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