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Margaret Laurence is best known for her extraordinary series of novels celebrating the fictional community of Manawaka, Manitoba. Earlier in her career, though, she lived for two years in the very different world of the Haud desert of Somaliland (now Somalia), where she explored the oral narratives of the Somalis, who at the time had no written language, and studied African culture. Her time in West Africa provided the impetus for her non-fiction account of that experience,
The Prophet's Camel Bell; her first novel,
This Side Jordan; her first collection of short stories,
The Tomorrow-Tamer; a study of Nigerian novelists and dramatists,
Long Drums and Cannons; and
A Tree For Poverty: Somali Poetry and Prose, which she edited and translated.
For The Prophet's Camel Bell, Laurence drew on diary nearly a decade after she had returned to Canada. Coming out of her study of African colonialism, the work emphasizes political and personal independence, cultural inheritance, racial equality, women's liberation, and the need to promote burgeoning national literatures, including that of Canada. It is also an astonishingly intimate memoir that complements Laurence's posthumously published Dance on the Earth. In the course of mapping out the literary geography of Somalia in The Prophet's Camel Bell, Laurence found a clearer sense of what she wanted to accomplish as a Canadian writing about Canada. This book is a fresh and forthright work of imagination and observation, and it is still a pleasure to read. --Jeffrey Canton
Product Description
When Margaret Laurence set out for Somaliland with her engineer husband in 1950, she confronted the difficulty of communication between peoples of vastly different cultures. Yet she came to know the skilled orators, poets and craftsmen of the country, and to share the vision of a people’s struggle for survival in a barren land.
The Prophet’s Camel Bell is part travelogue, part autobiography, part celebration of human nature, and essential reading for anyone who has ever been a stranger in a strange land.
