Consumingdesires seems too much, or out of place. Quiet by Anne McClintock epiphanies rise from the story like the bones that keep rising to the surface in in IL:Triquarterly Books, 1999,216 pp., Still Waters Niger, by KathleenHill. Evanston, the novel: "there they are, bathed in the $24.95 hardcover. clean light of the sun, careless, tossing aside the sand that streams from their FAMINE IS A GEOGRAPHY of haunted cise meditations on motherhood. Under bland and perfect stare." places. In Kathleen Hill's luminous the mother's fever ran a deeper dread. Vivid details emerge as forcefully as novel about hunger, Still Waters in "Sickness is one thing, but suppose the more tumultous events might arrive in a Niger, the heart too is a haunted and hun- mother is perfectly well." Suppose she is different novel, evoking a world of com- gry place. simply too distractedby her own hungers plicated density and joy: women with How many of us could find on a world to attend to the children pressing at the "legs thin as herons"; a lizard "with an map the sunstruck city of Zinder, lashed door? The narratoris haunted by the fear orange head rigid in the sun";the glass of by sand and beset by famine in West Af- that she may never be able to slake her water ringed with flies. The spareness of rican Niger? But for the Irish-American child's thirst or appease her hunger. the plot becomes itself the plot: the nar- narrator of Hill's exquisitely crafted Nowhere before have I read such an rator's dawning discovery that the place, novel, it was there, in Zinder, "floating unsparing meditation on the inadmissi- Kathleen Hill Zinder, which she "had thought com- the seeds of life and death indifferently," ble: that motherhood does not come monplace, even undesirable, has become that desire fastened. naturally. I am familiar with memoirs in B ACK IN ZINDER, searching for her as necessary to you as your breath and Zinder was "a case, always, of unre- which daughters chastise their mothers, own past, the narrator discovers that without it you will die." quited love." Seventeen years before, the but am unaccustomed to a mother ran- the mothers and children of fam- One question courses through the unnamed narrator had lived in Zinder sacking her heart for her own fearful and ine. The novel is threadedwith miniature bo.ok: "What does one need to live?" A with her husband, Chris, he doing re- consuming desires. stories rendered in an immaculate prose. handful of millet? A cup of beans? A search, she being a mother. There, in a Hill has the poet's sense of the vivid, es- breast plump with milk? The frangipani And my own fear? That I shall never wedge of sand, stunned by hot winds sential detail, the novelist's sense of the heavy with blossom? "The indispensable recover from her brief tenancy of a "that made a nightmare of each new human measure of passion and loss. In potato, rotting in the field?" Now in Zin- body now in decline, that housing day," she looked sideways at a world she one of the most moving passages, a near- der, the narrator recalls another great her limbs, meeting her thirst, has left did not understand.At a sky "so dazzling demented father searches for a lime to hunger: the Irish famine of her own fam- me a creature distraught. How am I the eye reels backwards,"at nights so hot save his dying child. In another episode, ily past, the starving man, teeth black to forget the frantic cries that night "the sheets run quick as fire." Marianma, a young woman in her twen- with hunger, the woman distraughtwith after night jolted me from dreams Now, years later, the narrator'sgrown ties, has borne seven children; all have desire: "It can seem a matter of shame, a that gradually took on the dark tones daughter, Zara, has returnedto work at a died in birth. Seven born. Seven dead. hunger as desperate as this. She is sick of disaster? The helpless body, limp clinic, to help the casualties of famine, Now Marianma has retreated into her with desire, she cannot help herself. It is as life, whose rescue from starvation and her mother has gone back briefly to self, barely able to recognize the world. a case of someone lost to the world. But depended on my renouncing the self join her. The plot -turnson the narrator's Stabat mater: this suffering goes beyond for what is she starved? A turnip? The sought in sleep and turning to her encounters with the mothers and chil- comprehension, yet Hill evokes it with a face of God? A caress?" Hill's quiet ex- with full breasts? How is it possible dren of Zinder and an almost unnoticed steadfast gaze. ploration of the hauntings and hungers of for either of us to recover from an secret: what had happened on Zara's Much of the achievement of the novel motherhood makes this novel a work of intimacy such as ours? (p. 75) sixth birthday, seventeen years before? lies in its lyrical restraint; not a word startling power. * During the harmattan, Zinder was Perhapsit is one of our fiercest taboos: filled with the sound of coughing. The for a motherto look this deeply at her own mother, too, was feverstruck. Zara, the ambivalence. Women can seldom admit child, stood in the doorway; it was her that motherhood involves not only con- birthday. But through the film of fever, suming love, but also shame and baffle- the mother could not recognize her. ment, frustrationand rage. When she goes Now, in Zinder, mother and daughterre- to the doctor-the walls of his office cov- call that lost birthday: the daughter's ered with mounted butterflies, "wings mute sense of betrayal, the mother's spread everywhere poised for flight, helpless sense of guilt. When their rec- wings beating wildly"-she cannot an- -aU, onciliation comes, the moment is as swer his questions. "To have pronounced slight as wind on still water, but it bears the word, baby, would have been to admit the force of subtle revelation. openly that there was no way back, no From the still center of the book rise a way to invite the return of the lightdaz- series of lyrical, pained, poetically pre- zled self so recently betrayed." MARCH 3 V APRIL 2. 2000 AT THE STATE.OF'*THE-ART BALTIMORE CONVENTION CENTER Ritual, Myth, and ON THE I-NNER HARBOR I N BALTIMORE MARYLAND 0 Mysticism in the Join tho.usands of fenmnsts from the LUInitedStatcs atnid Work of Mary Butts around thc wo rkd to showvcase thie t' tlmntltemnlt its idea s and tbr the 1 BetweenFeminism and Modernism vision 2 st centurv; as. wll as the diversit of its woIrk, on e CSandcemvsmt, Roslyn Reso Foy Highlight of Fe0ti mst o ( include:cive a -i 'ntcr d Exhiibit HFli )rganized arou:.nndtheic themce Visualize a FeministFutuire," which will t&aturchighitech n xAsfor orgav Unjustlyignored afterher death in 1937, Mary Buttswrote fiction that confrontsand reinterprets nizing iwo)men in. the next centurys a Feminist Career (Cente realityin extraordinaryways, and her modernist and book signings by your favorite femni st authors, vision recallsthe naturalorigins and powersof the femaledivine. In the firstsustained critical study of Butts,Roslyn Reso Foyexplores the significanceof Contact the Fetminist Majority Foundation by Phone (703- feminism,mysticism, and magic in her life and 52 2A2 214 or email. (ep5o2'000 ffictminiist.t:Argyf(ir hotel and writingsand builds a foundationfor furthercritical rcgistration info.:rmattiomnOr check out Expo.)20(X) on the studiesof this remarkablefemale modernist. wvebat xvwwkninist org $34.00 cloth .... .... .--..... ...... FEMItNISTMAJORITY FOUNDATI|ON 16;0 Wilson Blvd. Suite 801 Arfington VA, 22209 * l *S e 0 i T T~ OF ARKANSAS PRESS Mcllroy House * 201 Ozark Avenue* Fayetteville, AR 72701 The Women's Review of Books / Vol. XVII, No. 5 / February2000 5 .