The Camel Bookmobile
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Synopsis:
Fiona Sweeney wants to do something that matters, and she chooses to make her mark in the arid bush of northeastern Kenya. By heping to start a traveling library, she hopes to bring the words of Homer, Hemingway and Dr. Seus to farflung tiny communities where people live daily with drought, hunger and disease. Her intentions are honorable, and her rules are firm: due to the limited number of donated books, if any one of them is not returned, the bookmobile will not return.
But, encumbered by her Western values, Fi does not understand the people she seeks to help. And in the impoverished small community of Mididima, she finds herself caught in the middle of a volatile local struggle when the bookmobile's presence sparks a dangerous feud between the proponents of mondernization and those who fear the loss of traditional ways.
Book Excerpt:
February 1989 – Mididima, North Eastern Province, Kenya
Scar Boy
The child, wide-legged on the ground, licked dust off his fist and tried to pretend he was tasting camel milk. Nearby, his father spoke to a thorny acacia while his older brother hurled rocks at a termite mound. Neither paid him any attention, but this didn’t change the fact that for the child, the three of them existed as a single entity. It was as if he drank dust, beseeched a tree and threw stones all at once. He took this oneness for granted. Separate was a concept he was too young to recognize. Nor did he know of change, or fear, or the punishment of drought. All of life still felt predictable, and forever, and safe.
Now, for instance, this child-father-brother unit was enveloped in the reliable collapse of day, when the breeze stiffened, color drained from the sky and shadows tinted three sets of cheeks simultaneously. The child welcomed this phase. The texture of the graying light transformed faces. It made people, he would later think, resemble charcoal portraits.
Something disturbed this particular dusk, though, tugging his attention away from the intimate comfort of his tongue on his skin and the dust’s piquant flavor. Out of the gloom of nearby bushes rose a rigid, narrow object, standing frozen but quivering. This was odd. Everything in his experience either walked or dashed or flew or was blown by the wind or planted in the ground – in other words, it plainly moved or, less frequently, it didn’t. What could he make of this harsh immobile shuddering, this tense and stubborn suggestion of flexibility? He crawled closer, then sat back to look again.
From this perspective, he spotted another object, small and round to the other’s long and narrow. It was the color of a flame.
In fact, there were two.
Aha, he thought with satisfaction, the puzzle starting to shift into place. Eyes. Eyes, of course, moved and stayed still at once and could flicker like fire-light. So the object must be human. Or maybe animal. Or maybe ancestral ghost.
Whatever it was, he understood from somewhere, an inherited memory or intuition, that he needed all of himself to meet it. So he called to his other parts, his father-brother. “Here I am,” he said, a gentle reminder. Even as he spoke, he didn’t look away from the eyes and the rigid tail; because of that, he saw the object begin to grow larger. And then it lunged. It joined him, as if it too wanted to be part of the son-father-brother entity.
He was unaware of pain. Instead, the moment seemed unreal and confusing, like drifting off to sleep in the midst of one of his father’s sung tales and losing track of the story. What had already happened? What was happening still? He would have to ask his father in the morning.
Only one part remained distinct: the sound that would echo in his mind until death. The wet, high-pitched ripping of his three-year-old flesh as the spotted hyena, never a kind beast and now mad with hunger, dove onto his leg, chomped at his waist and then reached his face and gnawed, grunting with pleasure.
Later he would hear how his father turned, killed the beast with a miraculously aimed knife, scooped his son into his arms and began running, the child’s blood weeping down the father’s arms. He would learn that all this took less than five meditative breaths – but he would never quite believe it. In his memory, the crunching of bone and tearing of flesh stretched over a decade of sundowns and sunups, disrupting all patterns, making everything separate and fearful and dusty and fleeting forever.
Topics/Categories:
Africa, intercultural relationships, Kenya, Libraries, literacy
Genre:
Contemporary Fiction, Fiction, General Novel, Travel Literature, Women's Literature
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Original Publish Date:
April 3, 2007
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