Letters from Togo

by Susan Blake, Albert E. Stone (Foreword)

Blake's adventurous essays--her Letters from Togo--are based on the letters she wrote to her friends from Lom(r), the West African capital where she spent a Fulbright year teaching American literature from 1983 to 1984. As Blake begins the process of making sense out of a vibrant, seeming anarchy, we are pulled along with her into the heart of Togo--a tiny dry strip of a country no one can even find on a map. With her delightful prose and insight for detail Blake introduces us to Mahouna, her housekeeper, who runs a cold drink business from his refrigerator in a country where electricity is unreliable; to American Lee Ann and her Togolese family, who works at the American school to earn the fees for a private education for her children; and to the suave Ren(r), wearing silk shirts and a most seductive smile, who teeters on the edge of the Togolese and expatriate worlds

Genres: Africa, Nonfiction

199 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Chelsea · Rating 1 out of 5]

In summary: Out. Of. Touch. Like a Dorothy who crash-lands in Oz and then deems herself an authority on the new land while describing what she sees without ever setting foot out of the house, Blake claims a knowledge of Togo that is superficial and tinged with unintentional racism.

Please, please take my advice and read "The Village of Waiting" by George Packer if you want to learn anything about the realities of everyday Togolese life and culture or the actual history of the country. Packer's memoir weaves together his immersion in Togolese life with astute observations about the complexity of development in Togo and Africa, in the context of colonial history in the country and throughout the continent.

"Letters from Togo," in contrast, portrays the life of an American whose perspective is insulated by and contained within the Western ex-patriot community. This in and of itself is an interesting world, but what makes the book cringe-inducing is Blake's continual misinterpretation of her privilege and cultural tourism as an accurate representation of Togolese life. She comes close to recognizing the bias of her perspective with her parrot-like repetition of an awareness that "there are haves and have-nots," but then veers away with laughable conclusions like "Travel in Togo is easy" (Yes, for a white American who buys a Honda Civic in her first week there!) and "...the African women are older and more independent than the typical American students." (She then goes on to identify "independent" as being tied down to a husband and children.)

This book is painfully self-unaware. Blake has a superficial understanding of politics and the hierarchy how things work in Togo. She tells the story of Dictator-President Étienne Eyadéma by relating the text of a piece of propaganda, a children's book, published by the party. Her analysis of history goes no further, seeks no other sources. This is not the only area where she miserably fails to delve. She never learns a local language, she never really gets to know her Togolese friends. Maybe the wealth divide prevents this to an extent, but her unfortunate mistake is not really comprehending the extent of this, and its implications. She fancies herself a resident of Lome, and says as much, expressing offense and bafflement that she would be perceived as a tourist.

Quotes follow with more examples of her infuriating lack of cultural and general awareness...respectively: inability to understand the lifelong pervasiveness of cultural socialization, speaking on behalf of Togolese colleagues, assumed cultural supremacy (my way is right and better, Africa is "backwards), and racist terminology/value judgements:

Because she spent nine years in the U.S., I tend no to make the cultural adjustments when talking with Elise that I do with most other people. I figure she'll know what I mean. But I keep being surprised at how differently we understand things." (p 104)


Rather than teach an almost certainly controversial book, "I did what (I say) any Togolese professor would have done, ordered a collection of short stories." (p.102, parenthesis hers, not mine)

Getting access to information is a challenge, "So it seemed like a sudden dawn of rationality when the stationery store opened in the commercial center a few weeks ago." (p 94)

"The temple of the python was a gyp." (111)

In the forward, Albert E. Stone compares "Letters in Togo" to a 1920s travel memoir "African Apprenticeship" by Margery Perham. He says, "Blake has confronted and discarded the racism, snobbery, and chauvinism which Perham so artlessly voices as concomitants of her fascination with and love of Africa.... 'I seemed to feel the immensity of the problem they represented and the absurdity of my attempting to understand it,' she [Perham] confesses with a trepidation Blake never feels." Although Perham's racism and elitism seem to be more outwardly obvious, she also struggles with her own irrelevance. The forward is right to point out that Blake doesn't seems to struggle with the incongruousness of her presence and the relevance or sustainability of her work. She is merely there to teach for a year and record the sights and sounds, diary-like. It would be a better book if she had grappled with her context in a way that showed she understood it.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of essays based on letters written home while she spent a Fulbright year in Lome, Togo, from 1983-1984.

[Liralen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blake spent a year in Togo in the mid-80s, teaching English on a Fulbright scholarship. Some time after her return to the States, she pulled together letters she'd written in that year, revised them, and wrote some new pieces in the same form. As such, this is somewhere between memoir and an essay collection; certain threads carry through the whole book, but each 'letter' tends to have a specific focus.

She's a good writer, and the letters are certainly funny and interesting, but upon finishing the book I realised that I know little more about Togo (this being the first book I've read set in the country) than I did going in. Much of what she writes about involves expats, or things more common to expats than locals, and I can't help but think that her story wouldn't feel very different if 'Togo' were replaced with 'Nigeria'. Or 'Tanzania'. Or 'Gabon'. She has some perspective, and spends a fair amount of time and space trying to figure out differences between her understanding and that of the Togolese around her, but when push comes to shove she spends very little time outside her comfort zone (erm, insofar as spending a year in a different country/culture is staying within one's comfort zone).

The parts of the book I found most interesting, and wished she'd spent more time on, were the chapters discussing the interpretations of students to Updike's 'A&P' or Walker's The Color Purple (the latter discussed not with students but with acquaintances). There she gets closest to understanding cultural differences and ideas; I would have loved to see more of the content cover the courses she taught.