Greatness and Freedom- Dinesen's Africa

Although I've commented in my class post about Dinesen's language and the way her surroundings influence her style, I'm always stuck by the feelings of freedom that must have existed for her in Africa. I can imagine that as a woman at the turn of the century it was difficult for her to feel much freedom in her daily life. That she could "escape" to Africa and find it there is clear in her writing, not just in what she says about the place, but the very places and atmospheres she chooses to write about.

"Everything you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility. The chief feature of the landscape, and your life in it, was the air... In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame, burning; it scintillated, waved and shone like running water, mirrored and doubled all objects.. in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart "(347).

Dinesen's passage about the way the air moved around her not only lifts me up to her level of appreciation for something so mundane as the air, but it undulates in pace and rhythm in much the same way a breeze blows a leaf down a dirt road. She may be talking about the atmosphere here, but as she shares these observations with the reader, she's also throwing out the contradictory nature of the place. Her air is a flaming candle at the same time it is running water, and the very juxtaposition of these things is as juxtaposed as her landscape and existence in it. Here she is, a landed woman, a member of society; White. But she's out on safari, she's engaging with her help and the natives. She's perhaps thought of as dainty and maybe even helpless at home, but here, in the "wilds" of Africa, she's got her own power, her own lifestyle.

Africa itself, as we see it through her eyes is as much a wild place as a calm one; as much a hot, dry land as a it is a sky full of vivid blues and violets.

I'm revising a piece about my childhood home for my thesis right now, and what I'm noticing is the contradictions and juxtapositions of the land and my perceptions of it. Many see a huge expanse of land as openness, possibility; growing up I felt hemmed in and confined by all that nothingness. One of Dinesen's brilliant moves is using these things to really put me there in her land, and this is something I'm trying to work with on my piece too. I want readers to feel the appreciation I have, now as an adult, for the openness, but I also want them to recognize just how limiting that can also feel. I don't get a sense of limits in Dinesen's writing, not the kind I struggled with, but the kind that came with being so different and removed from a "normal" society.