Rules of the Wild
by Francesca Marciano
List Price: $12.00
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0375703438
Publisher: Vintage
Francesca Marciano is a documentary filmmaker who divides her time between
Rome and Kenya. Rules of the Wild is her first novel.
top of the page
Francesca Marciano: In Her Own Words I was born and grew up in Rome. My grandfather was something of a literary figure in Italy: known as a writer, a founder of literary magazines, and a winner of literary awards, he wrote novels and essays and had a newspaper column, but most of all he was a mentor for many young writers and poets of his time. Our house was always filled with interesting people. I remember growing up listening to their animated discussions. When people asked me what I wanted do when I grew up, I said without hesitation, "I am going to be a writer." I had inherited my family's belief in the power of words, and that was the obvious answer as far as I could tell.
I dropped out of university and went to New York instead. I had planned to take a six month film course, and I ended up staying six years. I worked for RAI, the Italian television network, as a producer/director for their news programming, covering everything from whales to Muhammad Ali. It was there, at RAI, that I learned how to shoot and edit film, and learned to love the process of filmmaking. I also realized I would never have made a good journalist; in fact, I discovered I was more attracted by the idea of telling a story than by reporting actual facts. That is how, in my spare time at night, I came to start writing my first film script with a friend. In the course of the next two years, we managed to raise the money and codirected the feature, which was shown at the 1983 Venice Film Festival. This experience not only gave me the confidence to keep writing, but also made me decide to leave New York and go back to Italy. If I was going to write, I thought, I should do it in my own language.
Since then I have written several film scripts, some of which have won awards and have been shown at international festivals such as those at Cannes and Venice.
It is difficult to explain why I moved to Africa at the peak of my filmwriting career. There is hardly ever a rational answer behind a question like this. The first time I went to Africa it was completely by chance, but somehow I knew right away this wasn't just a coincidence. I had won an airplane ticket as an award for a short film I had made, and I decided to use it to go somewhere special that I had never been before. I found myself on a plane heading toward Zanzibar, the small island off the Tanzanian coast, an island about which I knew absolutely nothing. I hadn't planned to stay, but I also hadn't planned to fall in love with Africa, which I did, immediately. It's been my home, on and off, ever since.
I now live in Kenya, on the edge of the Indian Ocean, in an old secluded house without phone or television, and often without electricity. Over the last ten years I have made documentaries around the African continent (Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Benin), but my novel grew out of a desire to make sense of the relationship of the white people who live in Africa with this place where they will never belong. It is a unique relationship that one develops with a place. You have to love it without being afraid of the consequences, knowing all along that you will never be part of it, no matter how hard you try. It has struck me how brave you need to be to put all your love in one place, a place you will never be able to call home. I wanted to describe this feeling, which echoes the same determination and the same fear you feel when falling in love with someone. I wanted to explore this concept and realized that this time words--my own words on a page and not on film--would be the right medium for explaining it. Not only had I to abandon the language of film, which I had by then learned to handle with ease, but I also had to abandon my first language and write the novel in English. It was a challenge, because even though I have been speaking English to some extent for half my life, I wasn't born bilingual; English is a language I have had to learn. I felt very insecure when I set out to write this novel, fearing my English would not be strong enough.
It took me nearly two years to write Rules of the Wild. Sometimes I would look up from my desk and realize I hadn't spoken to anyone in months. Often I would pack up my computer, connect it to a car battery and a solar panel, go into the bush, and write inside a tent, under the stars, surrounded by the noises of the night. It has been sometimes hard, but most of the time wonderful, to be alone for so long with my novel in such a big space. It has taught me a lot about my life there, but most of all it has finally afforded me a chance to give something back to Africa.
Excerpted from Rules of the Wild © Copyright 2009 by Francesca Marciano. Reprinted with permission by Vintage. All rights reserved.
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
top of the page
