The Desire to Return

In the opening pages of Alexandra Fuller's Scribbling the Cat, the autobiographical protagonist recounts that her journeys in Zambia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are motivated by a desire to return to the colonial past of these countries, specifically to the violent war which lead to the independence of Zimbabwe. After a meeting in Zambia with a man called “K.”, a devout Christian with the murderous record of a white veteran Selous Scout during the independence war, Fuller asks ethical questions about her personal involvement in the war, which she experienced as the child of British settlers. Vastly different from Nietzsche's hypothetical demon that threatens with the eternal return of the same, in Scribbling the Cat the eternal return of the same is not just bearable, but even desirable. Driven by ambivalent manifestations of desire, the narrator travels in pursuit of the past.

In Western culture, the distant past as well as faraway places have always been privileged sites triggering dreams, desire and imaginations. Since late eighteenth-century Romanticism, the desire to escape from the surrounding world into more imaginary realms has been a recurrent motif in Western literature. William Wordsworth returns to his childhood past in The Prelude and John Keats imagines the medieval past in La Belle Dame sans Merci. Exotic places are staged in the work of Samuel Coleridge, such as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and in that of Lord Byron, for instance in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Characteristic of the Romantic focus on the imagination is that a will to realism remains present, even if it is only to highlight that the subject desires to depart from it. Since the surrounding world simply cannot be abandoned altogether, alternative realms come to stand as a paradigm of paradise lost and are imagined in a melancholic manner. As a mode of perception characteristic of childhood, the past or the Orient, the Romantic imagination is imbued with positive qualities that the empirical world lacks.