“It is only in adventure,” author André Gide observed, “that some people succeed in knowing themselves—in finding themselves.” And to quote travel writer Paul Theroux: “You go away for a long time and return a different person—you never come all the way back.” As romantic as these sentiments sound, however, the reality of traveling to a completely foreign part of the world involves enormous discomfort—both physical and emotional. To be an explorer is to leave behind both the conveniences and certainties of home, to cast off the familiar and embrace the unexpected.

Christine Herbert’s memoir, THE COLOR OF THE ELEPHANT, focuses on her time in the African nation of Zambia as a Peace Corps volunteer. Herbert is quick to dispel any notions of the book as a self-congratulatory tale of a philanthropic white savior swooping into a developing nation. As she writes in her introduction: “This is not about a voyage of self-discovery, of becoming more ‘woke’ in the world, or learning how to survive a Peace Corps term of service…this is about my experience of being broken and reforged, again and again.” Anything but a sanitized travelogue, THE COLOR OF THE ELEPHANT documents Herbert’s two-year adventure with candid, often unflattering self-awareness and no shortage of self-effacing humor.

Herbert, initially, can’t avoid feeling like a bumbling tourist, committing humiliating faux pas despite her best intentions. Invited to a meal by village headmen, Herbert’s attempts at politeness backfire spectacularly: “I just grabbed one of the serving plates and set it down gently at the feet of the headmen, smiled at them, stood up and walked back to the kitchen. The whole place burst into hysterics. My attempt at graciousness proved to be the most ham-handed and pitiable excuse for deference they’d ever seen in their lives.” Gradually, though, she learns the ropes of her host community, learning Bemba, the local dialect—one of seventy-three Zambian languages—and familiarizing herself with the cuisine (“The thing about nshima is it can actually hurt you if you are not used to eating it. It is hot. And I mean Chernobyl meltdown hot.”)

Rendered with the immediacy of present-tense voice and a storyteller’s gift for vivid description (“The freshly lime-slathered walls gleam in the afternoon sun, the reflected rays creating that kind of white that makes you squint your eyes against its brilliance”), THE COLOR OF THE ELEPHANT doesn’t attempt to impose an overtly inspirational narrative or contrived drama onto her story. There is humor throughout—and an abundance of digestive system horror—but it is never glib and is mainly at the author’s own expense. Herbert is engagingly frank about her frustrations and moments of weakness, as when, in one of the book’s funniest episodes, she vandalizes a pair of troublesome cows: “There under the mango trees, armed with only a paintbrush, a can of blue goop, and an angry alter ego calling the shots, I embarked on the quixotic mission of sending the cattle home to their owner looking like giant Smurfs.”

As her introduction promises, Zambia breaks Herbert, again and again. Along with comic fish-out-of-water anecdotes are scenes of heartbreaking poverty and social injustice that are the legacy of Africa’s history of colonialism and apartheid. Herbert contends not only with culture shock but the loss of new friends from the epidemic of HIV and AIDS that continues to ravage Zambia. She is confronted at every turn with her privileged status as a “muzungu,” or white person, as when, at a Christian mission church, an old woman tells her that God “loves the white people more. You whites, you are better than us. That’s why when God came down to earth, he came as a white man.” Herbert leaves Zambia with an appreciation for embracing new experiences with curiosity and humility, and melancholic admiration for the connectedness and community spirit of her host country that is lacking at home.

By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, THE COLOR OF THE ELEPHANT is an engaging, polished memoir that documents Christine Herbert’s adventures in Zambia with candid, often unflattering self-awareness and no shortage of self-effacing humor.

~Edward Sung for IndieReader