Reviews for The Braying Donkey: Reflections on a Life

The average rating for The Braying Donkey: Reflections on a Life based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-21 00:00:00 Molly M Gaitanoglou Nigeria is the place of my hidden self that is truer than my public self. It is the country of my heart. But having left Nigeria and Yoruba land long ago and having remained absent from my holy land, I have become broken. I've read quite a few books on Afirica and post-colonialism and oftentimes, I find that there's some emotional truth missing. Great books, some of them with nice imagery and exciting scenes, just nothing that felt like the truth of a person who was one with the place they called home for years. Then I read Orr's memoir: "...What if outsiders had entered Africa with a true interest in Africa instead of out of Africa?" This West African reader saw the place, heard the sounds, and smelled the scents with the author. I was one with her emotions; her nostalgia was my nostalgia and it was a great feeling. She wasn't just a white African woman (as she states in the title of her book) talking about where she lived in Africa and the people she encountered. She was an African woman missing the place she called home; a Nigerian-American woman. The book is told from the retrospective present of a professor who is experiencing kidney failure and in the middle of dialysis. As she awaits a kidney transplant, she recalls Nigeria, where she came of age as the child of missionaries. Her family was in Nigeria during the Biafran War that Adichie writes about in Half of a Yellow Sun, though being that they were tucked away in missionary compounds, theirs was a different experience: "...the sound of war for me was not Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. It was Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor, opus 16." She talks about her Nigerian childhood crush, her relationship with her aloof missionary mother and her own shortcomings as a wife and mother. The story is told in fragments, at times veering off into verbosity. My favorite parts were when the author was in the present and reminiscing. I remember...the beat of life around me. Here is a woman wearing one print wrap over a different print dress but the colors are coordinated...green, yellow, and orange, and she wears orange tasseled beads around her neck and a matching headdress that is bigger than a crown...Here is a man in slacks with a large loose tunic of the same print, all pale yellow, and he sports a white fedora and on his feet two-tone leather shoes. Here are Peugeots and Volkswagens and Fiats and an occasional Mercedes. Here is an advertisement on the side of the bar: Guinness is good for you; hot or cold. Here is a smell of goats and chickens and dried fish and smoking meat and urine and ancient dust. Here is highlife music and honking horns and the whishing sound of a bicycle passing by the car window, the jingle of the bicycle bell. Here is the Mobil Oil petrol station with Pegasus the horse emblazoned on the front of the building. None of this was horrible. Or if it was, I beg to be required to endure such horror again. *4.5 stars*

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-17 00:00:00 Arick Solan This is beautifully written, and I found the author's memories of her childhood--and the loss of that life--very moving. Narratively, I think it lacks some momentum and structure.