Alexandra Fuller on Growing Up in a Racist Family

In this episode of Just the Right Book with Roxanne Coady, Alexandra Fuller joins Roxanne Coady to discuss her latest memoir, Travel Light, Move Fast.

From the episode:

Roxanne Coady: Do you think your parents were attracted to go to Rhodesia by sensing the trouble that was about to happen or by the racism?

Alexandra Fuller: That’s the crazy thing. I constantly explore that in my books. How do you become racist? How are you that checked out, because it is something that is very necessary to explore in the States, too? How can you do this thing that is so blatantly what it is, that everybody else is saying “that is racist” and you say to yourself that you’re not feeling it? That level of unconsciousness, that level of truly neurotic numbness… What’s rare is that I come out of that upbringing articulate about it and so loving of the people that were in it.

I was so hateful of their belief system, but I don’t think we have many clear portraits of these people that were casually racist. In a weird sort of way, Rhodesia offers a petri dish on the global north and racism that exists globally. We don’t really turn a hair if we hear of a white family in the U.S. moving to a white suburb. It’s unspoken that it’ll stay that way for however long. However, we can remark that parents would move to a white country. Do you see what I mean? There are more ways that is damaging for their children than it is good for them.

Coady: Have you had a conversation with your mother? Or, would she consider herself a racist?

Fuller: I don’t know if this comes across in the books as much as it does in real life, but she is a very transactional person. For the most part, she’ll agree with whoever is sitting across the table with her until she decides to get into a disagreement with you. Sometimes, she’s quite able to accept that we were racist.

For me and my daughter, we talk about it incessantly. We wake up talking about this stuff and dig it through: social justice, climate change, how it’s all connected. It’s just endless. We’re fascinated by what it takes to deconstruct it. My mother can get to naming the blindingly obvious, and it’s not going much further than that.

Coady: There were five of you that your mother gave birth to, three of whom died, and a sister Vanessa. … You’re in Rhodesia where shortly thereafter your arrival embarks on a very long war of which your family is living under those conditions for an extended period of time.

Fuller: Actively participating, including the children. I mean, we were giving Uzi submachine guns at six.

Coady: That you were trained to use?

Fuller: This is the thing that I get so … I start to feel slightly insane because I had the childhood that people in this country think they want their children to have. You don’t want to take away a six-year-old’s innocence with that much fear and hatred. Speaking from experience, a child has no ability to rebound from that… You’re supposed to walk away from all that fear and all that training and all that horror as if it didn’t happen.

The truth is is that I’ve written about it so much to try to unlearn it and try to get to the bottom of it and understand it because it wasn’t passive. Passive is white privilege. We were more than that. We were active, militant. My father was called up. He fought for six months of every year by the time the war ended. My mother volunteered. We all ended up getting roped into it, whether you volunteered or conscripted or not if you were living that close to the front line.

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Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. In 1972, she moved with her family to a farm in southern Africa. She lived in Africa until her mid-twenties. In 1994, she moved to Wyoming. Fuller is the author of several memoirs including Travel Light, Move Fast, Leaving Before the Rains Come, and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.

Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.