I Dream (Read) of Africa...

My inborn wanderlust has struck again. I realized recently that for the first time in 20 years, I have been on the same continent for 12 consecutive months. This fact makes me itchy. With no relief in sight, and no trips planned (other than the honeymoon that will happen after the impossible-to-time wedding), I have resorted to the NYPL and Nancy Pearl. I have dusted off my little-used library card, a vestige of a former, no-longer-up-to-date Manhattan address, and invested 30 minutes on the NYPL website requesting Nancy Pearl's Book Lust recommendations be sent to the Harlem branch for my rapid consumption. I read a lot. I always have; this is a leftover habit of a youth spent traveling the world in my mind before I started traveling it in my body. E is still amazed at how fast I can read.

I devoured Francesca Marciano's Rules of the Wild in three days of train rides. Her Italian narrator's quirks were eerily reminiscent of my own, and her search for a home and place to belong in the wild, unknowable, ever-changing Kenya parallel my own hunt for a room of my own (so to speak). Pearl describes this book as a love story set in 90s Africa, among wealthy and self-indulgent white society. I would add, it is a bleak, if honest, portrayal of white Nairobi society. But it really is a love story, set in an insider's world, and detailed with the set of a semi-nostalgic African lifestyle, but at its heart, is a story about love and the search for belonging. As someone who belongs nowhere, I found it dizzyingly real, and as I grew further engrossed with the story, it became difficult to separate fact from fiction. As with any good story, I was sad to let Esme go.

Continuing in the same geographic if not thematic vein, my next Pearl recommendation is The Ukimwi Road by Dervla Murphy. At sixty years old, Murphy decided to bike solo through Kenya, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. Her account is brutally honest, sharing the flies and smells and sour meals - and her daily counts of Tusker beers (now familiar because of Marciano); she does not romanticize Africa, or what it is to be a white woman traveling alone there. While she is critical of the white intervention in Africa, she does not question of the fraught side effects of Western medical superiority or probe assumptions of Western feminism as the ultimate liberation (so far). The work quickly becomes about AIDs, as Murphy cycles through AIDs-ravaged villages in the 90s as the epidemic was on the rise, and before drugs were widely available that mitigated the effects (even for white patients) of what her acquaintances call "the slim disease." It is depressing that even in recent years, with the time that has elapsed since the book's publishing, a cure has not been found and the disease continues to devour. Murphy recounts the continual pleas for help of people she comes across in her travels: they assume she is rich because she is not African and traveling there, because she has a bike, because she is white. They assume she can help, they offer her their children to take with her, ask for money, request drugs. Her contribution is publishing a book to an audience who knows little of living with this disease, a trifling offering to those she meets but an important one for those who have not seen this disease at work.

I am enjoying living vicariously through the irreverent, spicy Murphy, and plotting how to make some voyages of my own very soon. My next Pearl recommendation, waiting for me at the Harlem library, is an account of the founding of Australia...I seem to have a white postcolonial guilt thing going for places that are depicted as rugged, lawless, unconquerable...