2 minute read
Letters from Tanzania
BY NOËL CARMICHAEL
Noël Carmichael, Dean of Faculty and Academic Affairs, joined the Northwood faculty in 2017. She teaches Humanities and Drama, and lives on campus with her family in the Bergamini dorm. Noël is currently at work on her first book. We caught up with her to get this special preview.
Prior to joining Northwood, I spent a decade living in Tanzania, East Africa. I hadn’t intended to live there so long. In fact, I expected the project I went for (establishing local production of therapeutic foods used to treat malnutrition) to last three to six months.
However, from the moment I started learning Swahili, the language and the culture it expressed quickly consumed me. From then on, Swahili culture became a part of my own. In 2010, I married Chisondi Mzese atop the highest peak on the African continent, Uhuru Point on Mount Kilimanjaro. I adopted my first daughter in Dar es Salaam, and gave birth to my second in Nairobi, Kenya.
While in Tanzania, I worked in the international aid sector, in the performing arts (theatre was my major at NYU) and began to dabble in what has now become my career in education. I also wrote. A lot. I returned home with a crate full of journals and a record of 200 letters I sent home to family and friends over my nine years abroad. Now, five years after returning home, I find myself kneedeep in the process of turning those letters into a book.
Since I have historically written smaller pieces such as essays and poems, tackling what is currently a 300-page work has been quite a learning experience. I initially expected to use the letters as fodder for a cohesive narrative of my experience, but as I spent time with the letters, I realized that the voice I wrote in originally (which I have termed “unexplainably confident”) was too valuable to throw out. I have thus decided to retain the epistolatory form and have focused my energies on curating the collection of letters and framing them with annotations from my present perspective which provide additional context and sometimes reveal my often hilarious and sometimes embarrassing naiveté at the time of writing.
The working title is Letters from Tanzania: 2008-2018 and I aim to get it off my desk and into the hands of a publisher by the fall.
A JOURNAL ENTRY FROM JUNE 10, 2008: Working our way, meter by meter, through the clouds. About to have my first glimpse of the African continent. My first sight of land below the equator… The 6-by-9-inch oval through which I get my first glimpse of the continent reveals a thick haze over brown land, dotted with globs of deep green. An impressionist painting from this distance. The flight attendant is welcoming us to Nairobi first in English, then in French, then in Swahili. I try to understand all three and make some sense of my new geographical perspective as the concept of Africa leaves the domain of my imagination and begins to take shape through my senses...
