A Duality In Africa: Memouir Induced by Poisonwood Bible

Today I remember Africa.

I can taste the bland mealie pop, like runny grey oatmeal, on my tongue. We used to add sugar in a failing attempt to make it taste less like soggy carboard. Some used salt to try and make it like grits. Others just ate it quickly. Because we didn't have a lot of options...unless there was toast. Heavenly toast, which we could put peanut butter and jelly on (as we had an unending supply of that). I ate that almost exclusively the last week--since, for reasons yet unknown to me, we came upon toast more often in Zambia than Botswana. I have a picture of Lydia, pretty redhead Lydia, sitting next to a giant iron pot--big enough to hold a person--full of mealie pop. It's an enduring image I carry with me: Lydia in a chair next to the pot, with a metal scoop to dish out into our bowls while we shuffled by kicking up grey and orange dust with our sneakers and sandals.

I am less than a chapter away from finishing The Poisonwood Bible. Some books take you away with them, but return you to reality in between chapters. Some books never capture you at all. And some books take you away so far--or, in my case, take you back so clearly--that you feel stuck in them and until you finish there cannot be conversation untainted by the feelings of the book.

Poisonwood Bible was that for me.

I have been reading it all weekend and have felt oddly disconnected with things at hand. Because the more I read the more I see. The more I remember. The more my heart, which has allowed it's knowledge to remain dormant, longs for the thickets with their sandy pathways and the donkey's braying in the morning.

Once, when us girls were off to powder our noses in the bushes, we were passing a swampy stream where we would be bathing later (though this fact was unknown to us at the moment) and a man came riding through the water on a donkey. He didn't speak to us. He just slowed and watched us walk along the water and laugh at eachother's jokes. Then he rode on, while we waited until he was out of sight to get on with our powdering.

We used to call the powder trips "tea parties." Particularly when the boys went all together out into the bush.

But if you went alone you could die. We knew this well enough, though the trip was "safe"--as safe as Africa can be. If you went alone into the forest what number of things you could encounter there--not just predators, like the leopards that prowled around our tents on the night that the bus had engine problems, but snakes and spiders that are smaller and harder to spot.

Never alone.

And it's a good thing. Though some American girls have trouble peeing where you can hear them.

In Botswana, once, while we were driving in the big open-air bus, Flipp screeched the bus to a halt and jumped out in his sandals to stomp onto a deadly poisonous snake. What person in his right mind tries to kill one with his flip flops. Only Flipp, who was a photographer and had long hair, and who I wish I'd spoked to more. I bet he had a lot to say.

We asked him why he stopped the bus to kill the snake. He said that it was in the compound and if he hadn't, what kind of damage would it do? There are children there, you know. Children of the missionaries. Now, when I am no longer there, children of my friends Sarah and Kevin. So Flipp stomped on the snake with flip flops. We could have lost the snake if we'd waited for something more substantial to kill it with.

I don't remember how the snake was actually killed. I think someone helped him, but my memory goes fuzzy after the news of Flipp jumping on the snake like that.

dumela ma. dumela ka. dumelong. Hello miss. Hello sir. Hello all.

I still remember the language, after all these years.

Modimo, Modimo a go segofatse.

God bless you.

I don't ever speak it. But I can hear it.

In the book she keeps saying how Africa gets under your skin. And I can't think of any other way to put it. Like malaria, which, upon being contracted, stays in your bloodstream. You're forever succeptible to outbreaks. Africa crawls into you and reminds you of itself. Over and over.

So many memories...

It makes me want to go back, you know. I want to wash the dust off my feet at night before bed with baby wipes, like I used to have to. I ran out of babywipes partway through the second month, I remember, so I used antibacterial soap and rubbed it off with dirty socks or underwear. We bathed occasionally, when there was water or space for it, in the rivers, while sentries watched upstream in the shallows for signs of crocodiles. I even don't mind thinking of that again, though the water was so terribly cold and the whole experience rushed and never naked. I think I was only entirely naked once during the entire two months--when we were in a big city and there were public showers we could pay for and shower in. Only, they were surrounded by bamboo poles that didn't always perfectly come together. You could see eachother a bit through the gaps--which was uncomfortable--but we didn't really care. It was our first real shower in four weeks.

Sometimes I had to wash my hair in a bucket. Most of the girls had hair that would get greasy from not washing and they'd pull it back, but mine dried up like wheat husks in the wind. It stuck out every which way and captured dust and who knows what else. So I'd fill a bucket with water and dunk my head into the cold depths and wash my hair in between baths--when I couldn't stand it anymore after three or four days.

We also shaved in the buckets a couple times. Not that it mattered. Since we wore long skirts every day. But we wanted to feel feminine--so we shaved our legs over a long shallow bucket of cold water in the cool night air of the winter desert.

I remember when we got to Zimbabwe, to the hotel, how long I stood under that hot water! I have photos of us all that night going to dinner. Everyone wore dresses and collared shirts and washed their faces. And we couldn't believe we'd been with these same people all month. Everyone looks different under a layer of desert sand and baby spit and dried sweat. My hair is shiny in those pictures, but not the rest. And Lydia is wearing makeup. And Jason cut his hair short and I never realized that Ian was handsome! Everyone looks a lot more like an American youth group photo. But we're not entirely used to eachother this way, and we behave more American there too.

Odd what a shower does to you.

So here I am, sitting in a black tank top in an apartment in Brooklyn I painted myself, with a computer at my disposal and hot water at my disposal and yet I feel like I am in Africa.

I am holding the baby in the refugee camp--the one who peed on me when I had no change of clothes and I had to live in those ones for two days until we returned to camp. I am the blind woman in a drama, staring blankly through the crowd of children at a little school, acting with all my heart for them. I am the girl with such faith! We pray for a blind woman and she sees. And yet I am also the girl having the secret conversations with Jeremy about sex (shhh) and lecturing my leaders on their moral principles. I'm a duality in Africa. But overwhelmingly I love it. And everything I do is to love it. I didn't tell anyone that the baby peed on me. There was nothing to be done, and I chose to come here, to serve here.

I am 15 again. Idealistic. Passionate. Untainted. Stubborn. And an incurable tomboy. I'm climbing the trees in my skirt and watching for crocodiles alongside the river; pitching my tent and sleeping in it, buried deep within my sleeping bag, deathly afraid of George--the big white spider living in the tent who is undetectable that night.

Africa was under my skin.

It still is.

Flipp says that "once the sands of the Kalahari get in your sandals, there's no shaking them out." And he's right. I can still feel the grains when I walk.