In the mid 1980s, when my family and I lived in Nairobi, I read Karen Blixen’s (a.k.a. Isak Denisen’s) novel, Out of Africa, for the first time. I even visited the writer’s home, in the aptly named town of Karen - a beautiful place, with a wrap-around porch from which the high savanna stretched, the (cape) buffalo roamed, and the dik-diks and the wildebeests played.
I loved the first line of her novel - “I had a farm in Africa.” - thinking it contained a simple brilliance; namely, that having read that line, no reader, not one in a million, would say, “Well, I’ve had enough of that,” or “That sure stinks!” and put the book down.
I also thought it would be funny (and audacious) to write a book of my own that started with the line, “I had a farm in Africa, too.”
At the time I had only published one novel - Solders in Hiding, set in Japan during and after World War II - and I was at work on one set in Nigeria (where we lived before Kenya), so I tucked the imitative line into one of the shallower pockets of my mind, chuckling at it each time I pulled it out. On a couple of occasions, when I quoted the line to writer friends, they also chuckled, saying something like “Whoa!” which, for me at least, was high praise! Other writers said “Whoa!” about a line I’d stolen? Manna from heaven!
It wasn’t until a half decade later that I finally wrote the line down on what these days passes for a blank sheet of paper, and began to see, not what I demanded of the line - an easy laugh - but what the line - if I was really going to steal all but the final syllable from the great Dane - demanded of me.
First, obviously, it demanded that my story be told in the first person and that it be set in Africa. And second, also obviously, that it had to be agrarian.
But thirdly - and here is the crux of the matter - in a softer voice but with growing insistence - it demanded that my “I” narrator be a woman.
Gadzooks! Me? A woman?
Of course, by then I had created female characters in other books, giving them words to say and complex personalities, but this time I had to put a woman in the driver’s seat… this time I had to render her world views, her subtlest sexuality, her entire internal landscape, with solid believability.
Had it been the age of the baleful mantra “Stay in your lane,” I might have backed out of writing the book as fast as a settler leaves a saloon when a gunslinger looks his way.
But it wasn’t that age so I plowed ahead. I had already strayed into a different sort of oncoming traffic by pretending to be a Japanese man in Solders; an amalgam of six or seven of my real-life friends in Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, my Peace Corps novel; and into a couple of over-the-top Nigerians in Indigo… so why not a female coffee grower, tending a failing farm not far out of Nairobi? The proof would be in the pudding, after all, so if I was willing to suffer the slings and arrows of critics if my woman turned out to be clumsily drawn or unconvincing… wouldn’t that be fair enough?
Well, the nouveau answer to that question might well be, “No, it isn’t fair enough! As a nearly geriatric and privileged white male, if you are going to write at all you better stick to white male-ism,” and I admit that, were I new to the game, I might be cowed by such adamancy, fearful of the outrage that barging in on someone else’s territory could generate.
But despite the mistakes I’d made - especially in Indigo - and since I wasn’t new to the game, I was fine with barging in, for I had a core belief: if we don’t work toward knowing the other, even if only during the course of a novel or a story, then all is lost. Of course, the work must “…unveil our common humanity with all its uncertainties, foibles, dubious pasts, and petty egos at work, avoiding judgements that derive from a culture that presumes itself superior…” * but if it clears that high hurdle then shouldn’t it be considered a contribution, rather than a theft?
I think so. Despite understanding where “Stay in your lane” comes from, I believe that the last thing we need during these hard times is to leave each other alone.
As a Nigerian policeman said to me once, probably unaware that he was paraphrasing Ayn Rand, “We are all brothers and sisters under the skin.”
Who would be unwise enough to disagree with him?
* from Wole Soyinka’s introduction to Soldiers in Hiding, Hawthorne Press edition, 2011
woow
Yes the lane markings seem very murky. I just finished "Akin" by Emma Donoghue, an Irish lesbian living in Canada where her main character is a cranky 80 year old man (a bit too close to home for me) living in New York. As far as I know no one has said anything about her leaving her lane. On the other hand a while back I read "American Dirt" by Jeanine Cummins whose main character is a Mexican woman trying to get to the States to flee gang violence that killed her husband. She changed lanes and was pilloried for not being Latina and writing about a Latina. Her authors book tour had to be cancelled because of security concerns and her publisher made to apologize.
Is there any consensus about what lanes you must stay in and where the lane markers allow you to change?