Chilson puts spotlight on Africa

Since the days of “Heart of Darkness” author Joseph Conrad, and maybe even before, writers have talked about visitors to the continent “going African.”

It’s hard to say exactly what that term means. As with all other all-inclusive descriptions, definitions usually are linked to the individuals they’re applied to.

All Peter Chilson can say is, “I don’t know why, but it seems to be all I can write about.”

Africa, he means.

Coordinator of the undergraduate creative writing program at Washington State University, Chilson, 46, is the author of two books about Africa.

The first, “Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa,” is a 1999 nonfiction exploration of the road culture of Niger. It was the December 2006 selection of The Spokesman-Review Book Club.

The second, which Chilson will read from at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Auntie’s Bookstore, is a collection of short fiction – a novella and four stories – titled “Disturbance-Loving Species” (Mariner, 229 pages, $13.95 paper).

For a variety of reasons, we’ve chosen the latter to be this month’s S-R Book Club read.

Not only is Chilson a regional writer, but “Disturbance-Loving Species” is available in paperback, and his Tuesday reading gives readers a chance to hear the author explain in person why he chose to write this particular story collection.

He’s likely to repeat some of the things that he had to say last week during a phone interview from his home in Moscow, Idaho.

Based on Chilson’s experiences first as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1980s, and then as a freelance journalist in the early 1990s, “Disturbance-Loving Species” is his attempt, he said, to show Americans how we and our country are perceived “at least from the point of view of Africa.”

“I’m always trying to look at things from a more global perspective,” Chilson said, “and I hope people (who read the book) will come to a larger understanding of what it means to be American in this world.”

His own experience came, as it often does, through trial and error. One particularly hard lesson that was pressed on him is told in the novella “Tea with Soldiers” and involves his being assaulted by a pickpocket.

“I turned around full knowing what was going to happen, but I was tired, exhausted, suffering from dysentery,” Chilson said. “I was just not in a good mood, and I pointed at the guy in a marketplace and I accused him of being a thief.”

Things quickly got ugly.

“In Africa, that’s a death sentence,” Chilson said. “You point at somebody in a crowded place and accuse them of thievery and within seconds you have people crowding around wanting to beat this person to death. And that’s exactly what happened.”

The wannabe thief didn’t die, Chilson said, but he was beaten badly, both then and later by police. Sorry he had said anything, Chilson tried to intervene. But his efforts were in vain.

“(A)fter a few minutes the station chief became pretty annoyed with me,” he said. “He basically said to me, ‘You know, who are you to come in here and to moralize about what we are doing here? We’re just doing our jobs. You accused his man of stealing from you in a public place, and now you come in here and try to tell us how to do our jobs?’ ”

This incident became, in fact, the first piece of fiction that Chilson ever wrote. He incorporated that story, “English Lessons,” into “Tea with Soldiers” as a way, he explained, of getting to a larger truth that nonfiction can’t touch.

“I felt that writing about it in a fictional way could get deeper to the emotional center,” Chilson said.

But beware. Don’t read “Disturbance-Loving Species” hoping to understand Africa any more than do any of the American characters that Chilson has created.

The only one who does glean some sort of overall knowledge, a character based on Chilson’s own sister, ends up dying. (He stresses that his own sister is alive and well, thank you.)

The character, however, “does have some success in immersing herself and in understanding a bit of what’s going on. And then the place kills her. It devours her, which is another one of those ironies of Africa.”

Part of his intent in creating such characters, Chilson said, involves his own uncertainty about Africa.

“I didn’t want to come to any pretense that I could create a character who could fully understand,” he said, “because that would imply that I understand fully what’s going on there.”

Such self-effacement didn’t have a negative impact on at least one reviewer for a major newspaper. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten had this to say: “Chilson has written a smart and elegantly executed collection of stories that not only engage as literature but also reaffirm the ability of serious fiction to speak directly to the most urgent and baffling contemporary problems.”

What Chilson knows is that he can’t let go of Africa. And he will go on trying to figure it out.

He’s even working on a book proposal about the attitudes that Africans have about borders that were drawn, largely arbitrarily, by European colonizers in the early 20th century.

But before he was able to do that, he had to resolve his own feelings about Africa, memories that became the stories in “Disturbance-Loving Species.”

“It has always fired my imagination for some reason,” Chilson said, “and try as I might to write about other subjects I find myself coming back to Africa.

“And I really wanted, I felt an emotional need, to sit down and for my own emotional good work out these stories before I went on to anything else.”