Wendy Kann's Casting with a Fragile Thread joins works like Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight in offering a new definition of the white colonial experience in literature.
Your memoir gives readers a sense that in the late 1960s, white Rhodesians' rationale for fighting was along the lines of "We're all Rhodesians, and what we do is fight." Where did that attitude come from, and what happened to it after [President Robert] Mugabe's government took over?
It's a sense of closing ranks, and I think it's fairly universal. If you feel your livelihood or your lifestyle is threatened, it's instinctive to defend it. And after independence came [1994}, it was mostly just confusion. The racism didn't miraculously go away. Everyone was struggling with this change and what it meant, from being a Rhodesian to being a Zimbabwean. There were some hard-core whites who still called themselves "Rhodies" and didn't change their point of view at all. Some called them "When-we's," because they'd sit around and talk about "When we were in Rhodesia...."
When you left Zimbabwe and came to America for the first time [in 1984], what struck you the most?
The sense of communication. Everyone knew so much. There'd been censorship all through the Rhodesian years and that stayed when it changed to Zimbabwe. Getting a magazine was rare, finding a Vogue that someone had brought from England and left in a doctor's office was like peeking into a different world. So arriving in America with all these bursting bookstores and newsstands was like information overload.
When you go back and forth now, are things as different?
For the longest time, I felt like a Jekyll-and-Hyde. I felt like I had to change personalities when I went from one place to another, and it added to my sense of confusion about who I was. Now I'm able to stay the same person in both places. I do notice that people in Zimbabwe aren't used to information or putting forward their opinions, and it makes me want to encourage them to do it.
One motivation behind the memoir seems to have been your desire to know your sister Lauren better, to ease the pain of her death [in a 1999 car crash in Zambia].
When I went back to Zambia for Lauren's funeral, and I stood up to give my eulogy, I said, "Please, can everyone write me some anecdote about Lauren that they remember?" No one seemed to say anything real. So I wanted to delve more into who she was.
