Blog Post #5

I am still reading Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and I am still impressed by her bold style of writing. As I read on, I admire her sense of adventure, entirely appropriate for the story. She is the perfect narrator of this story and gives the book a flavor no other author could have provided. Her writing style is what gets me most about her book. The story itself is perfectly splendid, however, I think her purpose of writing her childhood story growing up as a White African is most forcefully conveyed not by her experiences, but by the way she retells her experiences through her unique writing style. A passage I thought further claimed to be Fuller’s work was her response when asked, “But what are you?”

My God, I am the wrong color. The way I am burned by the sun, scorched by flinging sand, prickled by heat. The way my skin erupts in miniature volcanoes of protest in the presence of tsetse flies, mosquitoes, ticks. The way I stand out against the khaki bush like a large marshmallow to a gook with a gun. White. African. White-African. (ch.2, pg.10)

In truth, she is right. Fuller is not the “Well-bred Scottish” she really is. Raised in a variety of African countries, she lives the African life. She grew up with lions lurking in her garden and hyenas howling just beyond her windowsill. However, her descriptive response to “what” she is, an unexpected question, is equally as unexpected, even more.