Exit Wounds — a memoir of love, loss, longing, exile and resilience

15 Sep 2024

Author Peter Godwin shares his experiences with honesty and vulnerability in his new book, Exit Wounds.

Author Peter Godwin has shared the content of his latest and “longest” written memoir, in a Daily Maverick webinar hosted by Ferial Haffajee.

https://www.youtube.com/live/bAOFZOO0794?si=G2EHOs49p85C_zPT

Exit Wounds shares his personal experiences of love, loss, longing, exile and resilience, and the complexities of his life.

Godwin’s newly published book comes after his previous works, Mukiwa, an Orwell Prize winner, and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, which garnered the prestigious Borders Original Voices award.

Importance of family and friends

“This is a funny-sad book. It is not a downer. It is funny … my mother is increasingly funny and she is eccentric but self-aware at the same time. As her world shrinks, we become her world, and there is a lot in this book for people like us who are a sandwich generation. When you find yourself really looking after kids … and ageing parents who sort of become kids in some ways, the way that relationship changes…’’ said Godwin.

“This book is about family and it is about how important family and friends really are … I realised almost too late to have a sort of ground and physical community of my own and a lot of the book is about looking for home, trying to recreate home, asking what home is? What it is to belong? These are the themes of the … book.”

Godwin reflected on his childhood and parenting experiences, drawing a stark contrast between his own upbringing and the approach he has taken with his children. He recalled a valuable piece of advice he received: “Remember to parent the child you’ve got and not the child you were.”

He acknowledged that he had taken this guidance to heart: “In that sense I am a very different parent to my parents. My parents were always away, always working, my mom was completely distracted.”

According to Godwin, among the issues that made his parents, particularly his mom, absent was because of work. Godwin’s mother was a devoted doctor with a “nearly 50-year career” dedicated mostly to her work in Zimbabwe.

However, her professional commitment came at a personal cost. As Godwin’s mother herself had acknowledged.

“My mother was many things, She was a great doctor; she wasn’t a great mother as she was the first to admit. She was a much better grandmother to my sister’s daughter… She saw her thousands and thousands of hours more than I ever saw my mother in my whole life,’’ Godwin stated.

Unspoken truths

In the webinar, Godwin further examined his family’s unspoken truths: “I am actually looking at stuff that we can’t normally talk about in our family. It became a weird thing because in Crocodile … one of the fairly dramatic things that happens in that book is, it becomes apparent that my father has lied about his identity and where he is from … which we never knew and that made me understand why we did not have those conversations in our family, we didn’t talk about that kind of thing, we did not talk about our feelings … the book became a way to have a conversation. ’’

Building on his previous works, Mukiwa and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, Godwin delivered an introspective account of his personal struggles and the complexities of the human experience.

“In many ways I had more conversations with my mother in these last years covered in this book than I had in the whole rest of her life. I hope people find it moving, but it is not supposed to be sentimental, it’s not self-consciously sentimental, I am not trying to do that, but there is a sadness.’’

“In the book, I have said that there is a sad symmetry to my relationship with my mother … in that I spent the first ten years of my life trying to get her attention and she spent the last ten years of hers trying to get my attention.”DM

Exit Wounds: A story of love, loss and occasional wars is available at the DM 168 bookshop

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Maverick Life

Importance of family and friends

Unspoken truths