THE TENNESSEAN

Sunday, Feb. 8, 2004

African-born Author Gathers Pieces of Life

Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life. Elaine Neil Orr. University of Virginia Press. 336 pages. $27.95

What is home? Where is it? Is it a physical place to which you can return or is it a place deep inside you, made up of memories of places experienced long ago? 

These are some of the questions that run at a very deep level under the narrative of Elaine Neil Orr's memoir.

Orr is a professor contemporary literature and women's studies at North Carolina State University and teaches creative non-fiction at Spalding University; the author of two scholarly texts, she also taught briefly at Belmont College, as it was then known, in the later 1980s.

There are really three stories here.

One is that of her childhood growing up as the child of Southern Baptist medical missionaries in Nigeria, where she was born in 1954. It was a rather nomadic childhood, since the family moved frequently among the many mission stations in Nigeria.

There were also year-long furloughs in the United States every few years, which were usually rather disorienting, since Elaine's life in Africa moved at a slower pace than it did in the rapidly changing America of the 1960s.

Her descriptions have much in common with the lives of those of us, myself included, who were growing up at the same time in this country; the fascinating thing is to see that things that were so important in our lives were barely noticed where she was, while many of the things she lived through, like Nigerian Independence and the beginnings of the Biafran War were just items in the newspaper to us.

The experiences she relates are poignant, funny and often excruciating, as growing up often can be, but it is her description of the people, especially the local Yoruba, and the many places that imprinted themselves on her heart that come most alive.

One of the most memorable of these is a trip she describes to the River Ethiope, a waterway of such purity and clearness that you can see to the bottom of it in the photograph on the cover of the book.

While reading this section, it becomes obvious that even today the river remains an anchoring image of her being.

Another of the stories is of Orr's illness. In the late 1990s, she was diagnosed with end stage renal disease – kidney failure that would require transplants to save her life and bring her back to health. The details of the disease's progress, the pain, the difficulty of the dialysis, the long wait for a compatible donor, are told unflinchingly and provide a counterpoint to the childhood experiences.

A third story ties the other two together. It began as Elaine was leaving the medical center after being evaluated as a candidate for transplants. Momentarily blinded and disoriented by the summer sun , "I hear a voice, sharp and full, like a series of musical notes; it seems to come from the air above me."

It turns out to be a woman from Nigeria; blond-haired, blue-eyed Elaine identifies herself as someone who was also born in Nigeria. When the woman's husband walks up, the woman tells him "Johnny, this woman is from Nigeria!"

For Elaine this is a catalyst that moves her to write this memoir, to go back to the true home of her childhood. By remembering her past she can re-member herself, bring together the scattered and shattered pieces of herself.

In her reading she comes across the Itefa, a ritual of rebirth for older Yorubas to bring together the splintered parts of their lives; writing the book will be her Itefa.

With the success of the kidney transplants in late 2000, she has regained the physical health to go with the spiritual health that the journey of her book has provided.

The journey is never over; as T. S. Eliot says at the end of The Four Quartets, "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time."

Michael E. Jackson is circulation manager at the Vanderbilt University Law Library.