Still Waters in Niger [Hardcover]

Kathleen Hill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 1999

An autobiographical novel chronicling a woman's ties to her daughter and an unfamiliar culture.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Zinder was a case, always, of unrequited love," according to the unnamed narrator of Kathleen Hill's Still Waters in Niger. Together with her husband and three small children, she once lived in this forbidding West African town, a "city of winds and wheeling vultures, of rocks shimmering in the heat." Yet in the end, its strangeness only made it more precious, and the place became her consuming passion. As the novel opens, the narrator has returned to Niger to visit her eldest daughter, Zara, who works in a medical clinic not far from Zinder. With Zara she retraces the scenes of her young motherhood, searching for the same transcendence she found there 17 years ago. Once again, she longs to become a woman freed from the confines of her own history:

This time, if no other, myth will overtake one's own stumbling story and all the griefs and longings spilled so messily over the sad confusion of one's days will at last assume a noble shape, both tragic and anonymous: Orpheus, unable to resist the backward glance. Demeter, crying for her daughter

Myth does suffuse this story, but not in the way the narrator envisions. As she meets the Hausa women in Zara's clinic, her story becomes a meditation on motherhood, hunger, shame, and love--both universal and specific, metaphorical and concrete. She moves from the clinic's malnourished babies to her own starving Irish ancestors, from her guilt as a mother to her grief as a daughter. In less sure hands, so much abstraction could easily become too much for one slight, plotless novel to bear. But Hill writes like a dream, and her Zinder is both lyrical and precisely observed. Still Waters in Niger is a lovely, satisfying book, as vivid and compressed as a poem. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

The unnamed, Irish-American narrator of Hill's transporting, semi-autobiographical first novel returns, after 17 years, to the searing heat of West Africa and the quiet sound of children murmuring thanks to Allah when a coin is dropped in their open palms. She comes to visit her grown daughter, Zara, who works in a medical clinic in Matameye, Nigeria, near the town Zara had lived in as a child. Alone together for a month (the narrator has left her academic husband behind in New York), mother and daughter reconstruct the strange years they spent as expatriates there and reconcile their changing roles. With a poet's odd precision, Hill resurrects the myth of Demeter and Persephone to help her describe the pathos attached to a child's coming of age and inevitable abandonment of the parent. In the narrator's version, Persephone is swallowed up and Demeter left to stare at "a field of asphodel, stupid beneath the sun," and listen to the "long wink of silence." The narrator's profound, unflashy observations about motherhood, the necessities and extravagances of survival, the effect of travel and dislocation and the peculiar beauty of the drought-struck land are the work of a brilliant essayist. Hill avoids both overexplaining and overexclaiming, and subtly flavors her story with words of the native Hausa language as well as the French of the colonists. Evocative dreams and disturbing memories, superimposed on the narrator's present experience, make a patchwork travelogue similar in effect to Ondaatje's Running in the Family. This is not a novel in the traditional sense, and may frustrate readers with its oneiric refusal to be literal, but it is nonetheless an exquisite piece of writing.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 206 pages
• Publisher: Triquarterly; 1 edition (May 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810150891
• ISBN-13: 978-0810150898
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 3.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,463,309 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

As a young woman in my early twenties, I lived with my husband in Nigeria, gave birth to two children there. Africa was the great good fortune of my young life. Nothing had prepared me for an entry into this world, and I even now imagine I would have had to be reborn - as perhaps I have been - to insure the glimpse I was given. A few years later - now with a third child - we lived in Niger, a country just north of Nigeria on the rim of the desert. It was here that I encountered the face of famine in the young children who were brought to the local clinics. Although I think now it was the sight of these children and the extraordinary landscapes in which they lived that first prompted me to write, I didn't begin writing fiction until I was in my forties. I had read Anna Ahkmatove's poem in which asked by someone in a crowd if she can write the horror they experience outside the prison walls where they wait, she replies, "I can." So in my arrogance, never having written a word, I said to myself, inspired by my brief stare, "I can." I whispered this to myself having no idea at all of the consequences.

So was born my first novel, Still Waters in Niger. But again I was in ignorance that a dream figure who played around the edges of that book, my great grandmother, Bridgit Fitzmaurice McDonough, would open the way into my next, Who Occupies This House. Bridgit left Ireland in 1846 during the time of the potato famine, lost a child at sea on the passage over. Her husband, who'd preceded her to this country, had secured a small leasehold in the Mohawk Valley, met her at the station in the midst of a snowstorm on Christmas Eve, caught pneumonia and was dead within a week.

Famine is endured in silence - unlike the catastrophe of war, for example - and it's the legacy of silence and the ways in which it's played out over many generations that led me to track, to reimagine, to release if I could, the ghosts who lived in the house where I grew up.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a wonderful book!, August 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Still Waters in Niger (Hardcover)

STILL WATERS IN NIGER is so masterfully conceived and written that I was reluctant to finish, reading more and more slowly as I came toward the end. This is a work that grows increasingly powerful and beautiful, especially in its final section and concluding three calls to prayer. The author transported me to Niger and enlarged my understanding of what is is to be a global citizen, a parent (and daughter), a mother, a woman, and (so searchingly) a person. I intend to survey recent issues of the Hudson and Yale Reviews where, according to the jacket, there are other works by Kathleen Hill. May she give us more writing and, soon, another book as fine as this!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The author knows and makes us feel the real Zinder / Niger., June 9, 1999

By 

Julien Cormier - See all my reviews

This review is from: Still Waters in Niger (Hardcover)

I have been in Zinder for three years and in Niger for 12 years. In "Still Waters in Niger" the author Kathleen Hill puts me back there as it was, as it is, as it will be when I will go back there. Quite a writer... everything is so true in that "novel". Zinder is more real than life. And fiction brings you to reality.It is a documentary through poetry. This is due to the great talent of the author and also to her keen sense of observation. An gode maki. Barka da aiki!

3 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful prose, no plot, May 21, 2002

By 

B. Farenell "Africaphile" (Glens Falls, NY) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Still Waters in Niger (Triquarterly Books) (Paperback)

Make no mistake about it: this book has beautifully lyrical prose. The writing is quite enchanting. But simply put, there is no plot. Nothing happens. The book's foundation is essentially on the relationship between a mother and her daughter. The daughter is a health worker living in Niger, West Africa, where she'd spent some of her childhood. The narrative alternates between the present and the mother's reminiscence of her daughter's and husband's years in Niger and Nigeria. Despite the heavy interior monologue, I never felt I had much insight into any of the character's psyches. I like character driven novels, but I didn't feel Ms. Hill's characterization was particular strong. Having lived in West Africa, I did appreciate some of the description; it was very heavily sensory, but you can't make a whole novel out of that. All in all, I was impressed by the prose, but the story was not very compelling. It was a struggle to finish.