Alexandra Fuller-Partir avant les pluies. National Geographic Live! Alexandra Fuller: Born Into War. Return Leave this field blank. In-Person Appearance Virtual Appearance. Date of Event. Location of Event. Topics of interest. Describe Event. Other SBA speakers of interest. Keep me up to date with information about speakers.
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Photo Tig. So my mother drove off with him on the roof! These people are my parents and grandparents nine times over, and they're behaving in this hilariously exuberant way. My mother is an infamously bad driver. So there she is roaring around the streets of Lusaka at heaven knows what time of night, with my father on the roof of the car, banging away because she's driving on the wrong side of the road!
Mum is shrieking with laughter. She can hardly tell the story. You say you "worshipped" your father. Do you think your adoration of your father complicated your marriage? My father's been described as the John Wayne of Zambia, which gives the real John Wayne a run for his money. He's so stoic, he's so wise, he's so surprising. He's absolutely infamous for his extravagances.
Anyone else would seem small by comparison. Of course, I wasn't trying to make a life with my father. That would be cringe-worthy.
But when you've been raised by someone like that, you have an expectation that the man you're with can match that. There's a wonderful description of your family's mealtime rituals in Zimbabwe. Set a place for us at the table. My father was very insistent that we come to dinner, to the captain's table, properly dressed, which in reality just meant we could not be grimy. We had to be bathed and at least not in ragged clothes. My father was raised in a naval family. I use the metaphor of the navy and ships and the language of signal flags throughout the books.
Your job is to entertain each other: That was really the demand of my father. From my mother, I learned the alchemy of storytelling. Watching her tell my father stories, turning the grist of her day into these bright, golden threads, was really instructive about how to tell the story. And this wonderful idea, which was deep in my father, that as long as you showed up, present and correct for dinner, stiff upper lip and straightened spine, and knew how to behave just badly enough to be entertaining but not so badly you courted disgrace, then he had done his job.
It was a wonderful lesson to get when we were young. The only crime in our family was to be boring. The book also takes the reader back to the Rhodesian civil war. How much did that conflict affect your childhood?
People have rehashed it as a war against communism. But this was a war about race. There were at most a hundred thousand white people who had access to the votes, the schools, the hospitals, and most importantly, the land.
Then you had about six million black Zimbabweans, who were in Tribal Trust Lands in these small, not very fertile, communal areas. Their access to the vote was severely limited. They had bad schools and bad hospitals. One of the things that was essential learning from my childhood was that being white made you intrinsically superior, and it was OK to lord it over six million blacks. But the biggest effect was that war was the weather system of my youth.
The war was everywhere. And what came with that was death and the insanity of war, which leaks on even after a cease-fire has been declared.
I think the hardest thing it did was to make childhood innocence, those precious years until you're about 11 or 12, not exist for us. War makes you cunning and a survivor. It can make you very damaged or very resilient.
But it never leaves you. You spend the rest of your life trying to redress what happened to you in those first years, even though it's not your fault. But your body doesn't know that, your limbic system doesn't know that. You're always waiting for the next trauma to happen—or drama. You're constantly on watch. My sister, Vanessa, lost the ability to be around instability.
She had used up all her resources in that department. And we both looked for men to marry who would protect us against dangers that actually didn't exist anymore.
I went back to Zimbabwe for a National Geographic piece a couple of years ago, and I think it's very obvious that you cannot have a calm, productive, democratic future when the foundation is violence and inequality and war. And I think that the half-life of the Rhodesian war is proving horribly long. Robert Mugabe is a product of that war. I know this is an unpopular thing to say—people want to separate out Mugabe as a distinct piece of evil that sprung up out of nowhere.
But there's no way he would have been able to carry on as long as he has if he couldn't get so many people to act as if the war happened yesterday. When you go to Zimbabwe, the rhetoric and the behavior of Mugabe and his cronies make it seem as if the Rhodesian war was still going on. What's astonishing to me is that there have always been women primarily, but also men, who put their necks on the line to stand up for a robust kind of truth, and a robust kind of justice, which acknowledges where we came from.
For me the definition of grace is to be prepared for where you're going. The future. Your children. I think victims is a strong word. We were really perpetrators in the crash. The kind of greed where for very little work you could make a lot of money. It was called cheap money. But that didn't make sense to me. Those words shouldn't be in a sentence together.
My very African instinct was that you don't have credit. My parents can't get credit in Zambia. It doesn't exist in that way. It certainly didn't exist in my family. So to be in a culture where there's cheap money that allows you to borrow against a kind of financial bubble felt to me, even at the time, so confusing I couldn't understand it.
I'd also married right out of college. I'd never even balanced a checkbook. Charlie would show me numbers, and they didn't make sense to me. I was financially completely illiterate. And that really put this huge strain on our marriage because, as a southern African, I didn't trust that. I felt emotionally and instinctively that we were doing the wrong thing. We were living beyond our means.
We had a custom-built home and a car each and a getaway cabin, and all this land we'd bought as investments. We traveled a lot, and we weren't paying attention to the fact that it wasn't endless. But deep down, I kept thinking: This feels crazy.
You are now a successful, critically acclaimed author. But it wasn't always like that, was it? Not only was I rejected by every major publishing house in this country, I was even fired by my agent, who said, "You maybe have some teeny-weeny vestige of talent, but you don't have a story. I wrote really dreadful novels, I think that's fair to say.
But I wrote out of desperation. I'd been told relationships are "work. But once you get married, you're supposed to be miserable. Surely if I put this all on paper, I can somehow make it better. I can put words on the page, and the words will make sense of everything, and it'll be OK.
I think a lot of writers will recognize that impulse. So I wrote and had toddlers and worked part-time and woke up at 4 a. In terms of my health and ability to move on with clarity, this book has been a lifesaver. And I hope it is for others. Not just for women, although I think it's more common for women to end up in the situation I was in: financially illiterate, in a relationship where they think that their white knight showed up, but it turned out not to be true; where they pick their heads up out of the diaper pail and realize they absolutely cannot carry on.
I look back at the last years of the marriage and say, Wow, that was the definition of insanity. I just kept doing the same thing over and over, thinking I could make the future different. How have the characters you describe, particularly your ex-husband and your children, reacted to the book?
I'm not sure that my ex-husband has read it. Or that he ever will. I'm very grateful to him, actually. I have three children. I learned a lot in that relationship. I think this is traumatic for him, and for me there's a line about what I can say about him either in the book or aloud, because he should have his own privacy.
As a woman writer of memoir, your fear tends to be private. I'm not saying this is true of all women or of all men. But men tend to be in the public eye, and women tend to be in the private eye. And one of the most taboo things you can do is write about the private.
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