THE GEOGRAPHY OF DESIRE

A debut memoirist recalls her life-altering journey from southern Appalachia to West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer.

“It was sleeting the day I decided to go to Africa, but it wasn’t the cold that drove me out of Tennessee,” writes Gambill in her characteristically literary prose. A 24-year-old in the late 1970s, the author watched as her peers left the mountains of Tennessee to get married or pursue careers in big cities. Her life was admittedly adrift, split between an unfulfilling job teaching psychiatric patients how to make clay pots and an on-again, off-again relationship with her former philosophy professor. Dissatisfied with the direction of her life, Gambill joined the Peace Corps. Sent to a Muslim enclave in the Gambia, the author experienced culture shock as she confronted the societal and religious differences between her home country and the West African nation. A born rebel, she not only taught local women nutrition and health, but also sex education (in a region where female genital mutilation was common) that included closed-door lessons on contraceptives. While her official Peace Corps duties shape the book’s narrative, what drives Gambill’s story is her competing romantic relationships with two men: her Wolof teacher in Jenoi and a Polish doctor working in the nation’s capital. The Gambia “changed [her],” she states; she poignantly describes its paradoxically welcoming and alienating mix of stifling tropical weather and cultural isolation, reveling in “the love, the lust…[and] the intertwined sounds of [the] Wolof and Fula” languages. While the book charts the author’s move from Tennessee to Africa, it’s really about the journey of internal self-discovery taken by a woman seeking her own identity and a path to becoming an acclaimed photographer. Gambill’s writing style is often poetic—the memoir reads like a novel, replete with sparky dialogue, inner monologues, and a narrative unafraid to embrace the complexities and erotic moments of romantic relationships. This material is balanced with scholarly research on the Gambia that provides readers with cultural and historical context.

A poignant, occasionally steamy, memoir of self-discovery.