Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller
"It should not be physically posible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. the shock is too much, the contrast too raw. we should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips, maybe touring through South America and Mexico before trying to stomach the land of the Free and the Brave. “
“It wasn't that i didn't want to join in the innocent, deluded self-congratulation that goes with living in such a fat, sweet country. I did. but I couldn't. And confining myself to the house didn't help. Now I felt like a tresspasser in my own home with all its factory-load of gadgets and machines and the ease of the push-button life I was living.”
“Then gradually the winter seeped into spring and I resumed the habits of entitlement that most of us don't even know we have. And K's imaginary voice—which had been an almost continuous presence through the cold weather--melted into an only occasional intrusion. I drank coffee at the cafe on the creek without imagining K asking me how I could pay three times the average Zambian's daily salary for the priviledge. "
"I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We are incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible--from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin--to know the difference between right, wrong, good and evil? "God go with you!" the mushroom man had said, and I was grateful to him."
"I felt somehow that if I knew this one secret about K--this one, great, untold story--then everything else about him would become clear and I could label him and write him into coherence. and then I would know what I was doing here and how I had arrived here and I'd know more about who I was."
“I knew that the war hadn't created K. K 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 he thought of as his own to defend. and when the cease-fire was called and suddenly K was remaindered, there was no way to undo him. And 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 who looked like him--who took the life of his brother. You can't rewind war. It 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 on can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place."
"Why do i destroy?" he asked.
I said "Why do I push people to destruction?"
"Because you're a woman" he said.
I said "Because its what you do. It's what you've always done. you have a genius for it."
"Those of us who grow in war are like clay pots fired in an oven that is overhot. Confusingly shaped like the rest of humanity, we nevertheless contain fatal cracks that we spend the rest of our lives itching to fill. All of us with war-scars will endeavor to find some kind of relief from the constant sting of our incompleteness--drugs, love, alcohol, God, death, truth. K and I, each of us cracked in our own way by our participation on the wrong side of the same war, gravitated to each other, sure that the other held a secret balm--the magic glaze--that might make us whole. I thought he held shards of truth. He thought I held love. Those of us who grow in war know no boundaries. After all, that most sacred and basic boundary of all (thou shalt not kill) is not only ignored in war, but outright flaunted and scoffed at. Kill! Slot! Scribble! We will seep into unseen cracks to find solace. And we will do so without thinking twice, since we are without skins, without membranes, without the usual containments of civilization. We know that life is cheap and that the secret to an inner peace is so dear and so elusive as to be almost unattainable."