Gods of Noonday: A White Girl's African Life

by Elaine Neil Orr

The daughter of medical missionaries, Elaine Neil Orr was born in Nigeria in 1954, in the midst of the national movement that would lead to independence from Great Britain. But as she tells it in her captivating new memoir, Orr did not grow up as a stranger abroad; she was a girl at home?only half American, the other half Nigerian. When she was sent alone to the United States for high school, she didn't realize how much leaving Africa would cost her. It was only in her forties, in the crisis of kidney failure, that she began to recover her African life. In writing Gods of Noonday she came to understand her in the Christian church and the Yoruba shrine, the piano and the talking drum. Memory took her back from Duke Medical Center in North Carolina to the shores of West Africa and her hometown of Ogbomosho in the land of the Yoruba people. Hers was not the dysfunctional American family whose tensions are brought into high relief by the equatorial sun, but a mission girlhood is haunted nonetheless--by spiritual atmospheres and the limits of good intentions. Orr's father, Lloyd Neil, formerly a high school athlete and World War II pilot, and her mother, Anne, found in Nigeria the adventure that would have escaped them in 1950s America. Elaine identified with her strong, fun-loving father more than her reserved mother, but she herself was as introspective and solitary as her sister Becky was pretty and social. Lloyd acquired a Chevrolet station wagon which carried Elaine and her friends to the Ethiope River, where they swam much as they might have in the United States. But at night the roads were becoming dangerous, and soon the days were clouded by smoke from the coming Biafran War. Interweaving the lush mission compounds with Nigerian culture, furloughs in the American South with boarding school in Nigeria, and eventually Orr's failing health, the narrative builds in intensity as she recognizes that only through recovering her homeland can she find the strength to survive. Taking its place with classics such as Out of Africa and more recent works like The Poisonwood Bible and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Gods of Noonday is a deeply felt, courageous portrait of a woman's life.

Genres: Africa, Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Nigeria

336 pages, Paperback

First published August 29, 2003

About the author

After surviving end stage renal disease in my early forties with the gift of two transplants (kidney and pancreas), I took a right turn in my writing life: from scholarship to creative writing. Because I was born and grew up in Nigeria, my memoir and fiction are trans-Atlantic. I am keenly interested in place, not as a backdrop for stories but as a character. What I love most about writing is the practice of it. Writing, I am meditating. "How exactly do I describe the feeling of heartbreak? Does the heart really hurt?" "When my character enters this river, what is she thinking?" The normal world is lost to me; I am in a transcendent realm of creation. Being there is one of the greatest joys I know. I love being alone in nature: walking, catching a glimpse of the blue heron, feeling the wind on my neck. I try to live in the faith that all I really need is already with me.

Reviews

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

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*

[Megan Doney · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Esther Bos · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting remembrance of growing up as a Missionary Kid in Nigeria. The author demonstrates well her deep connection to this land of her birth. Her descriptions of the flora, fauna, rivers, roads and people show how much she identified as a Nigerian. She is clearly not just an American who lived in Africa for a few years, even though she never lived there again after leaving at 16 to go to high school in the United States.

Her family's story was fascinating to me partly because my childhood church supported missionaries in Nigeria, and returned at intervals to report on their mission work. There were names and places that sounded familiar. But we never really knew anything about current events there, including the struggles for independence and setting up of new governments in the 1960's. Many of her experiences as a missionary kid certainly sounded familiar, as I have heard other stories of those who had difficulty knowing who they are and where they belong and how to adjust to life back in the US.

I enjoyed Orr's personal stories and reflections of life as a child in Nigeria. She wrote it while dealing with kidney disease and eventually getting a transplant. This is what stimulated her to tell her story in this format. However, for me the downside of the book was in it's organization, with many switches between her childhood story, her marriage and parenting issues, and her health issues. I did not understand why she juxtaposed some of these varied experiences as she did.

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

Elaine was born in Nigeria, the daughter of American parents serving as missionaries. This is the account of her childhood to high school years and her struggles with determining where she fit.
I struggled with this on a number of levels. I'd previously read her fiction work, A Different Sun, which is about missionaries in Nigeria in the 1800's and thought this memoir might be interesting as it's the same portion of Nigeria only 100 years later. The book was written during her battle with renal failure and the wait for kidney transplants. An aspect of that would be included and then it would go back to the years in Nigeria. Parts of it were possibly journal entries - I never did see an explanation of why some of the text was in italics. It seems as if this book was an outlet for her during that period. I wonder if it would have been better left as her private record.

[Michelle Hannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love expat lit. As a third culture kid myself, it intrigues me to see how growing up in a foreign country affects people in such different ways. Elaine’s book is unique, however, because she’s reliving her Nigerian Missionary Kid childhood as she’s suffering from end stage kidney failure and awaiting a transplant. It’s simultaneously painful and beautiful. My favorite part of the book is the way Elaine describes a swimming spot in the cold, clear, Ethiope river that sounds like heaven. It’s that magical place from childhood that she goes back to in her mind when she needs to escape. I have one too. Mine is a huge sand dune with the slit face dropping steeply right into deep water in Half Moon Bay on the Persian Gulf.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I relate with much of this life story.
Compelling, interesting, good read.
I appreciate the effort the author put into sharing her story with us.She paints a vivid picture of her upbringing, her internal conflicts and insights into a life lived in service to converting others to fundamental christian faith.

[Marcelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is worth reading. You get a different perspective on being a missionary kid and growing up in Africa (but people assuming you are American). Might want to skim the parts that are just author's catharsis.

[Sandy Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memoir of growing up in Nigeria, shared with feelings and understandings of the differences with life in the United States, from the author’s prospective both as a child and as an adult.

[Bernie Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gods of Noonday by Elaine Neil Orr is a magical, haunting book about life as an MK, a missionary kid, growing up in Nigeria. When I had to put it down, Orr's Nigerian life - its dry red dirt, its rivers and flowers- stayed in my head like a vision. Her love for the country rings true in every page, and the reader's heart breaks for her when she has to leave it, temporarily or permanently, or when it is torn apart by civil war. So many things struck me: her love for her family, the strangeness of living in a boarding school dorm with her parents in the next building, her missing them as if they were miles away. Ordinary teenage dilemmas, like wanting to be popular, wanting to mimic American pop culture, yet knowing so little about it, even though she was American as well as Nigerian, all played out in this strange and beautiful place. I highly recommend A Different Sun to anyone who wants to be transported, both physically and emotionally, to a fascinating land and life. (less)

[Ruth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I expected more of this as an expat (though not missionary) kid myself, having been in Nigeria around the same time.

Whilst the Nigerian background was evocative at times and certainly nostalgic (though from a different perspective) I found the format somewhat bitty and unsatisfactory. Whilst sympathising with the author's medical battles, I found the whole rather too inwardly-focused and fragmented to be truly engaging, and found myself wanting to skim quite a lot.

There were some pleasing sections of contextual description that struck a chord and brought back some quite vivid memories, and these I enjoyed. The Biafran story as seen by the "MK" is not an easy tale to tell, and I think the author only partially succeeded.

(And should you ever read this, Elaine, I still have the glass animals I also bought in Jos Kingsway!).

[Laura Davenport · Rating 5 out of 5]

My readings of this memoir were 10 years apart, and I think appreciated more the second time. A life-threatening illness prompts the narrator’s time travel back to her childhood in Nigeria and forward through furloughs in the States sometimes with her missionary family, and sometimes separated from them. She rediscovers herself through the journey of memoir and not only survives organ transplant surgery, but emerges with a new sense of purpose and love of life. The prose is exquisite and moving. Depictions of African villages and the Ethiope come alive on the page. I intend to read it again. The experience of this memoir resonates with this reader differently at different points in her life.

[Amelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a term awhile back that accurately describes former MKs (missionary kids), and that term is 'Third Culture Kids' -- we don't belong in the country where we grew up and we don't belong in the country of our parents. Though my own experience growing up in West Africa was not exactly the same as Orr's experience (thank goodness, Burkina Faso did not experience civil war, and I was never sent away to boarding school!), there are moments in this book that speak such truth to me that my heart aches and I want to weep.

"All my life in the U.S., I have felt almost at home but never really home."

"Nothing I have ever done has seemed large enough for what I thought was expected of me as a girl."

Beautifully done.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished Elaine Neil Orr's memoir "God's of Noonday: A White Girl's African Life" and loved it. Beautifully written, painfully capturing MK/TCK loss against the backdrop of Nigeria's own struggles and losses. Her mother was one of my mentors as a woman in ministry, and people I know kept showing up in the book, including my cousins. But if you know any adult MK's out there who have struggled with their experience, I can't imagine a better gift. And it's worth the read even if that's not at all your struggle.

[Leslie Waugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was sad to reach the end of this richly layered and emotionally resonant memoir, with its absorbing prose and fascinating insights into personal, social and cultural histories. I still want to know more. Although the book is a meditation of sorts on trying to put a dislocated self back together, it's not without some LOL-worthy lines: "These days, of course, in the Southern Baptist Convention, if you're a girl and hear God calling you to lead, you're hallucinating and stand in need of therapy, or prayer, which is cheaper."

[LeAnne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This beautifully written memoir of growing up in Africa made me wonder about my daughters' perspectives on growing up in Mozambique and losing their African world when they returned to the U.S. for college. Did we do right when we spoke only vaguely of 'the situation' in Mozambique during the 1980s? Or by not making a big deal of the shooting they heard every night, did we fail to give them the opportunity to express their fears and concerns?

Highly recommended for adult TCKs and parents of TCKs.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this memoir a great deal. It was a winding tale, and it took me awhile to get through, not because the storytelling isn't great, though. There were moments when I felt like the middle wandered, but perhaps it needed to, perhaps Orr needed to wander into these details so we would know just how very much was lost, how very much she sought.

[Kim Mccully-mobley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was charming, poignant, painful and disconcerting at times. I loved this book because it was a gift from the author...my friend: Alaine Neil Orr...She is charming, intelligent, dignified and lovely. I can't wait to see her again next summer. This memoir is a true testament to faith, destiny and those still rivers that run at the very heart of our souls.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting memoir that at times meanders - I was never sure exactly what was the author's purpose in telling this particular story in this particular way. Some sections were fascinating, others much less so. I would enjoy another piece of writing with a slightly more focused perspective.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love any and all books about Africa. This was a great one and when talking about it with my Mom she suddently remembered all kinds of things about my own childhood in Nigeria.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

My nerdy N.P.R. book. Very educational...

[Erin Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in love with this beautiful book, memory, revelation by Elaine Neil Orr... thank you so much for sharing your extraordinary life.