Kids Can Be Cruel
The narrator, Doreen, is growing up amid poverty conditions, but like so many kids raised under such circumstances, she remains blissfully unaware that she is poor until it is pointed out to her. The culprit in this case is, as it probably is in most such instances, another kid. A nasty little classmate whom many years later Doreen captures in the kind of stunning visceral imagery that can only be recalled from the depths of emotional pain:
“A girl in my class revealed this to me after I had badly defeated her in a game. She took defeat badly and in her moment of shame and mine of pride, she remembered something that brightened her mood. She laughed, and said, `I let you win of course, and you are so poor you need to win sometimes.’ She opened her eyes wide as she gesticulated, her whole body shaking, her hands flying in all directions, sticking out her tongue like one about to vomit. She screwed up her mouth just so, in that way makes the the one scorned feel like scum, like a dirty and useful rug.”
The Philosophy of Fatalism
Many people go through their entire life without realizing that hard work, talent, ability, and all that jazz is meaningless without luck. Luck is the difference between working like a dog and making it and working like a dog and not making it. A hard lesson to learn, surely, but even more difficult to finally accept as irrefutably true. Of course, most people who do reach this recognition still devalue it by attaching the hand of God to what is purely random fate:
“I no longer agitate, getting worked up by issues outside my power to change. I have now largely, though not completely, accepted that fate will invariably carve out the route my life will take. Now I can say that I, like any human being, am like a speck in the whorl of the God force which rules life.”
The Daemon
It doesn’t take an advanced literature degree to figure out that demons are major imagery in the book. Part One is subtitled “The Struggle with the Daemon” and Part Two is subtitled “Daemon at the Hearth.” The hardest part here may well be understanding that daemon is just another way of spelling demon. It does not take for what will become an abundance of imagery to kick in:
“There was a living daemon inside me constantly pushing for action, for pre-occupation of the mind. This daemon found residence in me when I left home to study teaching. It took the form of a lingering loneliness that accompanies me everywhere I went, like a shadow. It was a quiet presence that seemed to threaten my sanity and my sense of peace.”
Webs
References to webs both real and metaphorical recur often enough to become officially situated as major imagery in the narrative. Great Aunt Mai is described as “long adapted to living in the social web.” Tanzanian society is thoroughly implicated as existing within a weblike structure with the patriarchal dominion singled out as a particularly malevolent sort of web which entangles everything and reduces it to flies for spiders. And, of course, the spider web itself is intricately worked into the imagery:
“The image of the spider comes to mind, the way it spins its web from the very inside of its stomach, for itself, and for trapping others into its power and into death, for is life for itself. Death for one, life for another. The spider spins its power web from the secretions of its stomach in order to survive, doesn’t it? Does it not know that it is not just the fly that can die inside that web, but also one of its own kind or even itself?”
