Notes on Tanya Shaffer's Somebody's Heart is Burning

A long-standing debate among travel-lit critics is the issue of perspective: Should travel authors involve themselves as active, changeable characters in their own narratives, or should they record their destinations at arm's length, avoiding mention of themselves whenever possible? Many critics (especially British ones, it seems) insist that dispassionate objectivity is the proper way to write a travel book -- claiming that a writer's personal involvement in the story only clouds his ability to truly examine the places to which he travels. From a scholarly or journalistic standpoint this approach makes plenty of sense, but it also has an inherent weakness: In the process of ferreting out social, cultural and historical facts, objective travel writers usually fail to communicate the actual experience of travel amidst other cultures. After all, your typical traveler doesn't spend all his time visiting libraries and arranging interviews -- and this is why there will always be a need for travel books that draw us into an author's personal experience of a place.

A new book that wonderfully evokes the subjective experience of travel is Tanya Shaffer's Somebody's Heart is Burning: A Tale of a Woman Wanderer in Africa. Based largely upon a year spent as a volunteer worker in the West African country of Ghana, Shaffer's stories read more like parables than journalism, gracefully bringing to life that tenuous zone where people of different cultures interact and try to understand one another. Like many veteran volunteers in Africa, Shaffer is a world-weary realist, but she readily admits the desire to be "knocked over the head by a sense of purpose." She realizes that her work is futile at times, but she hopes it will nonetheless make her a better person. As she describes interactions with the Africans around her, she draws the reader into the simple mysteries that arise when working in an unfamiliar culture: Are the men she meets do-gooders or scam-artists? Is the naïve Dutch volunteer experiencing a purer part of Africa, or just setting herself up for heartbreak? Why won't the village woman buy proper medicine for her baby? What is the motivation of the little girl who so desperately offers up her friendship? Shaffer doesn't force conclusions on any of these questions, and (unlike more erudite travel authors) it's obvious she struggled with them on a human level well before she portrayed them on a literary level.

Shaffer's best strength is her deft touch at portraying the awkwardness that comes with being an optimistic stranger in a strange land. "The Children of Afranguah" describes how a well-intentioned attempt to pass out papers and pens to village kids readily dissolves into chaos. Another chapter, "The Man in the Cave" illustrates the uncertainty and nagging incompleteness that comes when visiting a holy place (in this case an animist shrine) as a mere tourist rather than a pilgrim. At times, Shaffer writes disapprovingly of other Americans in Africa (an abrasive black nationalist in one story; a disturbingly rude tourist in another) -- but not without subtly hinting at her own complicity in the problems these people represent.

The least effective element of Somebody's Heart is Burning is Shaffer's somewhat incomplete portrayal of a faltering relationship with a boyfriend back in America -- no doubt inserted as a thematic thread to hold the various stories together. The effort to tie this thread full-circle makes the book's ending (which suddenly jumps to Tanzania) seem a bit disjointed. Fortunately Shaffer has already achieved narrative realization in the book's haunting second-to-last chapter, "Sand Angel", which recounts the accidental drowning of a deaf man on the riverboat to Timbuktu. In pondering this senseless death -- and the details that led up to it -- Shaffer realizes that she hasn't found a sense of purpose in Africa so much as a sense of grace. She writes:

"Two weeks had passed since the day a devout man with cracked feet and glowing eyes had asked me for my shoes. I remembered the disappointment I'd felt when he'd asked. I'd taken him for an angel, and there he was behaving like a human being. I realized, suddenly, that I'd spent much of my time in African befuddled by the notion that if a friend asked me for something, it rendered our entire relationship suspect. But what friendship isn't a balancing act, an ever-shifting dance of altruism and self-interest? How naïve I'd been, to imagine that any human exchange could take place in a vacuum, let alone between a person with shoes and a person without.

"It struck me, then, that the only changes we humans are capable of are small ones. You can beat yourself up for years, wishing you could be kinder, happier, more decisive and secure. And then one day you realize you've made a slight shift, moved your inner lens a fraction of an inch to this side or that. Not a whole new self, a remade identity, just a little change in perspective. A loosening, really, an out-breath, a drop of acceptance in the salty ocean of the soul. You haven't solved everything, maybe you haven’t solved anything, but if you're lucky, that small shift will be the difference between holding your life in grace and simply holding on."