Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

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In "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Her choice to use a child's POV is incredibly clever since it allows her to touch on issues like racism, post-colonialism, and dysfunctional family dynamics without needing to present apologies, excuses, or really any editorializing and that let's her experience shine through. I am not normally a fan or autobiographical writing, but this book is exceptional and I have been recommending it to everyone I know.

When they arrived back at Dublin Airport, my aunt mistook her aunt for their new houseboy, and wordlessly handed over her suitcase.

Not because of sentiment, but because the rings are the family's single valuable possession, and must be pawned as security prior to planting the tobacco crop each year. Fuller is also estranged, perhaps, by her mother’s “icy” look, the way her eyes, in her madness, shine “like marbles, cold and hard and glittering”. Then there is a life-changing tragedy, for which Bobo feels responsible: "My life is sliced in half". I envy her when I should probably not -- her life has clearly not been easy, but it has been rich with experiences. When they drive into town they go past Africans “whose hatred reflects like sun in a mirror into our faces, impossible to ignore”.

There is beautifully written passage describing driving through a European settlement and then Tribal Trust Lands: "there are flowering shrubs and trees. Her parents’ wildness is now terrifying to their children and the war seems, at times, just an extension of that fear: “then the outside world starts to join in and has a nervous breakdown all its own, so that it starts to get hard for me to know where Mum’s madness ends and the world’s madness begins”. As a kid, you have no idea your parents are racist, so it can be uncomfortable to read of this families ideas of blacks, but also deeply informing.Her descriptions of sounds, smells, and miscellaneous details were truer than true and made me ache with memory. While giving a sense of the continent’s political shifts, she mostly focuses on her own family: the four-person circus that was Bobo (that’s her), Van (her older sister Vanessa), Dad, and Mum (an occasionally hospitalized manic-depressive alcoholic who lost three children) – not to mention an ever-changing menagerie of horses, dogs and other pets. I thought this book was going to be about Africa and how she came to see that the White people in Zimbabwe were in fact the 'bad guys' in the war but instead it was really about her family surviving in Africa. I know that a lot of white Africans are terrible racists and have servants and are so prejudiced but if she showed us that some white africans (the narrator, perhaps) redeems themselves through seeing black people as human then it would have been a better, more poignant book.