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Book review: Scribbling the Cat – an uncomfortable, important read

Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller is an uncomfortable read. Telling the most haunting of tales, the book tries to find humanity in a man who might not have any.

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This book is the most jarring, painful book ever to come out of Africa.

The constant referral of black people as “googs” drags a reader back to the darkest part of Africa’s heritage.

However, if a reader is able to see past these constant slurs and is able to cope with the horror of the injuries that these soldiers inflicted on innocents during the Rhodesian war, you will see the author is talented. Exceptionally talented.

The past that Fuller writes is painful. Not only for her characters, but for the reader too. Knowing how these horrific acts were perpetrated upon thousands of Africans in the name of war makes for uncomfortable reading. The age old adage of “I was doing as I was ordered to do” is a harsh flashback to the crimes of the Nazi officers.

The author tells the story of a family friend Kay. Kay is the epitome of what we as young South Africans were expected to be. A mans’ man. A fit healthy man. A man respected by his employees. A man who would willingly jump into a river to save a woman from being eaten by a crocodile. A man of men.

But Kay is haunted by the demons of the horrors he endured and inflicted during his various wars in Southern Africa. These acts of horror he forced upon hundreds of people sneak up on him day after day, and this book tells the story of Kay trying to come to terms with his demons, as well as the demons he brought unto others.

“I had supposed that if I walked a mile in Kay’s shoes, I would understand what he had been through. I thought if I walked where he had walked, if I drank from the same septic sludge of water, if I ate nothing all day and smoked a pack of bitter cigarettes then I’d understand the man better. And understand the war better. And there would be words that I could write to show that I now understood why that particular African war had created a man like Kay. But I already knew that the war hadn’t created Kay. Kay was what happened when you grew a child from the African soil, taught him an attitude of superiority, persecution and paranoia and then gave him a gun, and sent him to war in a world of as his own to defend. And when the ceasefire was called and suddenly Kay was remainded, there was no way to undo him. There was no way to undo the vow of every soldier who had knelt on this soil and let his tears mix with the spilled blood of his comrade and who had promised that he would never forget to hate the man and every man that looked like him who took the life of his brother. You can’t rewind war. It’s spools on and on and on. Looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain. And no one can even remember or imagine why the war was organized in the first place.”

Fuller’s words best describe the haunting place so many men who fought that war still somehow love. Distorted in whatever way that might be. Distorted it remains.

A very difficult read. An uncomfortable story. A real tale of so many men that suffered in silence then and most likely suffer in silence even still. A novel that is potentially the most important account of a soldiers story and how they live with themselves afterwards.

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