Swimming in the Congo, by Margaret Meyers (Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions, 1995)
Short vignettes share the childhood story of Grace, daughter of missionaries living in the Congo during the 1960s. Readers enter the Congo through her day-to-day experiences with the natives; fellow foreigners; and the landscape itself, including her attachment to the Congo River. Meyers, herself the child of missionaries in then Zaire, adeptly portrays the pull Grace sometimes feels between her Protestant upbringing and her new experiences in the Congo.
Related Websites
“A light breeze ruffled the long grass and set the traveler’s palms swishing gently like enormous green fans. The river lay broad and blue beneath the early-afternoon sun, so smooth that the billowing clouds cast perfect reflections. There was no traffic on the water, save one lone pirogue gliding west with the current. A tall thin man stood in the back of the pirogue holding a steering pole, and his laughter drifted across the wet spaces. I watched the water hyacinths float downstream, tangled clusters of green tipped with lavender, their river-loving roots sunk deep in water instead of soil. I knew those hyacinths lived the river as I never would, resting in unnamed lagoons and roaming tributaries that didn’t exist on my father’s maps. They could wander fifteen hundred kilometers, from the Kisangani white water to glossy Malebo Pool, and never leave home.” – from Swimming in the Congo, by Margaret Meyers