Book Talk

Book Talk provides authors’ perspectives on libraries, books, technology, and information. If you have any suggestions of authors you would like to see featured in Book Talk, or if you are interested in volunteering to be an author-interviewer, contact Kathleen Hughes, Editor of Public Libraries, at the Public Library Association, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611; khughes@ala.org.

Without Soil, I Am Not: A Conversation With Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Fuller moved to Rhodesia with her family when she was two, where they lived until civil war broke out in 1981. From there they moved to Malawi and later Zambia. Her first book, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, detailed her childhood in Africa and was met with considerable acclaim, including being listed as one of the New York Times' Notable Books of 2002. With Scribbling the Cat, she recounted her trip with a former soldier through the landscape of the Rhodesian War. The Legend of Colton H. Bryant examines, through the biography of a young oil worker, America's dependence on the oil industry and the effects it has had on the country's economy, culture, and geography. Fuller currently lives in Wyoming with her husband and their two children.

Public Libraries: The geographical landscape plays a huge role in all three of your books. Can you talk about how your writing is influenced (if it is at all) by the natural environment?
 
Alexandra Fuller: Without soil, I am not.  
 
I learned that lesson so early and so clearly that I can't remember not knowing it.  Given how I was raised, and by whom, it’s hard to see how it could be otherwise.  As a child of Africa, raised by parents whose first love was land, the earth beneath our feet is not just an influence in our lives, but life itself.   It is understood in Zimbabwe (where I was raised) that  to give your blood and your breath for land is normal.  After all, take away our soil and where do we bury our dead?  How do we raise our children and to what end?  What do we eat?  Where do we find solace? 
 
The irony is that we can so easily talk ourselves out of our principles and into killing our earth and poisoning our water and air for profit.  Everyone can look out of their back yard and find a way in which their geography is being inalterably damaged for financial gain: a strip mall in Idaho; uranium mines in Namibia; over-fishing in the Atlantic Ocean; natural-gas drilling in Wyoming; monoculture in the mid-West. But we tend to look the other way - or overlook the destruction - if there is enough money involved.
 
Over the four years that I was researching the material that went into The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, I saw the carcasses of hundreds of animals that had been hit by oil-field traffic on an area that has been federally designated as critical big-game winter range. On January 15, 2007 twenty-one pronghorn antelope were killed in a single collision with an oil-field truck on the Jonah gas field in Sublette County, Wyoming.  Meantime, mule deer populations in the same area have crashed to less than half their 2001 size.  And in Pavillion, Wyoming water from wells near natural gas wells has become undrinkable.  And, between 2000-2006, at least 89 people died on the job in the Interior West's oil and gas industry - among them a young husband and father, Colton H. Bryant. 
 
I know without any doubt that an assault on our environment (for profit, recreation, convenience) is both murder and suicide (in 2002, biologist E.O. Wilson estimates that if current rates of human destruction of the biosphere continue, one-half of all species of life on earth will be extinct in 100 years).  As resources are becoming more scarce, conflict and war have become more common, not only over oil, but over water and arable land. It is as Alan Paton wrote in 1948 in Cry the Beloved Country, "Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator.  Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men.  Destroy it and man is destroyed."  
 
PL: All of your books have an immersive quality, where the reader is plunged into a place where they probably have never been before. How did you arrive at this method of telling your stories and what are the benefits it affords you as a writer? 

AF: I grew up among some of the most celebrated oral story-tellers in the world (the MaShona).  The competitive and creative ways in which the MaShona recount a story is powerful to witness: song, drama, and community are part of the process.  I wanted to bring some of that visceral, vibrant use of language to my books not only because it was something I knew as a child, but also because I wanted to recapture the cadences and rhythms of Africa.  When I was writing The Legend of Colton H. Bryant it was as if I had to learn a new language, beginning with the language of the land (the hundreds of discrete ways sun, wind, snow, chill, rain, drought can stir up scents); the language of the people who love and live on that land and the language of bureaucratic corruption that put both land and people at risk.
 
PL: In the Reader’s Guide to Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, you talk about how you initially tried to write the story of your childhood as a novel. How did you come to the realization that you had to write a memoir?  
 
I realized that my truth was more powerful than anything I could make up.  There had been so many lies growing up, so much propaganda, so much revisionism after the war (each side trying to justify their atrocities and highlight their heroism) that I felt the best way to address those inconsistencies was with a non-fiction account. 
 
A decade after I wrote Dogs, my attention was caught by a line in the film,  The Young Victoria: Albert writes to the inexperienced Queen (who has been experiencing a tough ascension to the throne), "Open your mind, examine your choices and your honesty will get you through the storm.”  It seems to me that as we all become numb to the myriad of lies in our day-to-day discourse (politics, advertising, spin), a rigorous, searing, compassionate attention to a deep, soul-felt honesty is more important than ever.   The responsibility to be clear about the grey areas in which honesty resides; the patience to grapple with the messy, inconsistencies that arise with honesty - that is where I find the bell-note of authenticity.
 
PL: You describe yourself in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs as a voracious reader. How were you introduced to reading and what role has it played in your life?

AF: My mother is a wonderful storyteller and has always had an extensive library, and she or my father read to us almost every night and afternoon for most of my childhood.  The enormous treat when we went to town was that my sister and I were allowed to select a couple of books from the used bookstore on Meikles Avenue for ourselves.  To this day, the smell of an old book puts me into a kind of dreamy habitat, a place of promise and poetry, a world of my own.  
 
In this way, as I grew up, and began to try to make sense of the fall-out of the violence of our civil war, I turned naturally to literature: Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Ngugi wa Thiongo, JM Coetzee, Breyten Breytenbach, Dambudzo Marecehra, Chenjerai Hove, Doris Lessing.  This was a critical part of my development - through literature I learned that it is possible to get under the skin of a forbidden worlds (under the Rhodesian government we had been prohibitively protected from the writings of anyone who opposed the Ian Smith's regime).  My social consciousness and sense of justice were, I think, forged by these authors in those very tender years of my mid-to-late adolescence.
 
PL: How did you get introduced to Colton’s story and how did you realize that it was going to be the subject of a book?
 
AF: I had written an article for the New Yorker Magazine ("Boomtown Blues," February 5, 2007)  which was an exploration of the social and environmental affects of natural gas drilling in Sublette County, Wyoming.  During the three years in which I researched that story, I noticed periodic sidebars in the local paper telling of yet another death on the rigs but I did not realize then that Wyoming had the unhappy distinction of killing workers at four times the national average, thanks in large part to the death of workers on the oil patch.
 
After I had submitted the article, I knew I had more to say, but I wasn’t sure what, or why or how to say it. Then I found a searing article in the "High County News" - Disposable Workers of the Oil and Gas Fields by Ray Ring (April 2, 2007).  Ring had managed - through dogged persistence and hundreds of Freedom of Information Requests - to get many of the so-called Fatality Narratives issued by Occupational Health and Safety (OSHA) when an roughneck or roustabout is killed on the job.  Those Fatality Narratives shocked me: the blatant neglect on the rigs; the appalling low fines (you get fined much more for killing a moose out of season in Wyoming than you do for killing a roughneck).  It was the injustice that spoke to me most powerfully - the blatant, irrefutable injustice.  Once that piece of had settled into my mind - the piece about the injustice - it was impossible, irresponsible even, for me not to write about it. 
 
Under Wyoming law, it is close to impossible for the family of a roughneck killed or maimed on the rigs to get justice. Colton's family received nothing but Wyoming's paltry worker's compensation for his loss.  For their part in Colton Bryant's accident, Wyoming's OSHA fined Patterson-UTI, the drilling company for whom Colton was working, $7,031.  Less than three months after Colton's death, Patterson announced that their revenues for the quarter were up 70 percent to $598 million.  Ultra Petroleum, the company who had leased the well, were not found culpable of any infractions leading to Colton's death (in just over 18 months, four roughnecks died while working on Ultra Petroleum sites in the same vicinity).  In 2006, the year Colton died, Ultra revenues at Ultra hit a record $592.7 million.  It was impossible to ignore the blatant injustice of those figures:I picked up the phone and called his family.  They agreed to speak to me and the story went from their lips, through my pen, to the page.
 
 
PL: Reading Colton’s story is such a powerful way to be introduced to the inner workings and day-to-day life of the oil industry. How did telling his story affect your view of the oil industry?

As you would expect, I grew disgusted with the lies, the equivocation, the ways in which the oil companies fight exceedingly hard not to have to be accountable for the lives lost on the rigs, or the environmental damage they cause.  Anyone can see for themselves the shameful shuffling of blame that occurred after the April 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. 
 
All of us need to wake up to the ways in which our government and courts aggressively support and protect the oil and gas companies from liability, yet offer little recourse for those who oppose the power of big oil or those whose lives and livelihoods are stolen by the carelessness and negligence of oil companies.
 
PL: With The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, were there different challenges or obligations in writing about somebody else’s life? Were similarities in telling K’s story in Scribbling the Cat with telling Colton’s story?
 
AF: Both Colton and K were victims of a system of violence. K was the product of an illegal war in southern Africa (a war for land, water, power) and Colton's generation of drillers were responding to the urgency of the illegal war in Iraq (a war, let's face it, for oil) and a war on the lands of the west.

PL: Has there been any response to your book from the oil industry or Ultra Petroleum?

AF: Not officially, no.
 
PL: Since most of our readers are public librarians in the United States, can you talk about your experiences with libraries, both in Africa and the U.S.?

AF: When I was growing up in Rhodesia, books were primarily available only to white children although writers like Doris Lessing and Alan Paton were banned.  For black Rhodesian readers, literature was available through the Rhodesian Literature Bureau, but it ensured that any literature in the local languages was politically bland. 
 
Since independence in Zimbabwe, access to books has steadily declined even as censorship has become increasingly draconian.
 
When I first moved to Jackson, Wyoming, the library was in a little wood cabin in the heart of town. It was a haven for me, a young mother, trying to find her feet in a new country.  
 
PL: What are you working on next?
Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness comes out in August.  It's the prequel/sequel to Don't Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: a multi-layered narrative set around the perfectly lit, Happy Valley-era Africa of my mother's childhood; the emotionally frozen landscape of my father's English childhood; and the violent, chaotically beautiful Africa of my own childhood.