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Gods of Noonday: A White Girl's African Life
by Elaine Neil Orr
Product Group: Book
Publisher: University of Virginia Press (2005-08-25)
ISBN: 081392510X
EAN: 9780813925103
Dewy Decimal #: 920
Paperback: 308 pages
SKU: T071112-2819
Condition: Very Good
Comments: Very good overall condition. No writing, very tight binding. Ships same day or next in a bubble mailer. Enjoy.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
The daughter of medical missionaries, Elaine Neil Orr was born in Nigeria in 1954, in the midst of the national movement that would lead to independence from Great Britain. But as she tells it in her captivating new memoir, Orr did not grow up as a stranger abroad; she was a girl at home--only half American, the other half Nigerian. When she was sent alone to the United States for high school, she didn't realize how much leaving Africa would cost her. It was only in her forties, in the crisis of kidney failure, that she began to recover her African life. In writing Gods of Noonday she came to understand her double-rootedness: in the Christian church and the Yoruba shrine, the piano and the talking drum. Memory took her back from Duke Medical Center in North Carolina to the shores of West Africa and her hometown of Ogbomosho in the land of the Yoruba people. Hers was not the dysfunctional American family whose tensions are brought into high relief by the equatorial sun, but a mission girlhood is haunted nonetheless--by spiritual atmospheres and the limits of good intentions. Orr's father, Lloyd Neil, formerly a high school athlete and World War II pilot, and her mother, Anne, found in Nigeria the adventure that would have escaped them in 1950s America. Elaine identified with her strong, fun-loving father more than her reserved mother, but she herself was as introspective and solitary as her sister Becky was pretty and social. Lloyd acquired a Chevrolet station wagon which carried Elaine and her friends to the Ethiope River, where they swam much as they might have in the United States. But at night the roads were becoming dangerous, and soon the days were clouded by smoke from the coming Biafran War. Interweaving the lush mission compounds with Nigerian culture, furloughs in the American South with boarding school in Nigeria, and eventually Orr's failing health, the narrative builds in intensity as she recognizes that only through recovering her homeland can she find the strength to survive. Taking its place with classics such as Out of Africa and more recent works like The Poisonwood Bible and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Gods of Noonday is a deeply felt, courageous portrait of a woman's life.
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Customer Reviews
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Excellent Book!
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-08-28
I too was a MK in Nigeria, and I was there some of the same years Elaine writes about. In fact, our family lived on a missionary compound not too far from where Elaine lived early on. Because I could relate to her experiences and some of her feelings, at times I felt as if she was stealing my thoughts, emotions, and memories. Would I have enjoyed this book if not for the personal ties? ABSOLUTELY! She is a wonderful writer, and I wish she would write more.
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A whiny and self-absorbed memoir
Rating  (2)
Date: 2006-08-06
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
It may have been therapeutic for the author to revisit the emotional insecurites of her childhood, but it's no fun for the reader. I read this book to learn about her experiences as a white girl growing up in Africa, but this is not a book about Africa. It is a book about a whiny and self-absorbed person who is STILL agonizing over not being elected the princess of the Valentine's Dance in middle school. The person I feel sorriest for is her mother, who comes in for criticism for her emotional distance, when all the evidence offered by the author suggests that her mother was a loving and caring parent, albeit with a career of her own.
The same week I read this I also read Zenzele. Read that one and give this a miss.
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Plenty at Stake in "Gods of Noonday"
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-01-25
7 out of 9 customers found this reveiw helpful
Elaine Neil Orr's memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl's African Life, is an essential book in an era of global expansion. Orr's courage to claim as home Nigeria, the land of her birth and childhood, despite her expatriate status, should encourage expatriate children everywhere to claim their various nations, whether they integrated to host cultures or not. It should encourage them to do the archeology, as Orr does, uncovering the archetypes of their host cultures, whether they were conscious of them at the time or not. And it should encourage families raising children overseas to give them a fuller immersion, permit them host country playmates, and encourage local education and language study. Parents employed outside their borders must recognize that their childhood homes are not their children's childhood homes.
Orr's most symbolic immersion was swimming in the cool clear Ethiope, and she claims the river as her sacred ground. "Nothing you could tell me about Jehovah was equal to the proof of divinity provided by the mere existence of so lovely a river. And so I worshipped it."
The river represents the cultural immersion Orr longs for, after the fact. Her life in Nigeria seems decorous and material as she recalls American girl toys she got for Christmas in an American decorated house, later wishing it had been African art. Orr contrasts herself to "real missionaries" who spoke native languages, lived among Nigerians and regarded her, a white child, as no "more special than they (Nigerian children) were."
Honesty glimmers through that exceeds "Out of Africa" and "The Poisonwood Bible," however much those books claim to be "of the land." For instance, Orr sees the anger of Nigerians directed at American missionaries during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement when bulletin boards were defaced in the hospital where her father was administrator and her mother a nurse.
It seems that Orr mourns a land she lived on, often secluded from, rather than in and among. And yet she dares to claim more, and that claim of being Nigerian is like catharsis in her illness, which is, perhaps, her most poignant claim. She suffers a disease, diabetes, common to African Americans in the U.S., many of whom, she realizes, may not have received the care she did as she faces end stage renal disease.
Dr. Orr's writing recalls Isaak Denisen's, in that there is longing on every page. But it also recognizes the fallacy of claiming too much, knowing (as Ngugi wa Thiong'o did in "Weep Not Child," his lament in response to "Out of Africa"), that the land taken by colonists was not theirs to mourn. Even when her mother attempts to involve the teenage Elaine in Sunday evening meetings, she realizes, "I had become too Americanized to feel comfortable trying to pass as a Urhobo girl...."
Her voice and project gain strength as she interweaves her adult experience of declining health and relationships, finding that she has resisted intimate friendships, whether because she moved so often, or because she is seeking to "rekindle a greater loss." The reader may wish to know more about how her marriage was resolved, but that may be another volume.
Grippingly Orr writes about the Biafran war (1967-70), the suffering all around and the shields thrown up for the children even after the loss of a mission surgeon. "You really should not try to raise children in the midst of a war and pretend it isn't there," she writes in one of many direct addresses to her readers. We are drawn in.
Orr is also eloquent about the estrangement experienced on returning to the land that was supposed to be her home. She refutes the misconception that the trauma of MK life is about landing in Africa without prior knowledge of the culture. "West Africa will take you in." Rather the trauma is in moving back to America and trying to pass as an insider. "It's hard to hold up under that kind of pressure and remember who you are."
She finished high school in the U.S. where she "I often attempted greatness, but it was very hard without a village behind me." Her unique observation echoes a weighty theme among global nomads (see "Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global"). Orr recognizes that, despite being enriched by Nigeria, she was impoverished of community at "home." The America her parents were rescuing her for was already lost to her, and her boarding school compound was seperated from African village life.
Also essential at a time when missionary kids are confronting their missions (see: mksafetynet.com) and demanding trained dorm parents and child advocates, is Orr's recognition of sexual hazing and ritualized beatings in the boys' dorm. The rules of decent behavior frayed, so that "I left like the foreigner I was. I left the way I always left: without a tear." Her connectedness to any place was unavailable to her. Her wrenching refrain is, "For all I loved there, it was not mine to hold."
Even those who've lived all their lives as rooted as trees should read this book for Orr's masterful style; her resonant similes, "My youth was slipping away like badly spent money"; her metaphorical verbs, "the joy that petaled my youth"; her strong declaratives, "I was a Nigerian spirit born to an American mother: a crossed star, a mixed message, a long hunger."
There is plenty at stake in this book, as Orr faces death or rebirth from her illness. The tension builds and the ending is exquisite.
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A Kindred Spirit
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-01-23
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Although never a missionary kid, Orr's memories of growing up during the 60s and early 70s struck a resonant chord and I felt as if I knew her - or perhaps WAS her. We were born in the same year, and like Orr I was raised in the Southern Baptist Church. I was a "GA" like she was and learned early my "place" in the dynamics of a church congregation. So many of the conflicting emotions Orr felt as a girl who wasn't sure where she belonged, as well as her ambivalent feelings about her family led to an insightful prose that accurately describes my own emotions during that time in my life - although we were an ocean apart. With clear, concise writing that often turned poetic, this book was an enjoyable read from start to finish, and I'm sure to re-visit it time and again.
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A Memior Which Speaks to Parents
Rating (5)
Date: 2003-12-01
While the descriptions of the land and the people of Nigeria are powerful and beautiful, the relationship of the children and the author in particular, to the adults and to their parents really spoke to me. Do we pay attention to our children? Are we there when they need us? What happens when we are so distracted by our work and our passion that the child's voice goes unheard? Ms. Orr's book also portrays the universal struggles of young women, teenagers in particular, as they grow up amidst difficult and demanding societal pressures. Ms. Orr may have felt attached to Africa but America had a hold on her as a young woman. This book offers a rich experience for mothers and daughters to read "Gods of Noonday" together and to explore their own unique relationships. It is also a story of great survival and determination as Ms. Orr faced the very real possibility of losing her battle against Diabetes and kidney failure. "Gods of Noonday" is a treasure.
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