A Web Del Sol Featured Writer
The tip of the boy's hollow aluminum crutch is lodged securely in the hole it has made in the sand. It points toward the center of the earth, has sunk like the shaft of a well downwards. It points beneath the loose sand, beneath the ribbon of compressed sandstone sixty feet wide, to the water waiting there in darkness, stored during the Pleistocene when the Sahara was a garden lively with antelope and butterflies.
Her stories have appeared in The Hudson Review and other literary journals and have twice been cited in Best American Short Stories. She has received grants from the NEA and from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has also received the Bernice Slote award from Prairie Schooner, a grant from Breadloaf, and has been a fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell. Currently she teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence. Her novel, The Waters of Niger, will be published by TriQuarterly Books come spring of 1999.
Kathleen Hill has lived in New York City for most of her adult life but was born in a town just outside it. In her twenties she spent a couple of years in Nigeria, where two of her three daughters were born, and then another year in Niger, a country in the western Sahel that has repeatedly been struck by drought and famine. It is Niger, where she returned after seventeen years to visit her grown daughter, that is the setting for her book, All Pray in Their Distress. She has also lived for two years in France and has travelled in Asia.
Kathleen Hill, from The City of Zinder
Zinder was a case of unrequited love . . . Altogether on the margin, unsure and unskilled, what did I offer in return? Desire was fed on glimpses and surmises, on bits of knowledge baffled and withdrawn. The wind that blows down across the Sahara during the winter months is the same wind that in France is called the mistral, in Italy the scirocco. From North Africa it sweeps across the desert and on southward to the coast where it funnels into the Bight of Benin, spending itself at last in the Gulf of Guinea. South of the Mediterranean this wind is called the harmattan and in Zinder fills the air with flying sand so pure that for a time everything is seen through a mist. You could be walking along a stretch of sand. In the distance, a shape, a shadow. At first, it is only that. Then something can be seen bubbling up from the surface of the horizon, a dark tangle rising to a narrow twist, like a cyclone, before erupting anew in some fever of impulse and delight. Where have you seen this before? Surely no place on earth. Then there it is, the great silver baobab, its roots exposed to the air and sky, its trunk flung wide in a spray of leaf and branch.
(the City of Zinder appears in Kathleen Hill's
yet to be published manuscript,
All Pray in Their Distress):
The City of Zinder
Sister and Brother
Flood
Solstice
Kathleen Hill
