To the Moon and Timbuktu: A Trek Through the Heart of Africa by Nina Sovich

Author:Nina Sovich [Sovich, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: New Harvest
Published: 2013-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

25

Gnostic Life

I HAD NEVER READ Out of Africa before I came to Africa. The book seemed dated and irrelevant—important to a subsection of scholars and intellectuals who found, in Isak Dinesen’s memoirs, a reflection of Africa that no longer applied. What meaning could I possibly find in the story of a Danish woman running a colonial farm and her love affair with a British big game hunter named, rather loftily, Denys Finch Hatton?

I read Out of Africa during my travels through Senegal, before I came to Mauritania. I found that I had been very wrong to ignore it. Here was a book that transcended both time and place and spoke directly to the dangers that arise from too much solitude. Dinesen’s life in Africa, rendered in sparse Scandinavian prose, recalls not just Casper’s struggle, but my own and my mother’s. This became more evident as I lay in bed in Nouakchott and considered my strange brush with the doctor.

Dinesen, whose real name was Karen Blixen, was a wealthy Danish merchant’s daughter who married a ne’er-do-well Swedish baron named Bror. In 1914 they came to Africa and started a coffee plantation on the highlands above Nairobi. Like Mary Kingsley, Dinesen had an absent and traveling father, and like Kingsley is never completely clear on why she came to Africa. It is likely that she simply wanted to get away from the expectations and constraints of upper-class Danish life.

Unlike the movie, which is all wrenching love scenes and beautiful shots of the Serengeti, Dinesen’s book is a lyrical and anecdotal recollection of her time in Africa. It is less a love story, or a story at all, than a series of scenes depicting the difficulties of being alone, the pain of trying to run a farm in a capricious climate, and the small insanities that arise from spending years on end living in a foreign land. Like all the other Scandinavian women I know (I include here not just my mother but my grandmother, aunt, and cousin), Dinesen doesn’t have much time for either self-revelation or emotional hand-wringing.

She is, despite her chosen residence, Scandinavian to the core: beneath her outer reserve and resolute good manners lies a deep well of conflict and complex emotion. Thus, for all the poetry of her writing, the book maintains a down-to-earth, practical center. Dinesen is a hard-eyed frontier woman, hiking up her skirt to fight drought and British colonial officials who want to cart off beloved servants. To her immense credit, she puts Africans at the center of her life and writing. She is worrying about Kamante, one of the Africans who live on her land, who comes to her with a sore on his leg for which he resists hospitalization. She is conferring with her bodyman Farah on the protocol for hiring servants and running a farm. She is begging the stars for December rains and caring for wounded gazelles. Denys may have been her lover but it is Africa and the Africans she loves.

For all the richness of her life, however, she is also very lonely and strangely unlucky.

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