Review on https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/61444775 of “Suspended in Vast Plain” by Judyta Szacillo. She wrote one hundred and seventy reviews and hundreds of ratings for GoodReads. Her picks are books on history – she is a medieval historian with a PhD (Queen’s University in Belfast), on science and philosophy – she is a university’s Open Research Assistant at this moment of her career, and occasionally – biographies and memoirs.
Judyta dagged into the subtext of my book, perhaps not particularly deep; nevertheless, she saw “that time marked them forever, and they carry their Nigerian memories like tattoos, remembering the moments of pain but wearing them like a badge of honour.” Meaning marked us who were in Africa, especially the author. Indeed, that time stained me for life. And I polished them – the memories – to shine writing the memoir.
How easily can one rub off a tattoo from your skin or scratch it away many years after it was carved in? I remember when we settled in Canada and dunked into the Polish emigration wave of the 1980s. Then, everybody was anxious to share the experience, bitter or funny, of their migratory path. Everybody talked for hours about immigrant camps and conditions in Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria, Greece, Denmark, and Norway, sometimes to escape the fresh Canadian struggles. So we talked about Africa, episodes, adventures and miseries. The migration stories competed for several years. Then people spread and sunk into Canadian soil. Many acquaintances and friendships evaporated in time in thin air. In time memories of the months spent between Poland and Canada or the USA faded, forgotten and marginalized.
Perhaps, two years of migratory suspension in Africa deserve a badge of honour. However, putting the story of the time in an exotic place called “Vast Plain” is out of the ordinary, I bet. The records were sketchy at best, so memory played an important role. So, I am proud of being able to structure and plot, revive the characters from the remote past, and balance the truth with entertainment.
The African adventure became a short episode in my life, as brief as a quarter of an hour in the entire day. Undoubtedly, the most cherished and worthy of returning to.