Seeing the World Through Books

Having returned from central Africa after witnessing and photographing a massacre in which three thousand innocent women and children were hacked to death at a church, forty-year-old photographer Clem Glass now finds himself unable to function in the “normal” world of London. The memory of Odette Semugeshi, a wounded child he photographed, will not leave him, nor will the horror of the other dead and maimed. Odette saw her parents, brothers, and sisters murdered, and as she lay beneath a pile of bloody bodies, she thought she herself was really dead. Perhaps she is. At a Red Cross hospital, Odette refuses to cry. “Too much sorrow makes the heart like a stone,” the doctor says, to which Silverman, an older journalist who accompanied Clem on the trip, responds, “It’s how the heart survives.”

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Providing further proof, should anyone need it, that you can’t go home again, Paul Theroux returns to Africa, forty years after being a Peace Corps worker in Malawi and a teacher in Uganda. Expelled from both Malawi and the Peace Corps for driving the car of a political exile from Malawi to Uganda, he was hired as a teacher at Makerere University there, leaving just as Idi Amin was coming to power. Despite the political upheavals of the 1960’s, his memories of Africa during this time are good ones. Now, approaching his sixtieth birthday and wanting to escape from cell phones, answering machines, faxes, the daily newspaper, and being “put on hold,” he has returned to Africa, determined to travel from Cairo to Cape Town. He believes that the continent “contain[s] many untold tales and some hope and comedy and sweetness, too,” and that there is “more to Africa than misery and terror,” something he aims to discover as he “wander[s] the antique hinterland.”

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