Into the Arms of Africa, continued...
tribal Africa. More than a few times, I could put myself directly into Colin's shoes as he navigated his relationship with Joe—and it was uncanny. I'm not so sure even his biographer could relate as deeply to certain instances which I think nearly defy understanding by outsiders. At any rate, for me, the bottom line is that this book and these lives have truly become a small part of what is me (how could anyone forget them!). It's like they lived their lives "wrong side out" and we got a rare look at how humans actually work, thus helping us to understand how we ourselves work. Normally we don’t see such a depth in others by which to juxtaposition our own lives for dissection and comparison.
But enough of philosophizing. More specifically, this book is fascinating because Colin Turnbull was a complicated man of disparate interests—a world traveler, investigator of philosophies and searcher for love and the elusive understanding of it. At a young age he knew there was something he wanted and set off to find it; perhaps he even knew something of what it was. He made things happen. He savored immersion into whatever were his interests and his emotions. His "bizarre" placement of his own empty casket next to Joe's is an example of that. It doesn't seem so bizarre when you know Colin. He immersed. He wished to wring out the last drop of emotion and taste it fully.
In today's carefully nuanced judgments of what constitutes a proper motive for helping the indigent, or for a fascination with the exotic, or for traveling to tribal areas and deigning to "help" the natives—or even for the act of photographing them—it is disarming to see Colin's (and the biographer's) direct confrontation with all this mental gauze.
Perhaps what furrows the brow in trying to assess this book after the last page is turned is that the typical biography frames and displays a life we might largely want to emulate—or decidedly not—and the lessons are usually easy to peg. But the picture of Colin and Joe is more abstract—not so much good or bad, it just is. And what we take from it depends on how we look at it, given the eyes of our own life experience.