How to Cook a Crocodile: A Memoir with Recipes

November 4, 2010

Bonnie Lee Black experienced “nostalgia for Africa” – an affliction so common that a phrase was coined – since 1972 when she left the continent after living there for several years. In 1996, inspired by a Peace Corps ad in the New York Times, she returned.

Over the course of her two-year post in the equatorial rainforest village of Lastoursville in Gabon, Africa, Black accrued a lifetime of adventures, which are chronicled in her new book, “How to Cook a Crocodile: A Memoir with Recipes.”

She will host a book signing on Saturday, Nov. 6 from 2-4pm at Moby Dickens Bookstore on 124-A Bent Street.

“In America, we tend to value things only by money so we think, ‘Oh these people are very poor, they only make a dollar a day.’ But they have other riches that we’re not throwing into the calculation: friends, family, time… If I had to say in short my purpose for writing the book, it’s that I hope it can be an anti-dote to racism,” said Black in a recent interview.

While Black launched a number of service projects during her years of work in Lastoursville, her official job was health and nutrition instructor at the hospital’s mother infant clinic.

A lively assortment of props served as her assistants. Chantal Chanson, a purple-haired homemade puppet sang catchy tunes that were also recipes for dehydration medicine; Henri, an eight inch carved wood penis was the model for AIDS prevention demonstrations. These and other theatrics helped solidify her reputation as “folle,” crazy woman, a label she embraced.

“I’d be as crazy as can to keep their attention so they’d go back to their villages and say to their friends, ‘There’s this woman in Lastoursville you’ve got to go hear what she has to say.’ By the end, my classroom was standing room only,” said Black.

While adapting as best she can to equatorial heat, insects, reptiles and disease threats, Black falls in love with a young photographer from the Ivory Coast; befriends locals including an elderly, childless market vender who Bonnie adopts as her “maman,” and a revered Cameroonian chef who teaches her the art of butchering a crocodile.

She writes with a vivid intimacy and humility that allows messages of simplicity, adaptation and unity to emerge through colorful stories.
“In Africa on the ground, in the towns and villages, they’ve by and large had to struggle all their lives. Struggle is part and parcel of living for them so having struggled myself I feel like there’s this unspoken understanding that we’re all in this together,” says Black.

At one point in the story, she suffers a life-threatening burn. Her boyfriend, Youssef, goes for help, saving her life and she is brought to a hospital in Libreville, Gabon’s capital. The Peace Corps offers to medically terminate her so she can receive care in the United States that would prevent large amounts of permanent scarring on her leg.

“I don’t want it,” I told the Peace Corps doctor who visited me and Youssef at the clinic every evening,” she writes. “‘I won’t be modeling bathing suits or entering any beauty pageants. I want to return to my post.’ I dug in my heels. I had to stay in Africa.”

On top of her daily classes at the hospital, Black also organized and taught English, craft-making, cooking and (particularly inspired) bread-making classes to members of the community.

Towards the end of her two-year post, she teaches bread baking to a group of unemployed foresters, their wives and children. “By this time, in the two years I’d been in Gabon, I’d taught the same bread-baking lesson nearly 100 times. But I was far from tired of it… For me making bread was a labor of love, a near religious experience…” explains Black.

In the tradition of M.F.K. Fisher, author of How to Cook a Wolf, a World War II era memoir, Black includes original and workable recipes in her memoir. They serve as visceral punctuation marks, usually popping up at the end of chapters, offering a chance for readers to bring the smells and tastes of Africa into their homes.

The inclusion of actual letters in the book is another literary tool Black utilizes with success. A particularly poignant one was written to her sister who had apparently been feeling that her life was bland compared to Bonnie’s. Black responds by writing candidly of the unglamorous and frustrating nature of much of her work and then offers encouragement from an African perspective.

“I think life is very difficult, a constant struggle – not a struggle to be “happy” but a struggle to stay on your own footpath and keep hiking…” she writes.

Black currently teaches english, creative non-fiction writing and culinary arts classes at UNM-Taos. This is her first book since the publication of “Somewhere Child” 30 years ago. The latter book, also a memoir, brought Black national recognition and was instrumental in creating the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the implementation of various laws around the issue of child-snatching.

“I have returned to writing, believing now more than ever that writers must write,” Black writes in the forward. “It is our responsibility, our reason for being. It takes courage and audacity, but some truths need to be told and retold in order that the untrue stories don’t outlive them.”

For more information, call Moby Dickens at (575) 758-3050 or visit Bonnie on facebook. Her book is available on www.amazon.com