Exit Wounds by Peter Godwin: A moving memoir of love, loss, ancestors and exile
Exit Wonders by Peter Godwin (Canongate £20, 288pp)
When Peter Godwin’s mother neared the end of her life aged 90, she suddenly started speaking in an unfamiliar upper-class 1940s accent, saying ‘heppy’ instead of ‘happy’, ‘hice’ instead of ‘house’, and ‘ears’ instead of ‘yes’.
It took Godwin a while to work out that in very old age, she was reverting to the accent of her lost childhood, ‘the last time she was truly happy’, and was using the same clipped vowels Princess Elizabeth spoke with in her famous radio broadcast of 1940.
Our distant past never leaves us, he surmises, and it can come back at any time, in very strange forms.
From the start of his moving, if sometimes rather self-indulgent and whimsical memoir of love, loss, ancestors and exile, Peter Godwin refers to his posh-sounding mother as ‘Her Grace’. And it becomes clear that their relationship was never cosy or affectionate.
The family represses its emotions. Even after Godwin’s sister Jain was killed with her fiancé in a Rhodesian army ambush in 1978, just three days before their wedding, emotions were never aired.
‘In our separate ways,’ Godwin writes, ‘we screamed inside our hearts. Never out loud, and never together.’
As she lies dying, ‘Her Grace’ suddenly informs Peter that she wants to ‘get off her chest’ the fact that when he was gravely ill and expected to die in a
Nairobi hospital 33 years ago, she was too busy to come to his deathbed.
‘I cannot unknow this now,’ Godwin writes. ‘The knowledge that my mother couldn’t be bothered to say goodbye? unfurls in my brain like a malignant flag.’
He goes round the corner to the pub and gets blind drunk: an action he calls ‘reversible suicide’, or ‘suicide for sissies’.
Peter with his mother and sister, Georgina
Anyone who has felt unloved by a mother who then becomes a needy attention-seeker in old age (thankfully, I’m not one of them) may well recognise Godwin’s encapsulation of this syndrome: ‘I spent the first decade of my life trying to summon my mother’s attention, and she has spent the last decade of her life trying to summon mine.’
War journalist, author and documentary-maker, Peter Godwin made his name with his book The Fear, a powerful chronicle of life and suffering under Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe, the country in which he was born, and where his mother used to be a brilliant doctor, before Mugabe snatched away the family farm and laid waste to the country’s agriculture and economy, as well as torturing and murdering its citizens.
Ever since leaving Zimbabwe in early adulthood, he has felt a profound sense of homelessness: the specific kind felt by exiles from Africa.
The nickname for them, he tells us, is a ‘soutpiel’ – ‘salt penis’: one foot in southern Africa, one in the northern hemisphere, with the genitalia ‘marinating in the ocean’, as he graphically describes it.
An army major once explained to him that when a bullet flies into your body, it harms you, but when it flies out again from other side, that’s when the real damage is done: ‘It’s the exit wound that kills you.’
Hence the title of this book about the unhealable wounds made by exits.
There are in fact three great losses Godwin is having to absorb: the loss of his birth country, the loss of his mother, who does die, and the loss of his marriage.
I found the end -of-marriage description the most admirable aspect of this book. He’s searingly honest about how awful it was for him.
He was married to the high-powered British journalist Joanna Coles, who was the chief content officer for Hearst Magazines in New York.
They bought a flat on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a leaky but romantic Hobbit-hole retreat in rural Connecticut, where they went with their two sons Hugo and Thomas.
Godwin is slightly rude about Joanna’s screen addiction: ‘She emerges from her cell-phone, a rabbit startled out of a lettuce patch’, and he describes her in bed ‘snuffling gently in her ear plugs and eye mask’, but that doesn’t feel terminal.
Peter and his ex-wife Joanna Coles
Then, one Sunday morning 20 years into the marriage, apropos of nothing, while they’re sitting in the car together after a game of tennis, Joanna suddenly announces, ‘I don’t want to be married any more’.’
Peter suggests couples therapy, and they have one or two sessions, but it’s clear that Joanna is intent on escape. He names the process ‘Jexit’.
‘Like Brexit, Jexit, I maintain, is unnecessary, damaging, avoidable, self-inflicted, based on false information and prejudice? and harks back to a fake nostalgia for a life never actually led. In short, it risks sacrificing everything in a bid for sovereignty.’
THEY sell their beloved country retreat, and Joanna moves downtown to the white studio with a white sofa she dreams of as an emblem of her freedom. And after his mother dies, Peter writes, ‘there is no longer even a notional cavalry – neither parents nor spouse – to ride to my rescue when I lie wounded in some foreign field.’
Before she dies, his mother makes one pertinent criticism of his writing: ‘You alliterate rather a lot, don’t you?’ To which Peter replies, ‘Yes, I suppose I do. I like the prosody of it.’
The blurb tells us that Godwin ‘has taught writing at Wesleyan and Columbia’. I only hope he didn’t pass on to his students his excruciating sixth-form-poetry-prize alliterative habits: ‘parading a posse of potential purchasers’; ‘torn by tumults of temper’ and so on.
I worried that his alliteration might have been one of the things that drove Joanna over the edge.
There are also too many fanciful digressions about geese and storks, and too many uses of the adjective ‘late-onset’. But the pervasive atmosphere of loss and sadness is powerful .
After pouring his mother’s ashes into the same jar as his father’s, he returns to New York, alone, to ‘the ashes of my own life’.