Someone said I should state briefly what my memoir is about.
I began writing it at a point of crisis, a real post-migration crisis, because I had thought I was adapting somewhat until that point but then I knew that I had utterly failed. I also began writing to co-opt the past as a source of nourishment, because I was very cut off from any emotional source.
I eventually explored the relationship between myself and my father, because the truth is he had a very different character structure from mine, and he was intent on making me comply with his far right wing ideology.
The reason the title is "Minus the Morning" is to indicate that my status in Rhodesia was not by any means epistemologically privileged. I was not informed about such things as politics or Western versions of history, for instance. The framework we found ourselves in was an extremely dry, formalistic Christianity.
At school we sang,
Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God's recreation of the new day
I began writing it at a point of crisis, a real post-migration crisis, because I had thought I was adapting somewhat until that point but then I knew that I had utterly failed. I also began writing to co-opt the past as a source of nourishment, because I was very cut off from any emotional source.
I eventually explored the relationship between myself and my father, because the truth is he had a very different character structure from mine, and he was intent on making me comply with his far right wing ideology.
The reason the title is "Minus the Morning" is to indicate that my status in Rhodesia was not by any means epistemologically privileged. I was not informed about such things as politics or Western versions of history, for instance. The framework we found ourselves in was an extremely dry, formalistic Christianity.
At school we sang,
Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God's recreation of the new day
These words were not particularly clear to me even as I sung them, especially in first and second grade. (I now find this misunderstanding ironic, as I did lose my early foundations or "morning" of my life when I migrated at 15.)
As an adult in a mode of recapitulation I still found myself to be reaching back into the past for meaning in a context where very little useful information had been\supplied. Needless to say my childhood perspectives could be wrong or faulty, because I was working very much on the basis of my own conjecture and imagination.
In the end, I shamanically resolve the issue of being unable to communicate my anguish to my Western counterparts by ingesting the evil of history and making it my own problem.
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