Resilience and Trauma in Alexandra Fuller's Memoirs

"We were like blundering, disconnected, severed children, patching it together the best we could."

—Alexandra Fuller, Travel Light, Move Fast

Alexandra Fuller, born in 1969 in the UK and currently living in the US, has to date published five memoirs detailing her personal life. The experience of growing up in Rhodesia, Malawi, and Zambia is a major theme in her writing, which is largely dedicated to describing and reflecting on her childhood and settler farmer parents. The family lived through the civil war in Rhodesia that began after the Unilateral Declaration for Independence (UDI) in 1965 and saw the end of white rule in 1980 when Rhodesia became majority-ruled Zimbabwe. Fuller's parents struggled to make ends meet, moving from farm to farm, and lost three children in infancy; this all occurred against the backdrop of the war, which entered its most brutal phase in the 1970s. This highly complex background raises questions not only about collective responsibility for past atrocities, for white supremacy and minority rule in Rhodesia, but also about the role and place of personal experiences of loss and suffering in such a context.

This article thus examines Fuller's memoirs, with specific focus on the latest, Travel Light, Move Fast, from a perspective of trauma and resilience. The memoir largely focuses on the deaths of the author's father and son. The article asks to what extent traumatic experiences emerge from particular historic and sociopolitical circumstances, and what role resilience plays in relation to experiences of trauma and loss. While her memoirs have previously been examined from perspectives of settler discourse,¹ white childhood,² or postcolonial nostalgia,³ little attention has been paid to the intricate position Fuller occupies as a memoirist/biographer, documenting not only her own life but those of her parents too, and to the personal dimension of suffering and loss portrayed in her writing. The article therefore argues that Fuller's writing provides unique material for the examination of the in-between spaces of trauma. It becomes not only a question of trauma's inaccessibility,⁴ its disruption of time,⁵ or an unresolved past,⁶ but also a matter of personal and collective family trauma. Fuller's writing tries to address and do justice to both. The complex position of the white settler farmer is also a central aspect of the discussion.

The following memoirs will be part of the analysis in addition to Travel Light: Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (henceforth Dogs),⁷ Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness (henceforth Cocktail Hour),⁸ and Leaving Before the Rains Come (henceforth Leaving).⁹ Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier¹⁰ was published in 2004 and recounts travels Fuller made together with an ex-soldier who participated in the civil war on the Rhodesian side after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. It is not a family memoir to the same degree as the others and will not feature in the analysis, even though the text does to a significant degree deal with the traumas of war and the horrors inflicted on self and other.

Fuller's personal memoirs thus offer detailed reflection on suffering and loss, both from her own perspective as well as those of her parents, but they do not focus explicitly on how to find ways to reach healing or recovery. Instead, and more so than the other memoirs, Travel Light centers on resilience, primarily that of her father but also the resilience, or lack thereof, of the author herself. Seeing resilience as an inherent part of trauma¹¹ informs the analysis, which also aims to investigate the coping strategies of Fuller's parents, as they too are profoundly connected to the social and historical context of Rhodesia. The hypothesis for the analysis is that resilience, despite its generally positive connotations, can be as disruptive and incomprehensible as trauma itself.

Trauma Theory Revisited

This article examines two aspects of suffering or trauma in Alexandra Fuller's writing: the loss of loved ones (the death of Fuller's son, her father, and...