Still Waters in Niger

by Kathleen Hill

Overview

A New York Times Notable Book for 1999
Best Fiction of 1999, the Los Angeles Times Book Review
Starred review, Publishers Weekly 
Finalist for 1998 Dublin IMPAC Literary Award

The narrator of this book is an Irish-American woman who returns to the West African country of Niger where she had lived seventeen years earlier as the wife of an academic and the mother of three young daughters. Now she is visiting her eldest daughter, Zara, who has herself returned to Africa during a season of devastating drought and is working in a village clinic that cares for women and children suffering from starvation.

Still Waters in Niger is a beautifully observed account of a return to a place at once exotic and familiar, as well as a tale of inner discovery. As the narrator reacquaints herself with her daughter and with the Africa of her past, she meets other mothers and their children. With her own memories of young motherhood strong, she becomes aware of the strikingly similar ways in which the impassioned and often difficult bonds between mothers and daughters are revealed across the divide of cultures. Hill paints a compelling portrait of a community of women grounded in kinship and care for their children, a society characterized not only by pain and exhaustion but by humor, delicacy, and strength. Filled with vivid, elegant descriptions and meditations on hunger, poverty, the desert, women, memory, and the love between mothers and daughters, Still Waters in Niger is the haunting story of a woman looking simultaneously backward and forward.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810151345
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	03/06/2002
Edition description:	1
Pages:	206
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Kathleen Hill's fiction and essays have been published in Best American Short Stories 2000, Pushcart Prize XXV, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. The original publication of Still Waters in Niger (Northwestern,1999) was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was among the Notable Books of the Year in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. A French translation of Still Waters in Niger entitled Eaux Tranquilles was published by Editions Phébus in 2000 and was shortlisted for the Prix Femina Etranger. Hill currently teaches in the Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

When I read this novel, I realized I'd been hoping to find it for decades. Here were qualities of beauty, seriousness, distinction, tenderness, and moral sense, conveyed in a prose as austere and lavish as the desert landscape it evokes. Kathleen Hill's theme is hunger for an authentic relationship with her daughter, the hunger and fortitude of a people faced with drought and crop failure, and finally, spiritual hunger for reconciliation of the human and the divine. This is the most exciting debut since Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.

Table of Contents

	Prologue	1
Part I	Zinder
	Auto gare	7
	The Street	14
	Boissons Fraiches	24
	The Fort	30
	The Hostel	37
	The House	45
Part II	Matameye
	New Moon	51
	Moon in First Quarter	63
	Full Moon	82
	Moon in Third Quarter	152
Part III	Zinder
	First Call to Prayer: Fajr	176
	Second Call to Prayer: Zubr	186
	Third Call to Prayer: Asr	193

What People are Saying About This

Robert Coles

Here is a novel of fine social and cross-cultural observation, and too, of moral inwardness—a wonderfully knowing storyteller with a strong spiritual bent tells us so very much about idealism and its vicissitudes, parenthood and its possibilities.

Andrea Barrett

Subtle, elegant, and beautifully written, this apparently quiet novel is in fact surprisingly subversive. It captures, as few other books do, the deepest bonds of mothers and daughters and the unswerving persistence of memory.

Mary Gordon

A beautiful book, with great lyric power and emotional resonance. We desperately need to know more about the experience of motherhood, and in combining her passion for her daughter with her passion to experience and to know the world, Kathleen Hill makes a great contribution to our store of information about how women live. Her evocations of Africa, of the lives of women in Africa, give range and depth to her story, and carry it from the home into the world. I am full of admiration for this small miracle.

Editorial Reviews

In a fundamental sense, all novels can be said to be about journeys.Kathleen Hill's resonant first novel , Still Waters in Niger, charts an actual journey that the first-person narrator, an unnamed mother, takes to Niger to visit her grown daughter.To Hill's credit, she does not supply a false denouement to tidy up the proceedings; instead, this mother-daughter relationship is slowly and carefully illuminated by perceptions that present themselves as the narrator and {[her daughter] make a series of vists.It is rare to find intricate and ambivalent material feelings addressed with such a lack of posturing and such generous candor.

Los Angeles Times

...[P]ensive, particular and honest....[The narrator's] is a story of unrequited love for her daughter...and for a place the narrator realizes she never got to know....If the narrator laments that she failed to see things 17 years earlier, the author can see, and describe: perhaps it is this that makes Still Waters in Nigeran autobiographical novel rather than a memoir, after all.
— The New York Times Book Review

Annette Kobak

A woman restores her frayed relationship with an adult daughter, in a story that's more a meditation on motherhood and place (in this case Africa) than a narrative-centered tale. The nameless narrator, a middle-aged Irish-American woman, returns to Niger, where her eldest daughter Zara is working at a medical center in the provincial town of Matamaye. It lies near Zinder, the village the narrator lived in 17 years before with her three children and husband, who was then working on his Ph.D. dissertation. Both towns are on the edge of the desert; sandstorms are common, water scarce, and crops scanty. In addition, malnutrition is endemic, beggars with horrible deformities are numerous, and many of the children Zara cares for are dying of hunger. As the narrator accompanies Zara on her rounds, meeting her daughter's women friends, she is preoccupied with her failure to have done more to help when she lived in Zinder, where something happened that marred her relationship with her daughter. And in luminous if sometimes overwrought prose she recalls her own often difficult relationship with her mother and her confused emotions upon learning that she was pregnant with Zara. But as she meets African women and their daughters, she realizes that they are bound by ties that both strain and strengthen their relationships. In an anticlimactic, even trite revelation, the narrator learns why Zara felt that her mother failed her on her sixth birthday in Zinder. Rifts healed, insights gained, and a symbolic gift made, she is then ready to leave both Zara and Zinder. First-novelist Hill, who once lived in Africa herself, offers some beautiful evocations of place and people but not enough, sadly, togive this thin tale life.

Kirkus Reviews

"Although billed as an autobiographical novel, it reads just like a memoir: pensive, particular, and honest. 'How to speak to the silences, the spaces between?' the narrator asks. Hill . . . has had the courage and skill to do just that." —New York Times Book Review



"Although modest in plot, it is abundant in understanding." —Los Angeles Times



"A beautiful book, with great lyric power and emotional resonance. In combining her passion for her daughter with her passion for experience and to know the world, Kathleen Hill makes a great contribution to our store of information about how women live. I am full of admiration for this small miracle." —Mary Gordon

"Here is a novel of fine social and cross-cultural observation, and, too, of moral inwardness—a wonderfully knowing storyteller with a strong spiritual bent tell us so very much about idealism and its vicissitudes, parenthood and its possibilities." —Robert Coles

From the Publisher