Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Life

I have gone on record claiming that I am not an autobiographical writer, that my fiction will provide no handy keys to unlock the door to my personal history. However, I have written autobiographically in my non-fiction, more than I had ever imagined, and particularly about my African childhood and my schooldays — a near-decade spent in a boarding school in the north of Scotland. But in putting this collection together I realized that, over the years, even more of my life had crept into my writings than I had thought. Therefore these pieces are assembled in rough chronological order — the chronology of my life rather than their writing: there are big gaps but, to my vague surprise, they cover a fair bit of the ground. I still believe I’ll never attempt a bona fide autobiography or memoir. I suspect that these occasional scraps and gleanings will be all that it will amount to.

This section also introduces one of my favourite formal devices: the A-Z. I have used it with some regularity in my non-fiction (and it will be encountered later, several times) for the signal reason that it allows me to squeeze a quart into a pint pot or at least give the illusion of so doing. The strict logical progression of the alphabet paradoxically forces you to be arbitrary: you have to find something that fits a “Q” or an “X” or an “O” or a “V” even when nothing appears obvious or forthcoming. An A-Z of a given subject (a painter, a borough of London, an iconic writer) somehow seems more all-inclusive than a measured essay of exactly the same length. The necessary darting around, as you try to fit the letters to a relevant subject — makeshift invention requiring you to hammer a square peg into a round hole from time to time — inevitably assures a skewed, disparate and eccentric account that, when it works, produces a richer, more accurate portrait.