The Trouble With Words: Robert Lopez's Kamby Bolongo
Mean River
by Kathryn Regina
by Kathryn Regina
The narrator of Kamby Bolongo Mean River has trouble with words. Some words trigger a
lifetime of associations, memories saturated with emotion, very much
alive in the narrator’s present moment. Other words stand alone for him
like solid objects, necessitating rigorous inspection.
“The trouble is some people use words one
way but other people use those same words a different way altogether. My problem is I think about one word for too long. A caller
will say a word
like injury and I will think about the word for a minute or two and not
hear the other words. I won’t know who has the injury or why it
matters. This always happens to me and this is why should the
phone ring I might let it keep ringing until the machine answers.
“A
word like injury can split your head open.”
The
narrator’s head is always splitting open. The novel itself is basically
the speaker’s head broken open so that we can see inside—split like a
cantaloupe or a geode. What you’ll find in there is fascinating,
revolting, and heartbreaking.
The book is birthed by a simple phrase—“Should the
phone ring...”—the response to which reveals the entire insides of the
narrator. He doesn’t like it when the phone rings. It’s an intrusion so
frightening that he falls over sometimes. He loves answering machines.
Other things we know about him: He’s being monitored
in a hospital. Doctors are watching him through a two-way glass.
Military Police and security guards are guarding his room. His brother
is Charlie and his mother is Mother. People call him; often they are
wrong numbers. Sometimes he pretends to be the person they are calling
for, especially if they’re calling for Charlie. His phone doesn’t dial
out. He’s from Injury, Alaska. He has a headache.
Like Lopez's first novel, Part of the World, it’s hard to know
what parts of the narrator’s account are reliable. And like Part of
the World, it seems likely that the narrator is suffering some kind
of brain injury. It’s important to understand that neither of these
things matter.
While a more predictable writer might create a
brain-damaged character so distanced from the reader that he exists as
an anomaly, Lopez creates a narrator whose internal conversation feels
universal, familiar. The narrator’s injury only clarifies the faultiness
of all consciousness—the unreliability of memory, the power of
association, the present reality of the past.
The resulting effect has some kinship with A.R.
Luria’s case studies of brain-injured patients. Both of Lopez’s books
lead me back to The Man with a Shattered World—the case study of a
Russian soldier who suffered a massive head injury in 1943. The case
study is largely a first-person account of what it was like for the
patient to wake up with very few mental faculties (it was hard for him
to think of words or understand what he was seeing), to gradually
recovering memories of the distant past, and continuously struggling to
regain his mind.
In the end, Luria’s patient discovers that he is
able to write much more easily than he’s able to speak. He begins to
journal, and in writing, finds a way to restore some semblance of
function.
A correlation could be drawn to the narrator of Kamby.
The narrator can’t dial out. He’s often lost in the pull of his own
memories. He discovers though that he can draw stick figures, and with
the encouragement of his doctors, he fills the floor and walls of his
room with stick figured accounts of his life. Akin to cave drawings,
they tell the story of Charlie and Mother, his dark childhood, his
longing for connection and clarity.
The narrator’s unflinching love for Charlie is like a
dog that follows you home and waits outside your door, even though you
come outside every hour and beat it with a stick. And where is Charlie?
He doesn’t call or visit. And Mother, the second most important person
in the speaker’s life is not there either. Whether she’s in prison, dead
or just absent—we don’t know. What we know is that the speaker of Kamby
Bolongo Mean River is confused, forsaken, alone, and just like us.
Through astonishingly organic and layered language,
Robert Lopez has created an inner world so remarkable you might fall
over with fright, and then stay on the floor to laugh a while.
“Sometimes if it is a wrong number I pretend I am the person the
caller intended to call. In other
words, I pretend to be an actor like the hypothetical Charlie Robertson
playing summer
stock in upstate Alaska somewhere.
“After
I answer they will say something like Hey Gracie it’s Maggie calling
and I’ll say Hello Maggie
how are you. Then I will ask about the kids and work because most
people named Maggie have both kids and work. Sometimes they
realize I’m not Gracie and when this happens I will ask if they are Gracie themselves. This is
when I ask to speak to Gracie. I say Maggie put Gracie on the
phone. I say what have you done to Gracie Maggie. This is when they usually hang up if I
haven’t done so first.”
Order Kamby
Bolongo
Mean River Read an excerpt
