Sunrise with Seamonsters (27 page)

Some years ago (I was about twenty-four) I was appointed Acting Director of an adult education institute. But this was in Uganda and my chief responsibility was okaying invoices and signing chits for the vast shipments of green bananas that were devoured by the residential students. Another task was counselling the students and helping them solve the ticklish problems that arose in their transfer from a mud hut to the barrack-like building in which they were housed on our Kampala compound. Most, if not all, were much older than I, and while some of the problems concerned merely bed-wetting or drunkenness or lighting fires in their rooms, other were more serious. Major Oyet, who attended our course in Current Affairs for Uganda Army Officers, kept a machine-gun in his trunk. What struck me as unsafe about his fondness for the gun was the tendency he shared with his fellow officers for drinking whisky at breakfast, and one Saturday night he threatened to shoot Mr Ofumbi, the cook. I need hardly add that but for the single Kakwa among them, all these officers have since been promoted to glory by Idi Amin.

On the surface of it, the simple request by a man from Kigezi, his desire to get to Wales as quickly as possible, was not unusual. Ugandan students were constantly pleading with me to help them leave the country—indeed (and this was long before Amin) most of the students saw education purely as a means to emigrate, to go on an overseas course and never come back. The man from Kigezi wanted to go on a course, any course—Audio visual, pesticides, agriculture, primary teaching, developing suitable materials for bush schools, mental health, it didn't matter. His desperation was apparent. He stated his reason: he was being forced to marry his sister-in-law.

He had, naturally, participated a few years before in the Urine Ceremony of the Bakiga. This ritual is a necessary part of the marriage vow. The groom and all his brothers place their hands on the seat of a stool, and the bride—who has been chosen for her obesity and the wide gaps in her teeth—lifts her skirt and jams her naked buttocks onto their hands. Finally, with a certain amount of encouraging hilarity, she urinates and in this way shows that she is symbolically wedded to each of
the hands she taints, the brothers of her husband. The husband has the strongest claim, but if he happens to be out of town, any of the brothers may sleep with her. If the husband dies, one of the brothers must take charge of her, which is not the chore it might seem. Men in Kigezi do little more than spend the day drinking a kind of fermented porridge they call beer, while the women do all the farming and child-rearing.

The man in my office was muttering in what I first thought was his own language. I realized that he was saying "Coleg Harlech, Coleg Harlech", his destination, another adult education college in Wales. He wanted to leave Uganda; he did not wish to return to his village; he would not marry his sister-in-law.

I was deeply shocked. I told him so. I reminded him of his obligation, of the implications of the Urine Ceremony, and I advised him to go home. He became very fierce.

"You do not understand my life," he shouted. "African life is badness. Relatives always staying, cousins coming to Kampala to wear my shirts, brothers wanting money. I hate it! You do not know..."

His arguments were uninteresting and selfish, I thought. Yet as he was talking it occurred to me that while I saw only benefit in the kinship system called the Extended Family, he saw it as a burdensome invasion of his privacy. His answer—a diploma course in Wales—was evasive and provisional. But our discussion was futile. I believed in the Extended Family; he didn't.

Perhaps now he is convinced. In Uganda, there is no government, no law, and little, paid employment. There is chaos. But beneath this chaos there is something orderly and protective, the old sowing, growing, beer drinking, hut-building superstructure of the extended family. Except for that, Uganda would be total jungle and cannibalism might prove a necessity.

It is a long way from the gorilla wilderness of Southwest Uganda to the prim suburbs of Boston, but the family pattern has similarities in both places. I didn't, thank God, have to endure a Urine Ceremony, and I would not jump at the chance to sleep with my sister-in-law, much less marry her. Yet there are dependencies I recognize, and virtues which have gone unremarked upon, and if life offers any greater pleasure than a secure place in a large family I do not know what that could possibly be.

It was part of my luck to have been born in a populous family of nine unexampled wits. But my father was one of eight, and so was my mother. Two fertile clans: and together they have produced the equivalent of a multi-national (French-Canadian-American-Italian) corporation of
people—some, I admit, I barely know. Isn't that the way with all corporations? Only recently I learned that I have relatives in Piacenza and Guayaquil; it makes the thought of visits to Italy and Ecuador more attractive. The larger the family the more there is to do, but also there are more people to do it. In African societies, where women do all the farming, men take up polygamy and they prosper. In the fairer extended family there is a division of labor among the children which is unknown to the only child (inevitably made a bundle of nerves by the persistent attentions of his doting parents). The large family, splicing clan to clan, becomes more than a community—it becomes a nation. And nation speaks unto nation: no one wrote more passionately about Biafra, which was in every sense an Ibo family which had become a nation, than Auberon Waugh, himself a member of an extended family with the dimension and wholeness of a nation, being like-minded, self-sufficient and with its capital at Combe Florey. Because of this family's independence, Waugh writes from a position of strength.

Literature does not provide many examples of the extended family. It is a fiendishly difficult subject to deal with, for it is hard to do justice to it without writing a mammoth novel. The best of these is
A House for Mr Biswas
by V. S. Naipaul. It appears to be a chronicle of the inroads a huge family makes on the privacies and personal freedom of Mohun Biswas. Biswas's stated aim is to paddle his own canoe—"the paddler" his mockers call him. One could easily get the impression from reading
Mr Biswas
that Naipaul is describing an entire society. Well, he is; but Naipaul would call "society" a politician's word. He is describing a family, one of the largest in our literature. And though he deals with the persecution of one member of the family, he elaborates the plot in dynastic terms, for at the end of the novel Mohun Biswas has staked his own claim, and the "house" of the title becomes an extension of the Tulsi's "Monkey House". Naipaul's novel reads like a homage to family life. It is impossible to read this book and not be moved by the way the loyalties in Biswas's family resemble those of the Tulsis.

It is easier to describe the downfall of a family and its disintegration than to describe the complex ways a family grows and extends. Minor novelists have attempted it, but apart from the Russians I can think of very few writers who have managed to convey the complexity, of the extended family. We get it in William Faulkner's "Snopes trilogy"—
The Hamlet, The Mansion
and
The Town,
in Galsworthy's
Forsyte Saga
and in the neglected novels of Wright Morris.

There is no shortage of family novels. But here one must make a distinction between the family—a group of blood-relations—and the extended family, a corporate group in which some members are related by loyalty and others by blood. We don't have very precise words for
members of an extended family. Anthropologists become incomprehensible in trying to explain the subtleties of this sort of kinship. "Brother" is a fairly common designation, but "brother" is more affectionate than specific. A brother is just one of the bunch.

So it is in my own immediate family. The nucleus is recognizable: Father-Mother-First child. The addition of six more children was a complicating factor, various marriages added more family members, and the acquisition of property complicated things still further. The Tulsis, the Snopeses, the Forsytes begin to make a little sense, and
Emma
no sense at all. No longer is it a question of a little family in a little house. With more children, more houses, more duties to perform, more skills to learn, I might have foundered. Quite early in life, I came to regard my eldest brother as nearly indistinguishable from my father; a good deal later, I found myself treating the youngest as I would my son. In small families authority rests with the parents, but I had to learn the chain of command. The eldest, having mastered a skill, passes this skill to the next in line. It begins with donkey-work, dishwashing and snow-shovelling, the eldest superintending; but it moves on to music appreciation, to reading, to learning to drive a car. I learned to drive from my second-oldest brother, who had been taught by the eldest, who himself had received instruction from my father. My sister blames her bad driving on me.

Careers were another matter. "Find your nitch," my father used to say. My parents seemed to believe that it was essential that none of our careers was duplicated, and (this might have been unconscious on their part) they had it mapped out. The idea was that eventually there would be a painter, a priest, a doctor, a nun, a teacher, and so forth. In the event, we did not pursue those particular vocations (I was supposed to be the doctor; I abandoned the study when I came to organic chemistry), but we followed the pattern: our careers are different and mutually useful. And there are priests and doctors and teachers elsewhere in the family—why put them out of business?

It amazes me just how complete the family was, and how it has grown. Many of us were delivered at birth by my uncle, the doctor, and he has remained medical adviser to the family. Every nation needs a free health service; in the land of the whopping medical bill (the average family of four forks out four thousand dollars a year to doctors) Uncle Jim was ours. Another uncle—I never know whether to call him Uncle Louis or Father Mario—has performed marriages for some of us and baptized others and administered the Last Rites to at least two. A doctor and a priest can take care of practically everything. But there is an engineer uncle, too, a father of—I think—ten children, and designer of a bridge in Brazil that appears on postcards. If one needed a summer job one could always find employment with his construction company. I didn't, though
my two older brothers did and enjoyed the work, since several of their fellow workers were our cousins. One of my younger brothers chose a different option, working for a time in another relative's bakery. But I cannot imagine any of us doing this sort of work except for relatives: manual labor or bakery work is not drudgery when it is kept in the family, though I am sure we would have scoffed at the suggestion that we do it for perfect strangers.

In the same way, public issues could be kept within the family. When atomic testing was exercising people's minds in the 1960's it never occurred to us to write to the government, but rather to buttonhole our physicist uncle who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in a nuclear reactor somewhere on Long Island. The question of faith was always put to our priest uncle and socialized medicine to our doctor uncle. My first girlfriend was my cousin, Susan—a harmless romance and because of that the memory is idyllic.

It sounds like perfection: examples of industry and ambition and achievement and romance. But there were unambitious ones as well, a few failures, some drop-outs and dolts. The beauty of the system is that, while the world finds it hard to be tolerant of the non-scorer, there is always room for him in the extended family. He is "a good scout", "loads of fun", the comedian at family get-togethers. To ridicule a member of the family for being bone-idle was considered heresy: if we wouldn't have him, who would? Indeed, being "a good scout" counted considerably more than splitting the atom, something I suppose our physicist uncle did every day.

But we had cousins who weren't cousins, aunts who weren't aunts. An extended family includes people who have been recruited because they are liked and might be useful. Growing up, I noticed how children from smaller families used to become attached to ours. They used my older brothers as I did—to find out how cars worked or to learn baseball. They ate with us and if we were going somewhere my father encouraged them to come along. He called each one "Jack"—he still calls most people "Jack". As time went on, they remained part of the family, acting as unpaid handymen or plumbers or lawyers or whatever. The system was subtle, but if an outsider was willing (and "a good scout") he could find himself the object of a recruitment campaign. Aunt Gert was not really an aunt. She had gone to college with my mother, her father had shot himself, she was unmarried. Aunt Gert took us to movies on Saturday afternoons and, after each movie, to confession. She frequently ate with us.

This made mealtimes something of an affair. "How are you, Jack?" my father would say to Eddie Flaherty at the end of the table. Eddie coveted my brother's shotgun. The next evening Eddie's seat might be taken by
John Brodie, who captured toads in our back yard and usually stuck around to eat, or by Kenny Hall, who taught me to make model planes, or by any of my brothers' friends. Perhaps as a reaction to my father's "Jack", my brother Alex gave all his friends bizarre nicknames: Pigga, Chicky, Dada, Pin. Ten years ago, when the family really began to sprawl, my parents decided to buy a house on Cape Cod. This proved too small. They bought another, then my brothers began to colonize the Cape, each buying a house within driving distance of my parents. And now I have one. So August is what every mealtime used to be, a sort of jamboree. Cooking, driving, outings to the beach and childminding are shared. No longer simply my parents and their children, but grandchildren, cousins and nieces and nephews, and the recruits. Meetings are arranged, meals planned, weenie roasts organized; but because it is a family of poor planners (the extended family, by its very nature, prevents one from being a good planner) things go wrong and there is usually twice as much food as is necessary.