“The Illustrated Out of Africa”, by Karen Blixen

 

288 pages, Cresset Press, ISBN-13: 978-0712624053

My-oh-my but what a problematic book we have here. Consider: a privileged white woman from Denmark – that’s in Europe, the birthplace of White People and, lemme tell ya somethin’ brother, they don’t get much whiter than Danes – leaves the good ole Danevang for Africa, where she steals up to 6000 acres from the helpless natives…well, I guess technically she bought it, but can whitey really be said to buy anything not in Europe? Hmmmmm? She then rapes the native soil by planting coffee – COFFEE! – and exploits the natives by employing them to harvest this Yemeni bean and compounds her sins by selling the stuff like the exploitative capitalist witch that she is. For shame, madam; for ever-lovin’ shame. Only…well, since Baroness Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke was a woman in the 20^th Century she just HAD to be oppressed herself, despite her high falutin’ status, and she provided all sorts of things for the native Kikuyu people who worked her farm, and her husband gave her syphilis, and, hell, Meryl Streep played her in Out of Africa…so she just CAN’T be bad, right? (man, it’s exhausting being woke; I don’t know how the aggrieved do it).

So, anyway, what all this is about is The Illustrated Out of Africa by the aforementioned Baroness Blixen – or Isak Dinesen, if you prefer her pen-name. But this book is not like the other aforementioned Out of Africa movie, as this work is basically a chronological diary of this Baroness-cum-Coffee Farmer and her life in Africa. It is this long-forgotten and long-lost world – good or bad, you decide – that is, perhaps, the central focus of the book, perhaps unwittingly so. For Blixen loved the Africa she lived in and gives a sense that the surrounding natural elements embodied and reflected back her own depths of feelings and her joyous love for them. Throughout her autobiography, Blixen seems to have the uncanny ability to enter other people’s consciousness’ and virtually become the that other person, tracing their otherwise inscrutable thoughts and feelings back through their lives as though she had lived those lives herself. Reading Out of Africa is a magical experience as I felt as though I knew the minds of the other white folk she met on her farm in Africa and, surprisingly, of the native people working and living on the farm. Leaving must have been heart-wrenching for her.

The Illustrated Out of Africa reads like a diary – with notations on what happened on this day or what she said to someone on that day – but it is so much more; a reflection of one woman’s love for a home she built far away from her native land and the people she met. So I guess we can forgive Blixen for her whiteness…just this once.