Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary mother-daughter
relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually,
debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives
unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her
daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their
weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with
Alzheimer's disease twenty years later. In 1986, Kathleen accepted
a three-year teaching assignment in Uganda, after a devastating
civil war, and Geeske promised to be her daughter's most faithful
correspondent. The two women exchanged more than two hundred
letters that reflected their lively interest in literature,
theology, and politics, and explored ideas about identity,
belonging, and home in the context of cross-cultural challenges.
Two decades later, with Geeske increasingly beset by Alzheimer's
disease, Kathleen returned to the letters, where she rediscovered
the evocative image of a tiny, bright meadow bird perched
precariously on a blade of elephant grass. That image - of
simultaneous tension, fragility, power, and resilience - sustained
her over the years that she used the letters as memory prompts in a
larger strategy to keep her intellectually gifted mother alive.
Deftly woven of excerpts from their correspondence, conversations,
journal entries, and email updates, Bird-Bent Grass is a complex
and moving exploration of memory, illness, and immigration;
friendship, conflict, resilience, and forgiveness; cross-cultural
communication, the ethics of international development, and
letter-writing as a technology of intimacy. Throughout, it reflects
on the imperative and fleeting business of being alive and loving
others while they're ours to hold.
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