MINUS THE MORNING
A
Zimbabwean Memoir
Is now available in paperback!
Minus the Morning is a commentary on what it meant to me to be
brought up in Rhodesia and then to lose everything. The theme of
"morning" runs through the book as a metaphor for loss. Initially it
is introduced in the form of incoherence. Just as a child's view on the world
is a jumble of sensations and misunderstood communications, so it was that when
singing a Christian hymn in primary school, I believed myself to be singing
"Minus the Morning".
This early subconscious reinterpretation of the actual words, "Mine is the
Morning", sets the theme for the story of my life. Was my subconscious
interpretation -- based on a mishearing -- actually the correct one, whereas
the Christian, official meaning of the verse was wrong? This possibility puts
the onus for interpretation of life directly back to the child in us -- for it
is his or her initiative to make sense of that which adults have only partly
explained.
So it was that I navigated the meaning of Rhodesian politics and social life --
through a series of mishearings, and then later a desperate attempt to catch up
and understand.
The loss of the "morning" also refers to the "morning of my life",
as per the following song, sung to our departing headmistress, in Form three:
In the morning of my life I shall look to
the sunrise.
At a moment in my life when the world is new.
And the blessing I shall ask is that God will grant me,
To be brave and strong and true,
And to fill the world with love my whole life through.
It is a song that invokes the novelty and innocence of a child's growing up in
a culture where naivety -- especially for children and women -- was
systematically culturally and politically reinforced. When one migrates from
that "womb", one effectively loses the whole social context that
reinforced that innocence, thus loses touch with the sense of one's own
childhood completely. This is "minus the morning".
Finally, "minus the morning" signifies the forbidding of mourning.
For one is not to mourn that which one had never really had -- and in all sorts
of ways, I had never really possessed Rhodesia as my own.
Political correctness in the world at large also prohibited this expression of
a sense of loss, for whites were seen as never having belonged in Africa, and
therefore not to have the right to mourn their loss of it.
SEE: http://www.lulu.com/content/5487684
Sample chapters: HERE

Jennifer f Armstrong