Twenty Chickens for a Saddle by Robyn Scott
I Had a Funny Farm in Africa
The first scene in Robyn Scott's memoir takes place shortly after her family has arrived in Botswana. Her parents had decided on the spur of the moment to uproot their children from New Zealand and return to the peaceful nation where they had met.
Robyn, the oldest of the three Scott children, is just shy of 7. It's dusk and Grandpa Ivor is impressing the children by luring two giant moths to his face with droplets of wine and grape juice he lets pool in the corners of his mouth. First, one lands on his cheek, "wings flat against his face, long proboscis reaching for a drop," then the other settles on the other cheek.
Such scenes of innocent wonderment, "magical and ridiculous" in Scott's words, animate "Twenty Chickens for a Saddle" as it follows the Scotts' 15 years in Botswana. The six most colorful years are spent in Selebi, the former mining town where Grandpa Ivor and Granny Betty are the sole residents. Scott's family — in a typically unconventional move — sets up house across the yard in a foul-smelling former cow shed.
The rest of the book is divided mostly between the family's subsequent home on a 2,000-acre farm (another fanciful dream of her father, a doctor who flies to private clinics in even more remote villages) and Scott's teenage years at boarding school in neighboring Zimbabwe.
Robyn, or "Rob" or "Robbie," is smart and willful. And although she never articulates it — other than through her father's jokes about her lacking a sense of humor or her mother's homeopathic remedies, designed in Robbie's case to make her less rigid — Scott is not as quirky as the rest of her family.
Her mother home-schools the children in unstructured "lessons." Both parents allow their son to play with blasting caps from an old mine dump, which nearly blow his eyes out. They make their 9-year-old daughter break her own pony; and her father leaves her, as an adolescent, alone with an angle grinder.
"It was fine — as Mum and Dad's big decisions always were," Scott writes. "Now, as always, the past and its possibilities were soon banished by the excitement of what lay ahead: the temptation to dwell and regret no match for the love of change that Mum and Dad both lived and breathed so infectiously into the family."
Scott never attempts to square her love for her parents' sense of fun with the irresponsibility that accompanied it.
In fact, she misses most opportunities for introspection, revelation or catharsis — the particular gifts memoirs can offer author and reader alike.
Scott avoids many of the pitfalls some white African memoirists have fallen into: most important, the insistent if subtle sense of white superiority that sometimes lurks just beneath the surface. But her Africa is too often cast as an exotic "other" — though that may be inevitable given her age when she arrived in Botswana.
The menagerie of eccentrics in her family is the most interesting jungle in Scott's world. But rather than investigating them, or any conflicted feelings toward them, she chooses to concentrate on natural history.
Africa is mostly a backdrop, though, never deeply explored. Likewise, the endless stories of poisonous snakes and other Dark Continent vermin add as little to an understanding of Scott's inner life as do the beautiful sunsets she describes — above the brittle bush or the crocodile- and hippo-infested waters of the Limpopo.
She does, however, dwell awhile on her grandfather Ivor's drunkenness and her father's stubbornness in dealing with him. Ivor had left his three sons and his wife penniless after their divorce, and fled to a new life in Botswana as a bush pilot when Scott's father was 12. Yet after detailing Grandpa Ivor's catalog of fatherly flaws, Scott writes that "as a grandfather, however, he was perfect."
Beautifully written and lovingly told, Scott's book has the makings to be "Out of Africa" meets "Running With Scissors" — except Scott lacks Augusten Burroughs's wry wit and sharp analysis.
In the end, the Botswanan government's unwillingness or inability to heed her father's research into cheap, natural remedies to slow progression of early-stage AIDS leads him to give up on the country. Not long after, both parents give up on their marriage.
Scott earned a degree in bioinformatics, studying access to medicine in poor nations, and continues to volunteer in the field. In that sense, she is, in some way, trying to fulfill her parents' dream for Botswana.
That's heady stuff, but Scott doesn't address it here.
Like Scott, I wrote my memoir in my 20s, and I know from experience that when she writes the next edition of "Twenty Chickens for a Saddle," 20 years from now, she may well add some of the emotional complexity this first edition lacks.
Twenty Chickens for a Saddle by Robyn Scott
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/books/review/Mabry-t.html
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