At Home Abroad
Cód:
491_9780911051674
At Home Abroad is a stunning autobiography of Nancy Henderson-Jamess youth in Africa. Heart-wrenching is her uprooting at age 15 when the war for independence began, from Angola, whose natural world, people, customs, languages she so loved. Nancy bravely and articulately recounts a true saga of personal loss and bereavement. But out of the crucible of conflicts between herself and her parents, the Africa she loved and the America from which she felt estranged, comes crystalline strength, confidence, humor, and self-knowledge. Her journey to wholeness, with its exquisite analysis and detail, enlightens us, so that we, too, see our own lives with new understanding and compassion and recognize better our place in the 21st century as citizens of the world. Judy Hogan, Founding Editor of Carolina Wren Press, 1976-91. In this intimate and detailed autobiography, Nancy Henderson-James throws open the door on a room in the history of religion that has been locked and double-bolted: the life of a child of Christian missionaries in the 1950s in Africa. It is not another story of the children of a crazy preacher or an abusive father. Rather it is a story of the loneliness of a daughter of liberal Protestant missionaries who do (almost) everything right professionally, but are absent in crucial ways to the lives of their children. I was dancing between complex alliances of race, nationality, gender and religion. Readers will wince at a wastebasket made from an elephants foot, at a child going to a male teacher to tell a secret that belongs to a parent, at images of spacious homes and multiple servants in a village of poor dwellings - . . . my life in white colonial Angola . . .in the midst of a system fast coming apart. But At Home Abroad is also the story of a young woman finding her own way to survival, to freedom, and to her own spiritual path. Pat Schneider, author: Writing Alone and With Others, Oxford University Press, 2003 Nancy Henderson-Ja
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