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A Book Review by Kris Christensen
Child Mind: Truth and Point of View in Chameleon
Days
by Tim Bascom
Mariner Books, 2006
ISBN: ISBN-13: 978-0-618-65869-6
A couple of years ago, while trying to write my
own memoir, I hung out in Memoir Alley, the aisles labeled "Biography" in my
local bookstore, where the famous rub dust jackets with the
not-so-famous—hundreds of individual lives clamoring for witness. Then, as
now, it seemed to me that the result of the so-called "memoir explosion" was
so much shrapnel. To appear on those shelves, you’d better be alcoholic,
transsexual, have set yourself on fire, or better yet, all of the above. If
you are famous, you can write a book without confessing any major
malfunction (hence the bookshelf ménage a trois of Laura Bush, Madeleine
Albright, and NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon). If you are famous and
traumatized—jackpot! Post-partum depression is one thing, but when Brooke
Shields suffers it, and then has the "courage" to tell the whole world,
well, that’s even better!
Determined to learn the
secrets of the craft, I immersed myself in other people’s lives. For nine
months, I read nothing but memoirs. I chose the best literary authors I
could find, and yet, at the end of that time, mind numb, my own writing off
in the ditch, I felt the emotional and spiritual equivalent of a Halloween
hangover—that slightly queasy, headachy sickness that strikes after you’ve
filched too much of your child’s candy. I decided there’s something to be
said for keeping your dirty laundry in the hamper, for realizing what your
mother said was true: you are not the center of the universe.
The problem is that memoir,
by its very definition, puts its author at the center of a universe. Most
memoirs suffer as a result. Self centered writing—by this I mean "centered
on the self"—often stumbles in predictable ways. Many memoirs suffer from an
exaggerated importance of the author’s traumas, the author’s inability to
engage the larger world, or a story constrained by the personality tics and
blind spots of its maker. One of the most common failures of the memoir
involves point-of-view. The author is both main character (the self they
were at the time of the events) and director (the self they are now,
blessed—hopefully—with increased maturity and hindsight). Balance and
movement between these two perspectives helps enlarge the author’s universe.
However, when the author blurs the lines between actor and director, she
implies that her current revelations belong to the person she was then. This
can generate uneasiness in the reader who may find such insight hard to
believe. This separation of then and now is a particular challenge when
writing about one’s childhood.
With my memoir binge behind
me, I felt a touch of trepidation when I was asked to review Tim Bascom’s
Chameleon Days. Bascom’s book falls into a distinct subgenre: the
growing-up-in-an-exotic-location memoir (first cousin to
second-generation-immigrant memoir). Here, Bascom’s book hangs with an
undeniably good crowd including Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and
Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. Chameleon Days
chronicles the author’s childhood experiences—from age three to nine—in
Ethiopia with his two brothers and their missionary parents. While falling
victim to a few of the memoir’s pitfalls, Chameleon Days offers a voice
unique in its honesty that more often than not honors the perceptions of the
child the author once was.
In plundering his childhood,
a memoirist might believe the toughest challenge is remembering. I think a
harder task is perceiving. How does an adult writer, trained in the nuances
of sophisticated metaphor, translate a child’s experience without overlaying
an adult filter? Many writers fail. Diction, image, and metaphor are a few
places where an adult sensibility can fracture the illusion of a child’s
perception. This isn’t a problem of course when the author purposely takes
the stance of an adult looking back on childhood. But too often authors
attempt to reenter their childhood minds only to keep slipping into their
thirty-, forty-, or fifty-year-old selves. This not only fractures the
illusion, it undermines the trust between reader and writer. Could the
author really have thought that at age five?
When we read, we enter
another universe. We are transported, and the mechanism of that transport is
our suspension of disbelief. For a time, we choose to believe. We agree to
accept the universe presented to us, so long as the author doesn’t violate
the expectations he creates in us. When a book purports to be nonfiction,
one of our expectations is that it will be truthful—thus the brouhaha over
James Frey’s invention in A Million Little Pieces, and the clever disclaimer
in his new book, My Friend Leonard, in which he gives himself permission to
lie. Readers generally allow some leeway, understanding that memoir is
created in spite of, and through, the filter of memory, but when the writer
adopts a child’s point of view, and then resorts to language or imagery that
feels "adult," our suspension of disbelief fails, and the spell is broken.
In the opening pages of
Chameleon Days, Bascom offers us a child’s perception through carefully
chosen details, details that would matter to a three-year old child and nest
in his memory:
After sixteen hours in an airplane, we found that
our whole world had disappeared…Gone were the tire-thrumming brick streets
of Hiawatha, Kansas, where we were given candies and back-scratches from
Grandmother. Gone were the maple trees and the old-fashioned street lamps,
lit up like glowing ice cream cones.
In this paragraph, Bascom
creates his contract with the reader. He promises us the perceptions of a
child, a little boy lifted from the familiar and dropped into the strange.
For the most part, Bascom
fulfills his part of the bargain. The book, though rich with imagery and
metaphor, resounds with a startling clarity. This is due in part to Bascom’s
diction. Instead of relying on complex syntax and highbrow language, Bascom
chooses simple language punctuated with vivid imagery:
Our driver braked for a truck being unloaded, and
children pressed their faces against the glass, shouting, "Ferengi, ferengi,
hey you, my friend, give me money."
The resulting prose is never
austere, but rather, uncluttered—conjuring a child’s mind, refreshingly
unencumbered by adult interpretations of the world. And, as this example
shows, it is incredibly economical. In twenty-five words, Bascom has
captured the strangeness of the moment, the speech of the children, and the
disturbing economic disparity between these Americans and those they have
come to serve.
Bascom’s metaphors, too, are
generally apt, and appropriately within a child’s experience. Describing his
mother’s response when he asks why he must go to boarding school when his
little brother gets to stay home, he writes: "She picked her words
carefully, gluing them together like pieces of a broken teacup." Bascom
remembers a hesitance in his mother’s answer. But could he, at five years
old, have understood that she was choosing her words carefully because of
her own discomfort? Probably not. More likely, Bascom has merged his adult
understanding of the situation with the memory. But the imagery of the
metaphor—the piecing of a broken teacup—could easily fall within a child’s
experience, and so the presence of Bascom’s adult consciousness is
unobtrusive, while leading the reader to the interpretation Bascom desires.
Contrast this with Alexandra
Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, also set in Africa, also
relying on the child’s point of view. A main failure of this undeniably
powerful and beautiful book is the lack of any discernable stance. In this
case the family’s dysfunction is laid bare—authentically related through
young Alexandra’s perceptions—but without any guidance provided to the
reader as to how interpret it. In an afterword, Fuller writes that she
wanted to write a book like Running in the Family with "humor and affection
and, above all, no judgment."1 She did successfully withhold judgment, but
at the expense of the story. Some readers may be left feeling frustrated,
just as in life we may be frustrated by people who refuse to have an
opinion. There is nothing for the reader to pull against, nothing with which
to agree or disagree. It’s as if Fuller said, "Here’s what happened to me.
You figure out what to do with it."
Most of the time Bascom goes
just far enough in guiding our interpretations of events, revealing enough
to let us draw the desired conclusion. He keeps one hand on the back of our
neck controlling what we see, but the touch is so light that we don’t feel
it. Throughout the book, Bascom hints at the spiritual and interpersonal
challenges his parents experienced in their duties and within the mission:
She asked, "So what’s the
main thing you’ve learned these two years?"
"I suppose to keep
slogging, even when I don’t feel like it … And you?"
That I’m not as good at
this as I thought. I think I was more of a missionary in America."
Mom sighed, and I lay
there thinking that I shouldn’t be listening. This wasn’t the way they
talked around me. They wouldn’t want me to think of them this way.
Bascom doesn’t detail the
events behind his parents’ discussion. As a child he wasn’t privy to them.
He lets his experiences speak for themselves, but he makes sure they do
speak. Adult perspective is woven in seamlessly, present but not
interruptive. He feels no need to tell us that his parents are struggling in
their work, but he gives us the right clues. We feel as if we’ve figured it
out for ourselves, but our conclusions are pre-determined.
One of the unique qualities
of this book is its attention to the spiritual. As Christianity was woven
into the lives of this missionary family, so it is woven into Bascom’s
story. In one passage, homesickness becomes Satanic on young Tim’s first
night at boarding school. When he can’t stop crying, his brother tells him:
"It’s Satan that makes you want to cry like that. I
used to cry just as hard," he explained. "You’ve got to deny Satan."
I was surprised. I had never thought of it that way.
But since he had been through this before, I figured he knew better than I.
"Go away, Satan," I hissed in the gloom of the hall,
with only the faint light of dusk in the windows.
"Leave me alone."
"Say it in the name of Jesus," Johnathan explained.
"Talk about his blood."
So I prayed again, "By the blood of Jesus, leave me
alone."
I was spooked. I had never talked directly to Satan.
It seemed dangerous to be challenging him. What if he got mad?
But Johnathan seemed satisfied. "That’s right. Just
keep praying like that when you feel bad."
Passages like this are
honest, witnessing the overlay of doctrine on innocence, acknowledging, but
not exaggerating, dark nights of the soul. Free of adult commentary, this
moment allows us to enter into the sadness and fear of a little boy who
doesn’t know that homesickness is merely human, not Satanic. But other
times, Bascom loses the child’s perspective:
For that minute in the river ravine, we were all very
happy together—even Nat, who glowed after so successfully entertaining his
older brothers. Mom and Dad, who were buoyed up by the church visit, seemed
delighted that we could all be together in this experience, united in God’s
purpose. And for a moment, I felt the same pleasure. I sensed how we all fit
together into something much larger than us. (Emphasis mine).
By my calculations, Bascom
was four years old at the time. Maybe he was that spiritually developed as a
preschooler, but it seems more likely the usual care he employs when guiding
us toward interpretations is lacking. At first glance, it seems like a
simple case of "telling" not "showing" the reader his experience. But the
real problem is the presence of the adult sensibility overlaid on a
four-year-old mind.
The choice of point of view
in any work necessarily limits it. Fiction writers gain a sense of intimacy
with a first-person narrator, but lose the ability to enter the minds of
other characters. In memoir, the child’s point-of-view can reveal lost
insight, but it can also preclude a complex view of the world. With this
book, I found myself wishing for context: a broader, clarified view of the
political upheavals affecting Ethiopia and a stronger sense of the
missionary experience. I also found myself hoping for more insight in his
parents’ decisions. What compelled them to seek missionary life? What made
it bearable for them to surrender their older children to boarding school in
order to pursue this calling? And what of the politics within the missionary
community that eventually sent them home? We are left with snippets, the
faint inklings a child senses and overhears. And like that child we are left
curious, even a little uncomfortable, wishing we could eavesdrop from the
top of the stairs and discover the whole story.
Bascom’s refusal to conflate
results in a lack of the drama usually constructed by memoirists. But this
is more a symptom of a cultural sweet tooth for melodrama than a failure of
Bascom’s book. At the same time, as a reader, I expect a book to change
me—at least in a small way. I came away from this story with a gentle
expansion of my experience and an admiration for Bascom’s mastery of the
craft. It wasn’t life-altering. That said, the book accomplishes what it
sets out to do. It offers a refreshingly un-adult-erated view of an unusual
childhood. Our American addiction to voyeurism and the sheer number of
memoirs being published have resulted in a plethora of subgenres—the drunk
memoir, the anorexic memoir, the psychotic mommy memoir—that create
convenient slots for marketing teams and encourage a
my-trauma-was-worse-than-your-trauma contest between writers. Bascom’s book
is a welcome reprieve from these dueling dysfunctions. I was happy to live
for a while in the center of Bascom’s universe.
1 Alexandra Fuller, "Suggested Reading," in
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight (New York:
Random House, 2003), 309. |