This book review comes from our friend and occasional bookseller, Billie Green.
In her brilliant new memoir, called Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Alexandra Fuller returns to her African roots for a closer look at her parents’ own experience as white settlers on the Dark Continent. In so doing, Fuller wisely anchors much of her narrative on the reminiscences of her memorable, larger than life mother.
As Fuller explains it:
Our Mum—or Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself—has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them ( the way she likes large, expensive hats and like to appear in them) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe.
Alexandra's mum, Nicola, with Stephen Foster: www.alexadrafuller.org
From this rather lighthearted opening, one might anticipate an equally light-hearted read —sort of an Auntie Mame of Africa. And though Fuller does portray her flamboyant mother as almost zany at times, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is much more than that. In her non-linear, very fluid style, Fuller skillfully weaves moments of laugh-out-loud humor with incidents of heartbreaking sadness as she offers a vivid account of her parents’ dramatic and often tragic lives as British colonialists in East Africa.
Along with this very personal story, she seamlessly incorporates some fascinating history of a rapidly changing era of turmoil and upheaval, when Africa was beginning to shed the yoke of white colonialism for good. Her evocative glimpses of the African landscape and vistas and of the animals and people of a land she clearly still loves only add to the depth of the work itself.
Alexandra's Mum, Nicola, Le Creuset Pots: www.alexandrafuller.org
Born on the Isle of Skye, her mother, Nicola, moves with her parents to Kenya as a child. Meanwhile Fuller’s father, Tim, born in England to a British naval officer, rejects his father’s career path and comes to Kenya as an adult.
Nicola and Tim meet and soon are married and so begins their long love affair with Africa—an affair that proves to be one of continuous adventure and enormous challenge. They spend several happy years in Kenya (where their first child, Vanessa, is born), but after it is declared independent they move to Rhodesia where colonialism still reigns.
After several financial set-backs (including losing his job managing a farm) and the devastating loss of their second child (a son), they return briefly to England (where Alexandra is born). But as Fuller wryly puts it :
However much my parents tried to ensure a colorfully chaotic life for themselves, there was an underlying sense that as long as they stayed in England, they would always have to be the source of their own drama.
Alexandra Fuller with her dad, Tim: www.alexandrafuller.org
So it’s back to Africa and Rhodesia, where this time they buy a farm of their own and where, not incidentally, there is a full scale civil war going on. Her father, Tim, is conscripted into the Rhodesian Army Reserves. Her mother carries an Uzi in the Land Rover when they drive into town.
In the meantime, they face drought, constant danger and uncertainty, and most heartbreaking of all, the loss of two more of their five children—little two-year-old Olivia accidentally drowns and later their new baby boy dies. It is then that Nicola descends finally into depression and madness.
Somehow with amazing courage and resilience she manages to recover. And as the book ends, she and Tim are happily and peacefully ensconced on a farm in Zambia.
In Fuller’s first memoir about her family, written several years ago (Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight), she chronicles her growing up years in war torn Rhodesia through the eyes of the child she was then. Though generously laced with her often irreverent humor, it is a ruthlessly candid, even a disturbing book.
It is also one in which her mother comes off as a rather dark figure. Fuller approaches this latest effort from an adult’s vantage point, and thus expresses much more compassion and understanding for her parents’ situation and actions. She clearly recognizes the sheer determination and perseverance it took for them just to survive.
But while Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is ostensibly about the lives of both of her parents, it is, at its heart, her mother’s story. In fact, it becomes something of a tribute to her mother—a woman who could be quite outrageous, volatile, and sometimes even frighteningly unstable, but who also ultimately refused to be defeated by tragedy or circumstances and whose courage and resilience enabled her in the end to be reconciled to her past and to forgive herself at last.
The Tree of Forgetfulness: www.alexandrafuller.org
Written by Billie Green
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller, The Penguin Press: August, 2011.
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