Jackson, Wyoming

Alexandra Fuller, author of ‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’, has shifted her focus from the Zimbabwean landscape and politics that shaped her young life to the plains of Wyoming, US. Born in England, she was educated in Zimbabwe, Scotland and Canada and met her American husband in Zambia while he was working as a safari guide. They and their three children, Labrador, two Corgis, and Arabian horse split their time between a home near the affluent resort town of Jackson and a one-room log cabin in rural Sublette County. Her third book, ‘The Legend of Colton H Bryant’, tells the story of a cowboy turned roughneck, who lost his life on an oil rig.

The Zimbabwean concept of chimurenga, or “outcry”, shapes how I see the world. Because of what I’ve lived through, I can smell injustice from a mile away. The country and I came of age more or less at the same time. It’s been painful to watch the closed-door agreements that were brokered in Zimbabwe cheapen the notion of democracy. People’s survival instincts forced them to accept an expedient solution. They have no freedom now.

I long for the day when Africans lose patience with corruption. I pray that someone we haven’t seen yet comes along to lead Zimbabwe. “Harare North” (ie London) is crowded with talent; people that haven’t been tainted. Hopefully someone will emerge soon. The example of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberia’s president, taught us about selflessness and courage.

My 11-year-old son wants to be president of the US. He was born in the US and he’s very attached to the place. His political beliefs more closely resemble those of his country-club-going American grandparents than my views. Our differences were brought out during a family trip to Ellis Island. I got very emotional thinking about the people who had fled their lands to seek a new life in the US. Embarrassed by my tears, my son reminded me that his American ancestors were yacht people, not boat people, and that I had arrived on a commercial aeroplane.

If you had asked my mother if she thought I would wind up in the US she would have said: “No, never”. You can never really know what the future holds. My eldest daughter was born in Africa. When she started school in Wyoming she insisted she was black. On Martin Luther King Day she stood at the front of the classroom with the only African-American student in her grade. She’s 16 now and very intolerant of the surface stuff that interests a lot of Americans. She seems more comfortable thinking in Spanish and backpacking round Costa Rica.

Things in the US are changing. President Obama shifted how we define ourselves. He’s that rare leader that transcends race and gender. He’s in it for the infinite. We have the opportunity to change limiting attitudes. I think Obama’s candidacy drew poison to the surface of US society. A volatile minority’s identity is threatened by Obama’s obvious abilities.

Oil and gas have brought an obscene amount of money into this part of the US. With the money – and the demands on the oil workers – have come frightening rates of crystal meth and amphetamine addiction. People have lost their ranches, their traditional livelihoods and their souls.

I was getting my back adjusted by a healer in Wyoming when I experienced an epiphany. Listening to an elk loudly dying outside the healer’s window, I realised I was on the right path with my writing. Now, you don’t often find elk wandering from their herd into a suburban subdivision. Listening to its laboured breathing, I understood that this bony animal was sickened by the land that had been ravaged by oil drilling. I’m attracted to the stories told by the people of the First Nations, the American Indians. They believe the elk symbolise perseverance. I’m learning to listen to these kinds of messages.

In Zimbabwe and Wyoming I meet special people who are land-attached. Their geography has settled in their skins. The cowboy I interviewed for a New Yorker magazine article, which evolved into the book The Legend of Colton H Bryant, held on to his heart when he talked about fighting oil and gas development. The pain he felt at being torn from his earth is a pain shared by a lot of people the world over.

This land attachment is a gift I don’t have. I used to physically ache because I missed Africa so much. When I went to to college in Scotland I was desperately lonely. It was the first time in my life I wasn’t surrounded by people. I subsequently invested a lot of emotional energy in defending my Zimbabwean identity. But now I’ve come to enjoy separateness from physical place. Seven years ago my husband and I found land in Tanzania that we were going to live on but we couldn’t make it work. This experience made me realise that going to live in Africa again wasn’t going to make me more of what I was.

Visiting my sister in Lusaka restored my optimism about the possibility for change in Africa. Lusaka is now the Paris of Africa. Walking down Cairo Road you can get a great cup of coffee and watch people treat each other with humanity. When I was a kid you’d be lucky to be served stale instant coffee by someone that couldn’t look you in the eye. Zambia has become more open and middle-class. It’s wonderful that opportunity has infected so many more people.

But after 15 years of living in the US I realise that the American Dream is a myth. Americans have yet to reconcile themselves with the fact that people are not born equal. I don’t think capitalism and democracy are easy bedfellows.

Each book changes me profoundly. My clothes feel like they don’t fit after I finish writing a story. This process is especially hard on my husband. I went from hating God to going to church. I find it invigorating to remain open to change at the ripe age of 40 but I know it’s hard on my family.

I’ve come to make peace with the idea that the planet is my spiritual home. Like the peace activist KC Sheehan and her mother, Cindy, I consider myself a “matriot”, not a patriot. We believe that children within boundaries of certain borders don’t have special rights and privileges. Fighting just for your tribe or your country is a very limiting game. I think it perpetuates violence. Choosing to think beyond ethnicity has freed me up to endless possibilities.