When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago,
visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a
nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger." Her
father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo:
"Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her
strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and
veteran of the Rhodesian war. With the same fiercely beautiful
prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight,
Fuller here recounts her friendship with K.K is, seemingly, a man
of contradictions: tattooed, battle scarred, and weathered by farm
work, he is a lion of a man, feral and bulletproof. Yet he is also
a born-again Christian, given to weeping when he recollects his
failed romantic life, and more than anything else welling up inside
with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal
one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, unimaginable
tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians-and K, like all
the veterans of the war, has blood on his hands. Driven by K's
memories, Fuller and K decide to enter the heart of darkness in the
most literal way-by traveling from Zambia through Zimbabwe
(formerly Rhodesia) and Mozambique to visit the scenes of the war
and to meet other veterans. It is a strange journey into the past,
one marked at once by somber reflections and odd humor and
featuring characters such as Mapenga, a fellow veteran who lives
with his pet lion on a little island in the middle of a lake and is
known to cope with his personal demons by refusing to speak for
days on end. What results from Fuller's journey is a remarkably
unbiased and unsentimental glimpse of men who have killed,
mutilated, tortured, and scrambled to survive during wartime and
who now must attempt to live with their past and live past their
sins. In these men, too, we get a glimpse of life in Africa, a land
that besets its creatures with pests, plagues, and natural
disasters, making the people there at once more hardened and more
vulnerable than elsewhere. Scribbling the Cat is an engrossing and
haunting look at war, Africa, and the lines of sanity.
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