Home
Mimosa (Talonbooks $11.95)
"ONE NIGHT A FEW MONTHS AGO, IN the Fairview Hotel, Nairobi," commences Bill Schermbrucker in Mimosa (Talonbooks $11.95), "I dreamed that I was walking through an avenue of eucalyptus trees, in the Uasin Gishu district of Kenya, where I was born."
The dreamer enters a strangely familiar house and confronts a young woman sitting at a mahogany desk. "I did not recognize her face from my own memory, but I knew that it was my mother because she resembled a photograph I had recently seen of her, taken when she was nineteen or twenty."
The mother looks very busy. "Is this your house," the dreamer asks. 'No," she says, smiling at the thought, "Do you think I would keep animal skins on the floor? I would have Persian carpets everywhere!" As a child, Schermbrucker was forbidden by his father to attend his mother's funeral in 1950. He possesses almost no mementos of her. So after a visit to Mimosa, the family farm in northern Transvaal, the Capilano College English teacher began to create a fictionalized history of his mother's life and times, addressing his forgotten mother throughout. The result is an intimate novel with an epic historical backdrop, using real names and events from the Boer War, Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, the first stirrings of Mau-Mau rebellion and the privileged lives of the Afrikaaner and British elite. The unusual work is a follow-up to Schermbrucker's first book of autobiographical fiction, Chameleon and Other Stories, also set in Africa, published in 1983. Bill Schermbrucker was born in Kenya in 1938 and came to Canada in the mid-1960's. He is a former editor of the Capilano Review.
[Winter / BCBW 1989]
The dreamer enters a strangely familiar house and confronts a young woman sitting at a mahogany desk. "I did not recognize her face from my own memory, but I knew that it was my mother because she resembled a photograph I had recently seen of her, taken when she was nineteen or twenty."
The mother looks very busy. "Is this your house," the dreamer asks. 'No," she says, smiling at the thought, "Do you think I would keep animal skins on the floor? I would have Persian carpets everywhere!" As a child, Schermbrucker was forbidden by his father to attend his mother's funeral in 1950. He possesses almost no mementos of her. So after a visit to Mimosa, the family farm in northern Transvaal, the Capilano College English teacher began to create a fictionalized history of his mother's life and times, addressing his forgotten mother throughout. The result is an intimate novel with an epic historical backdrop, using real names and events from the Boer War, Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia, the first stirrings of Mau-Mau rebellion and the privileged lives of the Afrikaaner and British elite. The unusual work is a follow-up to Schermbrucker's first book of autobiographical fiction, Chameleon and Other Stories, also set in Africa, published in 1983. Bill Schermbrucker was born in Kenya in 1938 and came to Canada in the mid-1960's. He is a former editor of the Capilano Review.
[Winter / BCBW 1989]
Submitted on February 5, 2004 in By David.
