Word: hoagland
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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African Calliope, Edward Hoagland...
...would be a neglect of the obvious to write about America without mentioning Tocqueville, or Africa without a nod to Conrad. Those authors are not only fixed points to steer by but fetishes that protect a writer from foundering in swamps of detail. Edward Hoagland does not get around to his ritual reference until page 91 of African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan: "Far from learning something new about the black-white torque that is such a misery in America, here I was freer of it. But the other reason why I had come to Africa, instead...
Before the trips in 1976 and '77 to the Sudan described here, Hoagland, 46, had left his spoor in the wilderness of British Columbia, the wooded mountains of Vermont, the scrub of Louisiana and the streets of New York. He carried a supply of solitude in and a supply of observations out. In his essay (Walking the Dead Diamond River) and travel books (Notes from the Century Before), he displayed a gift for elegy that made the city as remote as the boondock, and a knack for seeing the familiar for the first time. In Africa...
...Hoagland does not burden the reader with a false sense of wonder or an exaggerated sense of adventure. He conveys what he learns as something that a middle-aged man should already know: months of wandering in a hard place make one sick, lonely, itchy and tired. "I was weary," he writes, "of the whole African calliope - that nagging, pulsing musical din that has been reverberating strongly without letup for thousands of years before you arrive and will be continuing without any respite for sickness or fatigue long after you have left the earth...
...Hoagland's footsteps are hardly the first to fall on East Africa from the outside world, any more than were those of Sir Richard Burton, the demonic Victorian explorer and scholar of the forbid den who infiltrated hostile cities dressed in native robes and speaking fluent Arabic. By contrast, Hoagland drifts in and out of stagnant backwaters, a rumpled, skinny fugitive from L.L. Bean whose spoken English is hampered by a bad stutter. He is as puzzling and exotic to his hosts as they are to him, one of a long line of white hunters and note takers whom...