ANTONIA SAW THE ORYX FIRST

ANTONIA SAW THE ORYX FIRST

Assuming you make it past the excruciating title, it's well worth making the acquaintance of Maria Thomas, an American aid worker stationed in East Africa in the mid-1970s, who wrote a number of short stories and this remarkably accomplished novel before her death in an air crash in 1989. Antonia, an American doctor running a dilapidated field hospital, develops a strong emotional bond with Esther Moro, a village girl disfigured first by a female circumcision ceremony and then by a drunken sailor with a broken bottle. Esther is inspired to become a doctor herself, adopting a mystical form of faith healing which causes Antonia to question her own competence. Thomas precisely captures the formless limbo of an expatriate life subject to "a chaos of international politics that had no root in what was real". And the crumbling, inadequate hospital makes an ideal symbol for the post-colonial era: "There was talk that the Swedes (or Norwegians) were planning to build a new wing. They would bring in plate glass and fluorescent lights, things that would break and never be replaced."