of a year shorter in duration, and drastically different than that of Blixen in Africa, but I take great solace in the small parallels between our experiences, and in her articulate, poetic expression of sentiments I could myself only stammer out, if I could articulate them at all.
