Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Books It to Africa
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus
A few years ago, Gideon Lewis-Kraus went to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to visit the setting of a Norman Rush novel, and learned a thing or two about literary pilgrimages. The Brooklyn-based critic and journalist's travel memoir, A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful is out via Riverhead books this May.
"The Kalahari," I said to Peter, "is one of the world's great deserts."
"And the Atlantic," Peter said, "is one of the world's great oceans."
"If we don't do this, we're going to regret it."
"By which you mean you're going to regret it."
"Yeah, that seems right."
"Well, I'm out," Allison said. "It could be the greatest desert in the solar system, the top-rated desert in the entire galaxy, and I wouldn't have the faintest interest in seeing it." Peter and Allison had been living in northern Tanzania for two years, in which time they'd cultivated an air of the dissipated postcolonial, and Africa no longer impressed them. We'd started on Zanzibar and were headed overland to Cape Town, where Peter and Allison looked forward to eating sushi. Now we were in a dusty, half-assed attempt at an eco-lodge in Maun, in the empty northeast corner of empty Botswana. We'd taken a train across southern Tanzania and into northern Zambia, then come down by bus past Victoria Falls and hitchhiked on the open back of a flatbed truck on northern Botswana's only east-west road, to Maun.
Which is where I'd activated a secret plan I'd come up with months before, just as we were beginning to plan this trip. I'd noticed, poring over a map of southern Africa, that if we went from Lusaka to Windhoek via Maun we'd skirt the northern edge of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, a mere two hundred kilometers north of Tsau, the location of Nelson Denoon's matriarchal utopia in Norman Rush's Mating. It's the sort of book that seems to contain an entire universe, but it held a particular allure for me as the best representation I'd ever come across of a romantic relationship as cerebral as it was animal. I'd given copies over the years to all the smartest women I'd ever fallen in love with.
Allison went to book herself on Air Namibia's prop plane to Windhoek, Namibia's capital and the next real city we'd have to pass through. She asked Peter if she should reserve a seat for him, too. He looked over at me.
"World's greatest desert," I wheedled.
"Eh," he said.
"Tsau!" I said. Since he'd moved to Africa he'd also become a Norman Rush fan, though he preferred Mortals. He thought the sex was better.
"Eh," he said, "fine."
The Kalahari, as it turns out, is not only not one of the world's greatest deserts, it's not a desert at all. It is, in fact, a "semi-arid sandy savannah," which is to say that it looks like nothing so much as the interminable stretches of Botswana we'd already pointlessly hitchhiked across. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve is a profoundly arbitrary trapezoid of undeveloped bush that is, in every possible way, exactly like the entirety of non-Kalahari Botswana, except, of course, for its massive inconvenience. This fact, that the Kalahari was perfectly indistinguishable from the knottily featureless bush we'd seen for some days, was something that only dawned on us gradually, as the scenery -- at which we peered, eyes narrowed against the blades of wind, held fast in horse-blanket sarcophagi in the dented bed of the shockless pickup truck speeding us toward the Kalahari, desperately trying to avoid the desultory conversation of the German who'd appeared from nowhere to worm his way into our excursion--continued to refuse to change in even the subtlest ways.
At last we reached the gate to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to discover that the park was simply a patch of regular old Botswana that happened to sit behind a large fence, a fence that happened to be a six-hour, unheated steel-bouncy-castle ride away from Maun, which itself was noteworthy largely for being nowhere near anywhere. The Kalahari was an unvarying landscape of survivalist shrubbery, low trees and unornamented bushes in a palette that runs all the way from brownish-green to greenish-brown. It wasn't even free of Germans, and isn't the only real point of chasing the ultimately remote the vain hope that we might find a place -- any place -- free of Germans? The German, for his part, loved the Kalahari immediately. We agreed he'd been taken in by a clever scam. The person, we had to conclude with begrudging respect, who'd named this camelthorn-thick swath of tan desolation the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, was a genius; it was rather like calling Nebraska the "Central American Plains Reserve" just to get people to go there. Luckily for us, we had a better reason for being there: This was the place the great Norman Rush had written about. Naturally there was no sign.
Except, of course, for the wooden sign, just inside the park, for "Tsau 183 km." We squealed in triumph, even if we were barely closer to Tsau, despite our harrowing ride, than where we'd started. Our squeals startled an oryx. With an equine frame, a bulbous undercarriage, and a masked face of black and white, the oryx looks like a cross between a horse, a zebra and a murderer. The next morning we took a short game drive around the Kalahari, a drive that, for all intents and purposes other than literary pilgrimage, might profitably have taken place anywhere else in Botswana, though on our way past the Tsau sign and the fence en route back to non-Kalahari Botswana we did see five cheetahs eating an oryx. From Maun we hitchhiked 16 more hours into Windhoek, every stalled second of which looked unmistakably like the Kalahari we'd left.
In Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer at last reaches D. H. Lawrence's home in Sicily. "We had found it," he writes. "We stood silently. I knew this moment well from previous literary pilgrimages: You look and look and try to summon up feelings which don't exist. You try saying a mantra to yourself, 'D. H. Lawrence lived here,' you say. 'I am standing in the place he stood, seeing the things he saw...,' but nothing changes, everything remains exactly the same: a road, a house with sky above it and the sea glinting in the distance."
Only the foolish would expect more. A literary pilgrimage is necessarily an encounter with the banal, an encounter with a Kalahari that looks exactly like both where you've come from and where you're going. We would be despondent, in fact, if it were otherwise. The last thing we'd want to find is a landscape that made inspiration foreordained; it would diminish what was there imagined, what made us suffer to our Kalaharis in the first place.
Photographs by Gideon Lewis-Kraus.
This piece is part of our Winter Issue "Get Out of Town" travel feature. Check out Sasha Grey's trip to Thailand and Germany here, Twilight star Jackson Rathbone's account of being robbed in San Francisco here, Momofuku Milk pastry chef Christina Tosi's 10 traveling rules here, designer Nicola Formichetti's love letter to Ibiza here, London trio Is Tropical's crazy, drunken time in Russia here and video artist Mika Rottenberg and sculptor Jon Kessler's account of going off-off-off-the grid in Botswana here. Brooklyn artist Michael Pellew's amazing celebrity transportation drawings are here and '70s super model and actress Marisa Bernson's account of camping in Africa is here.
"The Kalahari," I said to Peter, "is one of the world's great deserts."
"And the Atlantic," Peter said, "is one of the world's great oceans."
"If we don't do this, we're going to regret it."
"By which you mean you're going to regret it."
"Yeah, that seems right."
"Well, I'm out," Allison said. "It could be the greatest desert in the solar system, the top-rated desert in the entire galaxy, and I wouldn't have the faintest interest in seeing it." Peter and Allison had been living in northern Tanzania for two years, in which time they'd cultivated an air of the dissipated postcolonial, and Africa no longer impressed them. We'd started on Zanzibar and were headed overland to Cape Town, where Peter and Allison looked forward to eating sushi. Now we were in a dusty, half-assed attempt at an eco-lodge in Maun, in the empty northeast corner of empty Botswana. We'd taken a train across southern Tanzania and into northern Zambia, then come down by bus past Victoria Falls and hitchhiked on the open back of a flatbed truck on northern Botswana's only east-west road, to Maun.
Which is where I'd activated a secret plan I'd come up with months before, just as we were beginning to plan this trip. I'd noticed, poring over a map of southern Africa, that if we went from Lusaka to Windhoek via Maun we'd skirt the northern edge of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, a mere two hundred kilometers north of Tsau, the location of Nelson Denoon's matriarchal utopia in Norman Rush's Mating. It's the sort of book that seems to contain an entire universe, but it held a particular allure for me as the best representation I'd ever come across of a romantic relationship as cerebral as it was animal. I'd given copies over the years to all the smartest women I'd ever fallen in love with.
Allison went to book herself on Air Namibia's prop plane to Windhoek, Namibia's capital and the next real city we'd have to pass through. She asked Peter if she should reserve a seat for him, too. He looked over at me.
"World's greatest desert," I wheedled.
"Eh," he said.
"Tsau!" I said. Since he'd moved to Africa he'd also become a Norman Rush fan, though he preferred Mortals. He thought the sex was better.
"Eh," he said, "fine."
The Kalahari, as it turns out, is not only not one of the world's greatest deserts, it's not a desert at all. It is, in fact, a "semi-arid sandy savannah," which is to say that it looks like nothing so much as the interminable stretches of Botswana we'd already pointlessly hitchhiked across. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve is a profoundly arbitrary trapezoid of undeveloped bush that is, in every possible way, exactly like the entirety of non-Kalahari Botswana, except, of course, for its massive inconvenience. This fact, that the Kalahari was perfectly indistinguishable from the knottily featureless bush we'd seen for some days, was something that only dawned on us gradually, as the scenery -- at which we peered, eyes narrowed against the blades of wind, held fast in horse-blanket sarcophagi in the dented bed of the shockless pickup truck speeding us toward the Kalahari, desperately trying to avoid the desultory conversation of the German who'd appeared from nowhere to worm his way into our excursion--continued to refuse to change in even the subtlest ways.
At last we reached the gate to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve to discover that the park was simply a patch of regular old Botswana that happened to sit behind a large fence, a fence that happened to be a six-hour, unheated steel-bouncy-castle ride away from Maun, which itself was noteworthy largely for being nowhere near anywhere. The Kalahari was an unvarying landscape of survivalist shrubbery, low trees and unornamented bushes in a palette that runs all the way from brownish-green to greenish-brown. It wasn't even free of Germans, and isn't the only real point of chasing the ultimately remote the vain hope that we might find a place -- any place -- free of Germans? The German, for his part, loved the Kalahari immediately. We agreed he'd been taken in by a clever scam. The person, we had to conclude with begrudging respect, who'd named this camelthorn-thick swath of tan desolation the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, was a genius; it was rather like calling Nebraska the "Central American Plains Reserve" just to get people to go there. Luckily for us, we had a better reason for being there: This was the place the great Norman Rush had written about. Naturally there was no sign.
Except, of course, for the wooden sign, just inside the park, for "Tsau 183 km." We squealed in triumph, even if we were barely closer to Tsau, despite our harrowing ride, than where we'd started. Our squeals startled an oryx. With an equine frame, a bulbous undercarriage, and a masked face of black and white, the oryx looks like a cross between a horse, a zebra and a murderer. The next morning we took a short game drive around the Kalahari, a drive that, for all intents and purposes other than literary pilgrimage, might profitably have taken place anywhere else in Botswana, though on our way past the Tsau sign and the fence en route back to non-Kalahari Botswana we did see five cheetahs eating an oryx. From Maun we hitchhiked 16 more hours into Windhoek, every stalled second of which looked unmistakably like the Kalahari we'd left.
In Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer at last reaches D. H. Lawrence's home in Sicily. "We had found it," he writes. "We stood silently. I knew this moment well from previous literary pilgrimages: You look and look and try to summon up feelings which don't exist. You try saying a mantra to yourself, 'D. H. Lawrence lived here,' you say. 'I am standing in the place he stood, seeing the things he saw...,' but nothing changes, everything remains exactly the same: a road, a house with sky above it and the sea glinting in the distance."
Only the foolish would expect more. A literary pilgrimage is necessarily an encounter with the banal, an encounter with a Kalahari that looks exactly like both where you've come from and where you're going. We would be despondent, in fact, if it were otherwise. The last thing we'd want to find is a landscape that made inspiration foreordained; it would diminish what was there imagined, what made us suffer to our Kalaharis in the first place.
Photographs by Gideon Lewis-Kraus.
This piece is part of our Winter Issue "Get Out of Town" travel feature. Check out Sasha Grey's trip to Thailand and Germany here, Twilight star Jackson Rathbone's account of being robbed in San Francisco here, Momofuku Milk pastry chef Christina Tosi's 10 traveling rules here, designer Nicola Formichetti's love letter to Ibiza here, London trio Is Tropical's crazy, drunken time in Russia here and video artist Mika Rottenberg and sculptor Jon Kessler's account of going off-off-off-the grid in Botswana here. Brooklyn artist Michael Pellew's amazing celebrity transportation drawings are here and '70s super model and actress Marisa Bernson's account of camping in Africa is here.
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