![]() ![]() The travel books there backed up my hunch. I set off for the research library at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the prominent collections of Africana in the world, and spent the day doing an informal shelf search in the DT section (DT is the Library of Congress designation for African materials). To my surprise this small sample revealed striking similarities. I started by looking at the travel books about Africa that I owned. ![]() What would my fellow writers' first sentences tell me? I have always been interested in first lines - the way they are maps at a frontier. I found this out when I recently decided to browse the first sentences of travel books about Africa. And that what I conceived of as my experiences were themselves, in deep and sometimes untraceable ways, shaped by other people's language. Now I realize that I was doing nothing of the kind. I believed when I sat down to write my first book about Africa, published in 1988, that I was writing only what I had experienced, what had happened to me. We like to believe that our feelings and experiences are so personal, so intense, that their meaning cannot be conveyed by other people's language. ![]()
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