Missions Resources - Bibliography
Scribbling the Cat
Authors: Alexandra Fuller
ISBN: 0143035010
Publisher: Penguin
Number of pages: 272
Type of cover: Soft Cover
Summary:
reviewed by Paul Grant
Where do soldiers go when the war is lost, but the homeland they thought they were defending as well? What does one do when one discovers that for years one has believed a lie?
A pedigreed lie in the West, which many of us in the church, who should know better, nevertheless cling to, holds that individuals can create their own identities. We make heroes out of self-made men and others who shake their fists at history and go it alone.
More often than heroic self-determination, such individualism leaves us haunted by our own ghosts. Scribbling the Cat is a tale of these ghosts. It is the story of a road trip through the thickets of memory in a homeland gone forever.
Alexandra Fuller is a journalist from Zambia and Zimbabwe, and the daughter of white farmers who lost a war and had to flee. She married an American and left the country, even as she continues to identify as African. The genesis of this excellent book began with a chance meeting in Zambia, while she was home for Christmas on her parents’ farm.
Fuller was replenishing her soul with the smells and sounds of her childhood, listening to the birds, when a white man appears, a recent arrival in the neighborhood. A veteran of the civil wars that replaced white Rhodesia with black Zimbabwe, “K”, as he is called throughout the book, is a farmer, a veteran with a violent past, a divorcé, a grieving father, a newly-born again Christian, and a lonely man.
Elsewhere in the book, as she thinks about the impoverished rural peoples of Zimbabwe, Fuller observes: “How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.”
Whatever else he is, K is a product of Africa. He lives in Zambia because he was a soldier for the losing side in an ugly war. Although he cannot live in his homeland, he can’t really leave either. K is displaced and is in many respects a shell of a man, broken by war, suffering and loneliness.
Rhodesia, as the country was called before majority black rule, was named after Cecil Rhodes, founder of the De Beers diamond company. It was primarily a white state in a multiracial country, with an awkward relationship to the British crown. War erupted in the seventies after the Rhodesians declared independence, rather than submit to a British-imposed black government. Rebel black Armies, including one led by Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s current president, began a guerilla war from across the border in Mozambique.
Rhodesia mustered an army to fight the guerillas, and K was an elite soldier in that army. He killed many enemy soldiers, and saw many of his friends killed. He witnessed countless atrocities and spent years in the bush, afraid for his life.
And then it was over. Majority black rule was established in 1979, with a Methodist Bishop as Prime Minister, but the reconciliation-minded government collapsed, and Mugabe swept to power.
Alexandra Fuller goes out of her way to avoid politics. She is chasing ghosts instead. She embarks on a road trip with K through the landscape of his memories, passing through Zimbabwe to Mozambique. She is out to understand a war she experienced as a child, trying to bring an adult understanding to her foggy impressions.
K’s ghosts are many. Tears flow readily as smells trigger memories, and the sounds of the countryside resurrect suppressed terrors. K is also a man on the mend. His recent conversion – progressing from his son’s death – has forced him to reinterpret his past. Can the Holy Spirit heal a wreck of a soul? K believes so. It’s his last remaining hope.
Fuller, meanwhile, is unimpressed by K’s faith and generally sarcastic. She views his faith as just another lifestyle choice, although she grudgingly respects K’s reformed self-control. At one point, she asks him to get out of the truck to assist in a traffic jam. K demurs, saying “I’d get out there and do something, but I’d only end up killing someone.”
Fuller adds: “He sounded helplessly resigned, the way other people might say, ‘I’d help you do the dishes, but I always seem to break plates.’” At least it’s progress. When the Holy Spirit comes with power, for some of us it’s the power to break the cycle of violence. But Fuller shrugs it off with her characteristic cool.
And that’s the story for the book. Scribbling the Cat is a book about the hell of war, and about the meaning of home, but the biggest ghost of all is God. K wants to talk, and Fuller doesn’t let him. In God’s absence the story of all these people is overshadowed by incredible loneliness. Most of the veterans in this story cannot live healthy lives in community. They stand apart from their own families (one man was on Ritalin after trying to kill his own brother) and apart from the black people around them.
Because Fuller takes no interest in K’s spiritual journey, it is hard to tease out his relationship to the locals. His farm is across a small river from a village, and he speaks fluent Shona, and spends most of his life with locals. Does his faith have any impact on his relationship with his neighbors? Christianity is, after all, a communal faith. There are no lone-ranger Christians, even though there are plenty of lone ranger shell-shocked former soldiers. Where is K? Is he in communion with other Christians? Through the miracle of community, God makes it possible for us to rid the terrors of memory, and rebuild our lives as new people.
K’s story, as devastating as it is, and as lonely as he is, is one of hope. K genuinely believes a new day is coming, when all the pain will be healed. Fuller on the other hand, has so much more than K – a loving spouse and children, a safe home in America, good relations with her parents – yet she seems less optimistic. Scribbling the Cat is about the past, but the main subject wished it were about the future. Thus the seismic impact of salvation. Hope, along with its cousins Faith and Love, is all that we have, and as K seems to feel, it is sufficient for victorious living in a world gone to hell.
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