Rules of the Wild

I just finished a novel called Rules of the Wild by Francesca Marciano. It is set in Nairobi. I would describe it is heartbreaking, real, and brave. It begins with the following quote:

“I thought, if you’re really going to live in Africa, you have to be able to look at it and say, this is the way of love, down this road: look at it hard; this is where it’s going to lead you. I think you will know what I mean if I tell you love is worth nothing until it’s tested by its own defeat. I felt I was being asked to love without being afraid of the consequences. I realized that love, even if it ends in defeat, gives you a kind of honor; but without love, you have no honor at all.”

- Rian Malan

The author says, about the first time she landed in Kenya, “I felt so happy, as if I had been given a new life.” I love the way the author describes her characters…

About one…”she has a blind determination which tells her to hold on….and never let go…The less you flounder, the less likely you are to drown. Just hold on.” But about herself, she says, “I didn’t learn that lesson. I drowned a long time ago, my lungs full of water.” Maybe because I am teaching English now, the graphic detail of her descriptions really appeal to me.

And the characters admission that she had failed to learn this particular lesson caused me to reflect: what are our own fatal flaws? It is often our strengths which are also our weaknesses, the double-edged swords… One of the lines in the book reminded me of a favorite line in The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Marciano says, “Only at passport control did I realize how long I had been broken. How much I wanted out, how much I needed to be healed.”

Franzen said, "She still had a still-working old self, a Version 3.2 or a Version 4.0...not until she was at the pier and a quite different Denise, a Version 5.0...did the extent of the correction she was undergoing reveal itself." - The Corrections

Marciano’s book reminded me a bit of Kuki Gallman’s book, especially in the way she falls in love with Kenya. She says, “Here you are constantly reminded of what it means to be free and alive…it becomes very difficult to settle for anything less than this.

Life will demand everything from us. This is exactly what sets us free. It is the passion and force that allow us to continue alive; there is no turning back through the doors of perception.

At the end of the book, a friend tells her that “you have been here all along for a different reason. It has nothing to do with people in your life, but with your ability to feel.”

This is also how I feel about my time here – I often have the feeling that there are lessons that I am learning that I can’t quite put my finger on, that they lurk just beneath the surface, even at the sub-conscious level. But the person I am today, 1 year after I left the U.S., feels much different than the one that left Seattle last year. None of us know what the future holds, but I am excited, and Marciano’s book helped me to reflect on the joys and sorrows of living overseas, living in Africa, witnessing other people’s pain and triumph, of slowly unraveling yourself, and finding your core.