by Paul Theroux
The older woman is not trying to catch your eye—she is beyond that—but if you look she'll notice, and if she is interested she will make it simple for you, even protect you: you only have to co-operate. There is one chance in ten that she'll be hysterical or reckless, but the signs of that will become apparent long before the last move: and any hint of threat and you must fold your tent and steal away, for she is capable of destroying you.
She awoke in him his earliest sexual memory. I am not speaking of the Oedipus Complex, which is nonsense, and in any case enough of a taboo to make one suppress it. But that friend of your mother's, who visited and left an odor of perfume and cigarette smoke and an aphrodisiac smudge of lipstick on her gin glass; the first school-teacher you wanted—though you didn't know how it was done—to go to bed with; the first woman who gave ' you informed encouragement and knew what was happening to you even if you didn't—she was always older and always the ideal. We don't abandon that fantasy. The older woman gives us something that is very nearly incomparable, the chance to complete in adulthood what was impossible to complete as a child, a blameless gift of lechery that combines the best of youth, a maturity, romance and realism in equal parts.
My Extended Family
[1977]
Some years ago (I was about twenty-four) I was appointed Acting Director of an adult education institute. But this was in Uganda and my chief responsibility was okaying invoices and signing chits for the vast shipments of green bananas that were devoured by the residential students. Another task was counselling the students and helping them solve the ticklish problems that arose in their transfer from a mud hut to the barrack-like building in which they were housed on our Kampala compound. Most, if not all, were much older than I, and while some of the problems concerned merely bed-wetting or drunkenness or lighting fires in their rooms, other were more serious. Major Oyet, who attended our course in Current Affairs for Uganda Army Officers, kept a machine-gun in his trunk. What struck me as unsafe about his fondness for the gun was the tendency he shared with his fellow officers for drinking whisky at breakfast, and one Saturday night he threatened to shoot Mr Ofumbi, the cook. I need hardly add that but for the single Kakwa among them, all these officers have since been promoted to glory by Idi Amin.
On the surface of it, the simple request by a man from Kigezi, his desire to get to Wales as quickly as possible, was not unusual. Ugandan students were constantly pleading with me to help them leave the country—indeed (and this was long before Amin) most of the students saw education purely as a means to emigrate, to go on an overseas course and never come back. The man from Kigezi wanted to go on a course, any course—Audio visual, pesticides, agriculture, primary teaching, developing suitable materials for bush schools, mental health, it didn't matter. His desperation was apparent. He stated his reason: he was being forced to marry his sister-in-law.
He had, naturally, participated a few years before in the Urine Ceremony of the Bakiga. This ritual is a necessary part of the marriage vow. The groom and all his brothers place their hands on the seat of a stool, and the bride—who has been chosen for her obesity and the wide gaps in her teeth—lifts her skirt and jams her naked buttocks onto their hands. Finally, with a certain amount of encouraging hilarity, she urinates and in this way shows that she is symbolically wedded to each of the hands she taints, the brothers of her husband. The husband has the strongest claim, but if he happens to be out of town, any of the brothers may sleep with her. If the husband dies, one of the brothers must take charge of her, which is not the chore it might seem. Men in Kigezi do little more than spend the day drinking a kind of fermented porridge they call beer, while the women do all the farming and child-rearing.
The man in my office was muttering in what I first thought was his own language. I realized that he was saying "Coleg Harlech, Coleg Harlech", his destination, another adult education college in Wales. He wanted to leave Uganda; he did not wish to return to his village; he would not marry his sister-in-law.
I was deeply shocked. I told him so. I reminded him of his obligation, of the implications of the Urine Ceremony, and I advised him to go home. He became very fierce.
"You do not understand my life," he shouted. "African life is badness. Relatives always staying, cousins coming to Kampala to wear my shirts, brothers wanting money. I hate it! You do not know..."
His arguments were uninteresting and selfish, I thought. Yet as he was talking it occurred to me that while I saw only benefit in the kinship system called the Extended Family, he saw it as a burdensome invasion of his privacy. His answer—a diploma course in Wales—was evasive and provisional. But our discussion was futile. I believed in the Extended Family; he didn't.
Perhaps now he is convinced. In Uganda, there is no government, no law, and little, paid employment. There is chaos. But beneath this chaos there is something orderly and protective, the old sowing, growing, beer drinking, hut-building superstructure of the extended family. Except for that, Uganda would be total jungle and cannibalism might prove a necessity.
It is a long way from the gorilla wilderness of Southwest Uganda to the prim suburbs of Boston, but the family pattern has similarities in both places. I didn't, thank God, have to endure a Urine Ceremony, and I would not jump at the chance to sleep with my sister-in-law, much less marry her. Yet there are dependencies I recognize, and virtues which have gone unremarked upon, and if life offers any greater pleasure than a secure place in a large family I do not know what that could possibly be.
It was part of my luck to have been born in a populous family of nine unexampled wits. But my father was one of eight, and so was my mother. Two fertile clans: and together they have produced the equivalent of a multi-national (French-Canadian-American-Italian) corporation of people—some, I admit, I barely know. Isn't that the way with all corporations? Only recently I learned that I have relatives in Piacenza and Guayaquil; it makes the thought of visits to Italy and Ecuador more attractive. The larger the family the more there is to do, but also there are more people to do it. In African societies, where women do all the farming, men take up polygamy and they prosper. In the fairer extended family there is a division of labor among the children which is unknown to the only child (inevitably made a bundle of nerves by the persistent attentions of his doting parents). The large family, splicing clan to clan, becomes more than a community—it becomes a nation. And nation speaks unto nation: no one wrote more passionately about Biafra, which was in every sense an Ibo family which had become a nation, than Auberon Waugh, himself a member of an extended family with the dimension and wholeness of a nation, being like-minded, self-sufficient and with its capital at Combe Florey. Because of this family's independence, Waugh writes from a position of strength.
Literature does not provide many examples of the extended family. It is a fiendishly difficult subject to deal with, for it is hard to do justice to it without writing a mammoth novel. The best of these is A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul. It appears to be a chronicle of the inroads a huge family makes on the privacies and personal freedom of Mohun Biswas. Biswas's stated aim is to paddle his own canoe—"the paddler" his mockers call him. One could easily get the impression from reading Mr Biswas that Naipaul is describing an entire society. Well, he is; but Naipaul would call "society" a politician's word. He is describing a family, one of the largest in our literature. And though he deals with the persecution of one member of the family, he elaborates the plot in dynastic terms, for at the end of the novel Mohun Biswas has staked his own claim, and the "house" of the title becomes an extension of the Tulsi's "Monkey House". Naipaul's novel reads like a homage to family life. It is impossible to read this book and not be moved by the way the loyalties in Biswas's family resemble those of the Tulsis.
It is easier to describe the downfall of a family and its disintegration than to describe the complex ways a family grows and extends. Minor novelists have attempted it, but apart from the Russians I can think of very few writers who have managed t
o convey the complexity, of the extended family. We get it in William Faulkner's "Snopes trilogy"—The Hamlet, The Mansion and The Town, in Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga and in the neglected novels of Wright Morris.
There is no shortage of family novels. But here one must make a distinction between the family—a group of blood-relations—and the extended family, a corporate group in which some members are related by loyalty and others by blood. We don't have very precise words for members of an extended family. Anthropologists become incomprehensible in trying to explain the subtleties of this sort of kinship. "Brother" is a fairly common designation, but "brother" is more affectionate than specific. A brother is just one of the bunch.
So it is in my own immediate family. The nucleus is recognizable: Father-Mother-First child. The addition of six more children was a complicating factor, various marriages added more family members, and the acquisition of property complicated things still further. The Tulsis, the Snopeses, the Forsytes begin to make a little sense, and Emma no sense at all. No longer is it a question of a little family in a little house. With more children, more houses, more duties to perform, more skills to learn, I might have foundered. Quite early in life, I came to regard my eldest brother as nearly indistinguishable from my father; a good deal later, I found myself treating the youngest as I would my son. In small families authority rests with the parents, but I had to learn the chain of command. The eldest, having mastered a skill, passes this skill to the next in line. It begins with donkey-work, dishwashing and snow-shovelling, the eldest superintending; but it moves on to music appreciation, to reading, to learning to drive a car. I learned to drive from my second-oldest brother, who had been taught by the eldest, who himself had received instruction from my father. My sister blames her bad driving on me.
Careers were another matter. "Find your nitch," my father used to say. My parents seemed to believe that it was essential that none of our careers was duplicated, and (this might have been unconscious on their part) they had it mapped out. The idea was that eventually there would be a painter, a priest, a doctor, a nun, a teacher, and so forth. In the event, we did not pursue those particular vocations (I was supposed to be the doctor; I abandoned the study when I came to organic chemistry), but we followed the pattern: our careers are different and mutually useful. And there are priests and doctors and teachers elsewhere in the family—why put them out of business?
It amazes me just how complete the family was, and how it has grown. Many of us were delivered at birth by my uncle, the doctor, and he has remained medical adviser to the family. Every nation needs a free health service; in the land of the whopping medical bill (the average family of four forks out four thousand dollars a year to doctors) Uncle Jim was ours. Another uncle—I never know whether to call him Uncle Louis or Father Mario—has performed marriages for some of us and baptized others and administered the Last Rites to at least two. A doctor and a priest can take care of practically everything. But there is an engineer uncle, too, a father of—I think—ten children, and designer of a bridge in Brazil that appears on postcards. If one needed a summer job one could always find employment with his construction company. I didn't, though my two older brothers did and enjoyed the work, since several of their fellow workers were our cousins. One of my younger brothers chose a different option, working for a time in another relative's bakery. But I cannot imagine any of us doing this sort of work except for relatives: manual labor or bakery work is not drudgery when it is kept in the family, though I am sure we would have scoffed at the suggestion that we do it for perfect strangers.
In the same way, public issues could be kept within the family. When atomic testing was exercising people's minds in the 1960's it never occurred to us to write to the government, but rather to buttonhole our physicist uncle who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in a nuclear reactor somewhere on Long Island. The question of faith was always put to our priest uncle and socialized medicine to our doctor uncle. My first girlfriend was my cousin, Susan—a harmless romance and because of that the memory is idyllic.
It sounds like perfection: examples of industry and ambition and achievement and romance. But there were unambitious ones as well, a few failures, some drop-outs and dolts. The beauty of the system is that, while the world finds it hard to be tolerant of the non-scorer, there is always room for him in the extended family. He is "a good scout", "loads of fun", the comedian at family get-togethers. To ridicule a member of the family for being bone-idle was considered heresy: if we wouldn't have him, who would? Indeed, being "a good scout" counted considerably more than splitting the atom, something I suppose our physicist uncle did every day.
But we had cousins who weren't cousins, aunts who weren't aunts. An extended family includes people who have been recruited because they are liked and might be useful. Growing up, I noticed how children from smaller families used to become attached to ours. They used my older brothers as I did—to find out how cars worked or to learn baseball. They ate with us and if we were going somewhere my father encouraged them to come along. He called each one "Jack"—he still calls most people "Jack". As time went on, they remained part of the family, acting as unpaid handymen or plumbers or lawyers or whatever. The system was subtle, but if an outsider was willing (and "a good scout") he could find himself the object of a recruitment campaign. Aunt Gert was not really an aunt. She had gone to college with my mother, her father had shot himself, she was unmarried. Aunt Gert took us to movies on Saturday afternoons and, after each movie, to confession. She frequently ate with us.
This made mealtimes something of an affair. "How are you, Jack?" my father would say to Eddie Flaherty at the end of the table. Eddie coveted my brother's shotgun. The next evening Eddie's seat might be taken by John Brodie, who captured toads in our back yard and usually stuck around to eat, or by Kenny Hall, who taught me to make model planes, or by any of my brothers' friends. Perhaps as a reaction to my father's "Jack", my brother Alex gave all his friends bizarre nicknames: Pigga, Chicky, Dada, Pin. Ten years ago, when the family really began to sprawl, my parents decided to buy a house on Cape Cod. This proved too small. They bought another, then my brothers began to colonize the Cape, each buying a house within driving distance of my parents. And now I have one. So August is what every mealtime used to be, a sort of jamboree. Cooking, driving, outings to the beach and childminding are shared. No longer simply my parents and their children, but grandchildren, cousins and nieces and nephews, and the recruits. Meetings are arranged, meals planned, weenie roasts organized; but because it is a family of poor planners (the extended family, by its very nature, prevents one from being a good planner) things go wrong and there is usually twice as much food as is necessary.
Yet there is an advantage in the sheer numbers of people who gather on the Cape each August. One of my sisters had hesitated to introduce her new boyfriend to my parents. She couldn't face them and endure the silences, the awkward exploratory questions: he was divorced, he's from New York, a place my father regards as "full of fakers". But during one of these family parties—a soft-ball game here, my brother-in-law making hamburgers over there, some lost soul mowing the lawn, my father parked near a half-gallon of California sherry, seven oddly-assorted children playing Cowboys and Indians, my brother Alex doing his imitation of Sam Ervin, and Brother Gene countering with his Jimmy Carter impersonation, another group preparing to go to the beach, and Alex's girlfriend (her own parents about to arrive) wondering whether anyone is interested in a game of charades—it was during one of these parties, as I say, that my sister slipped her new boyfriend into the crowd. It was as good as his being introduced; he was tacitly accepted as one of the family, although many of us did not meet him, and there were some who were wholly unaware that he was present that day.
For a month, this family activity continues, from house to house, up and down Cape Cod. What makes it especially interesting is the fact that within the confines of the family there are dissenters from the manic day-to-day program. As
the month wears on the imitations become personal: "Who's this?" someone says, and a cousin is imitated down to his tiniest mannerism; my brother Peter imitates my father putting on his trousers; Alex does his spectacular number about all of us going down in a plane—this requires his imitating each person's characteristic reaction, thirty seconds before the crash, in cruel mimicry; I hear a familiar echo and realize that someone is doing me on the porch, a know-it-all voice with strangulated vowels. By the end of the month the impersonations are affectionate, and we part friends, or more than friends.
There are many children, I am not sure of the exact number, but many. It is never a question of liking or disliking them, or of being protective towards one's own. I think that children are one of the pleasures of life, but that is a small-family satisfaction. In an extended family it becomes hard to distinguish between one's own and one's nephews and nieces. It is better to keep away; to separate them is to spoil their fun. They are tolerated and they play by themselves, creating what amounts to a subculture in the garden or the next room. The more there are the less supervision they need, and already it has been possible for me to see that they have formed a family of their own, two cousins leading, the rest following—skills, information, cant words and dirty stories circulating among them.
Watching these children I am reminded of my own upbringing, how much freedom I had, how little privacy, how well I was defended and protected. These came as ideas to me quite early in life, for with so much variety around me—such an ideal version of the world—I was able to see the difference between freedom and privacy. I had a keen sense of these concepts, yet never felt that I was being closely watched. My solitude was seldom loneliness. And the idea of success in a family in which many had been materially successful, was merely to win the admiration of my fellow members. In twenty years of writing I have felt that in order to write well I would only have to please the family. It has not always been easy; they are severer critics than anyone would face in the literary world and they can be devastating mockers. After my fifth novel had appeared, a book set in Malawi, my brother Alex felt I was getting a bit above myself and he lampooned me in his next book, Three Wogs: "Then, of some notoriety, was bespectacled Paul the Pseudoplutarch, American oligosyllabicist and poet laureate of rural Malawi, who scuttled around in his pants of beaten wool and round cap, waving copies of his own Velocity: The Key to Writing (o.p.), a vade-mecum for gerundmongers and the sourcebook of his widely cited, narrowly appreciated, long-held theory that one's literary output should cease only when one ran out of possible dedications—and that remained, not a family, but a world away." Students of such things will be interested to know that I put Alex together with his family-airplane-crash skit in my next novel, Picture Palace. This family is a little like having a country; it is, in every way, like having a culture: art, literature, common memories, a private language.