“The Geography of Desire: A Memoir of West Africa” by Linda Gambill

“The geography of desire is different for everyone. Desire propels us forward but never lets us know where we will land,” Linda Gambill writes in The Geography of Desire: A Memoir of West Africa. In a clear-eyed, philosophical narrative, she chronicles her challenge as a Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia, West Africa. There she has to adapt to “the edge,” which are “circumstances vastly different from what I was used to” growing up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Not one to sugarcoat or hold readers at arms’ length, she opens with the misery of her post-college life in Knoxville. It’s sleeting. An ex, her former philosophy prof, is camped on the sofa, and she’ll have to relieve herself outside because her roommates are having sex in the bedroom she has to cross to get to the bathroom. Her dream since age fourteen of joining the Peace Corps rises as the contrast she needs: “in charge of my life, traveling the globe and helping others and meeting fascinating people who found me fascinating.”

 In exquisite, lyrical prose, she recaptures how far she travels from home (4,428 miles exactly), how she’s “blindsided by a deep and terrifying loneliness” and how she falls for her Wolof language teacher:

“He glowed with dark fire, I was luminous and white hot and our lips fit together like the curve between yin and yang.”

Still devastated by her parents’ hostile divorce, “for the first and only time in my life, I tasted the freedom of sexual love uncoupled from a craving for emotional intimacy.” She is overcome by a “dizzying sense of freedom” since no one knows her and she can be whoever she wants. She realizes it’s like her passion for framing the perfect photo—what to leave in and what to leave out—“mirrored what I was trying to do with my life.”

Yet her posting as a health educator to a conservative Muslim village makes her feel inconsequential “like a puff of silk from a cottonwood tree.” Her dispensary colleague rankles with his suggestion that workplace proximity should equate with sexual access. She feels “soiled, helpless and angrier than I’d ever felt in my life.”

At last Gambill makes female friends who cut through her grief and help inspire her vision of a health project that will change the future of the village. Her breakthrough, however, comes only after deep anguish over the loss of a village child to cerebral malaria. In mourning, she climbs a tree and envisions beyond the orchard, a garden of thriving vegetables to improve the local nutrition.

By then, she has visited and mapped the family compounds, as well as surveyed their health needs. She was cautioned not to discuss female genital mutilation though she faces and processes it with Wolof friends who do not practice the ritual. She finally receives her Peace Corps motorbike, which gives her more travel freedom, access to help from Catholic charity personnel, and learns what the village men really want—“my motorbike.”

A new dispensary colleague advises her to teach the children at school rather than the distracted women and babies at the dispensary. As a result, her vision develops solidity. The village women respond to an organizational meeting, dressing in their finest and bringing seed money. In solidarity, the struggle continues.

Gambill still has to learn to see herself clearly, not just someone whose chief role is to attend the needs of others. But someone who still wants to be an artist, contributing to society and creating visually tantalizing photos in equal measure.

This requires more growth through heartache, the trauma of revolution, a loss of innocence, and return journey to her village she must be willing to complete. Even years after returning to the U.S., her dreams are of Gambia, her friends and village lover:

“They seem to be telling me I’ve lost something here, that I needed to come back and find.”

Her return trip and the younger self she encounters and reunites with are enlightening and remarkable:

 “If we’re lucky, or if we let it, desire will take us not only around the world or into a lasting relationship but also into our buried sadness and cast-aside dreams.”

Gambill’s memoir, which starts with the disgust of her dead-end life in Knoxville, comes full circle and ends with a deep recognition of who she has become as a result of opening herself to hardship in a series of seemingly impossible challenges half a world away. Throughout, her cross-cultural struggles and learning are grounded in deep emotional acknowledgment.

Among the many people she thanks for believing she had something to say and making the memoir possible (including The Hambidge Center for granting several residencies, as well as Persimmon Tree and Parhelion for publishing excerpts) are the students and faculty at Apprentice House Press. It’s the country’s only campus-based, student-staffed book publishing company, a nonprofit at Loyola University Maryland. To explore more and see photos, please visit: https://www.lindagambill.com.

Linda Gambill

Linda Gambill has been a therapist at a state psychiatric hospital, a Peace Corps volunteer, a nationally exhibited photographer, and an ESL teacher at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. Her writing has appeared in Persimmon Tree and Parhelion Literary, and is forthcoming from Allium: A Journal of Poetry and Prose. She lives in the South with her husband and their overly talkative rescue cat.