Adrian Hartley was born in 1965 in Nairobi. In the 1990s he was a war correspondent for Reuters, covering African conflicts.
His memoir, The Zanzibar Chest, takes him from the Indian Ocean’s African coast to the Middle East, and Yemen in particular, in search of answers to questions about family history. His journey reads as a form of therapy that helps him comes to terms with both his father’s death, who is central to the book, and the outrages of war and genocide Hartley witnesses whilst compiling his despatches. Its opening pages, in particular, carry a range of haunting passages about the psychological burden that is carried by war correspondents on the front line.
The Zanzibar Chest (2003)
“Sometimes, the stories themselves can take on their own disturbing vitality. Inside my mind, they play out the what-ifs and maybes, throwing up fresh detail or facts I can no longer pin down. Or they spill over into my innocent recollections. Rows of silent infants with swollen kwashiorkor bellies gate-crash the childhood movie of my grandpa tying his runner beans to bamboo stakes in his garden. A gang of executed men in a banana grove falls to the floor as I’m flicking through pictures of my summers at Oxford. All these memories are unfinished business. They seep out of the hidden recesses and coagulate. I confuse the happy ones and the bad ones, where one fuck-up ended and the other began: childhood, or my thirtieth birthday, until I can no longer determine if certain events that still haunt me are either real or imagined, or just excuses for drinking too much, or my yelling rages, or not bothering to get out of bed in the mornings. And sometimes, there are mornings when I get up just so that I can stare at the wall of the room all day. ….
…… I can’t speak of my own (war correspondent) story without also telling you about Davey. In these pages I am going to take you to Africa and Arabia and a few other places besides, in different years and over centuries. Forgive me when it proves difficult to keep up, but you’ll just have to trust me. For now I want you to keep in mind a day in April 1947. We are in an emerald-green valley beneath the craggy peaks of high Arabia. The land has fallen silent but for the sound of birdsong and the gurgling of water in the cool mountain stream. Youth and innocence are dead. The broad-winged shadow of a vulture circles over three men. One body is that of an African, a sheikh’s slave, lying riddled with bullet wounds. Nearby sprawls the figure of Davey. The translucent bone haft of a silver jambiya dagger protrudes from his chest and blood soaks his khaki tunic. And standing over the two of them is my father.”
Published by Harper Perennial
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