Remembering Rhodesia

Casting With a Fragile Thread. By Wendy Kann. Henry Holt and Co., €25

It's not unlikely that Wendy Kann's memoir of growing up in Rhodesia, Casting With a Fragile Thread, will undergo close comparison to Alexandra Fuller's critically acclaimed memoir of growing up in Rhodesia, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. The two authors have more in common than just colonial Zimbabwe: white, female narrators who eventually go west; cartoonishly drunk, scary and entertaining mothers; photos of tow-headed family members; tragedy, racism, war. But there is a big difference. Fuller's sharp-elbowed wit and abrasive dialogue elevated melodrama to the level of a social critique of dull white colonialists and dysfunctional English families. Without such impressive writing, family drama, even in a strange, volatile land, is often just family drama – the stuff of all memoirs.

Such moments are rare in this Kann's first book. She relates the affluence and heartache of her youth, but her descriptions are methodical rather than illuminating. Her humourlessness hints at the empty smugness of colonial life, the grim paradox of white people engaged in an adventurous and privileged enterprise and clinging desperately to ultimately small and airless lives.

Yet she remains oddly distant, even uninterested, in the deadening ugliness of oppression. After majority rule is put in place in Zimbabwe, Kann writes, "I'm not sure I had understood that the eight million Africans in Rhodesia had really ever existed." That's certainly believable, but this newfound wisdom doesn't lead anywhere.

This is a family story, and Kann throws her energy behind understanding herself and her kin. However, despite her love for her sisters, their personalities (and her own) feel as vibrant as the future of the colonial project.

She eventually travels to New York, but returns to Zambia with her child, Claudia. There, she resorts to listing the mundane niceties of everyday life. Through her own child, Kann seems to have figured out a way to connect her past and present, but she leaves the reader struggling to grasp her deeper story.

SUZY HANSEN

Suzy Hansen is an editor at the New York Observer

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