Gods of Noonday

For my book club, I recently read Gods of Noonday: A White Girl's African Life, by Elaine Orr. We had a good discussion about it, and I highly recommend the book to anybody who is interested in the effects our childhood has on us, especially a childhood as an "alien." Orr grew up as a missionary kid in Nigeria, but as an adult she left that part of her behind. When she became seriously ill, she began to reconnect with her past.

Parts of this book were almost too painful for me to read, since Orr's mission compound experiences in some ways are so similar to my own. I identified with her deep desire to be African, mixed with her awareness that she wasn't and never would be. And yet she finds herself meeting Nigerians in North Carolina and having them claim her as one of them. I'm happy for Orr! This is something that doesn't happen to me too often. Probably mostly because I've just about quit identifying myself by the country where I grew up when I meet others from there. Sometimes I am welcomed with open arms when I do, but most of the time I just get suspicion. No, you aren't from there. How could you be? You're white!

Part of my problem is a linguistic one; though I grew up in an African country, I don't speak any African languages except the colonial ones, English and French. (Well, and a few words of the most rudimentary Kiswahili imaginable.) All education was in English, and my parents were always involved in education. Everyone always spoke English to me. It's hard to be identified with a country whose language(s) you don't speak. And now I see the same thing happening to my own children, growing up monolingual in a trilingual society. Orr doesn't go into how much of the local language she spoke as a child. She says several times that much of what she knows about Nigeria she learned while doing research for her book.

I underlined many parts of Orr's book.

"I want the Nigerian sisters and brothers I was not allowed to have."

She quotes a description of one of the towns where she grew up from a guidebook; the town is "horrible in every way." Orr admits that the details of the description are accurate but responds: "None of this was horrible. Or if it was, I beg to be required to endure such horror again."

Talking of the people who came and went during her childhood, Orr remarks, "Few explanations were given except, in a general, unspoken way, God's will. It was not until I came to live in the U.S. many years later that I realized it isn't necessarily normal to lose people as easily as the pebbles one puts in one's pocket and forgets to retrieve before the wash."

Describing missionary housing, Orr uses a wonderful image: "No house was ever actually owned by a missionary. We moved in and out of these great shells like hermit crabs." Later she describes her parents' decorating, which involved, in part, cutting out pictures from National Geographic to adorn the walls. She says, "My parents had the capacity to take something you might think of as temporary and recycled and make it into something elegant and privileged."

Regarding a mouse being killed by her father, she writes, "I simply didn't think we could afford any more casualties."

Perhaps my favorite part is where Orr describes returning to the United States and her impressions of her "home." Everything looks new to her, and clean, and without a past; "certainly," she says, "the furnishings had never been packed into drums and crates to bounce around in the back of a lorry."

And there are many more sections in my copy that I marked up; it's just begging to be talked about, and I wish all of my readers had been there at the book club.

We spent a lot of time discussing the part of the book where Orr writes of being at boarding school during the Biafran War. She appears to criticize her parents and other adults for keeping the children too isolated from what was going on around them. As parents here in Tecwil, we face a similar dilemma. How much do we shield our children from the situation and how much do we expose them to it? We don't want them to be frightened. Many of my students at school appear to me to know too much about what's going on, and to be perpetually on edge, waiting for the phone call to tell them that something is wrong with their family, that someone's been kidnapped or robbed.

Read the book; it's beautiful. And let me know what you think.