Detachment by Maurice Mierau

Author:Maurice Mierau [Mierau, Maurice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4604-0455-3
Publisher: Broadview Press
Published: 2014-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

In the last couplet I’d accidentally hit on a historical truth. The neighbour’s wife was raped, according to Lil. But then, so were most of the women and girls.

One of the things I had hoped for when I first read Dad’s autobiography was some explanation for why he’d trotted our family around the globe so relentlessly, and what role, if any, my mother played in those decisions. Mom told me that after finishing his doctorate, my dad had declined a tenure-track university position. Before she began losing her memory, she often wished for the pension that would have gone with that job.

When I asked him why, he said his religious convictions had led him to work for the American Bible Society in Africa. But his autobiography revealed that he had developed other, less orthodox ideas about God. I couldn’t believe that God told him to reject job security, or to jump off cliffs.

I also wondered why, in the late 1960s, we had not returned to Africa. As a kid I’d wanted to stay in a hot country, a place with no winter: we would have gone to Congo, a hotter place than I understood at six years old. Occasionally he did choose the safer path. His autobiography explained our sudden removal from Africa in the summer of 1968 this way:

… we came to a very difficult decision, which was not to return to Africa where we had all suffered from either malaria, intestinal parasites, or stomach ulcers. I began to feel very uncertain about my hopes for a career in the field of linguistics, and worse still, I had developed a serious problem in my failure to communicate adequately with my wife.

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