a.magazine’s African Interview Series

Kris Holloway, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali, West Africa from 1989-1991, has recently teamed up with the Literary Ventures Fund, a philanthropic literary investment fund, to publish the true story of a remarkable West African midwife named Monique. Kris and Monique worked side-by-side birthing babies and caring for mothers in an impoverished Malian village. Since it’s release, Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Mid-wife in Mali has been named a Boston Globe bestseller, one of Entertainment Weekly’s top 10 narrative travel books, and a Barnes & Nobles Book Club pick. It is a tale of friendship that reaches beyond borders to vividly and irrevocably unite another woman’s world with our own.

You’ve said that you always knew you would write about Monique. Had you always been interested in writing when the inspiration for your book came along? What was your writing background prior to Monique and the Mango Rains.

I always dreamed I would write about Monique. She was such an amazing African woman, midwife, and mother — really the first “feminist” in her tiny, rural region of West Africa. I lived with her as a Peace Corps volunteer from 1989-1991, and her effect on me was profound. Friends who heard about my experience said to me, “you really should write a book about her” as if writing a book is something that I could generate over the course of a few long weekends. My life here in the U.S. was full with work and small children — way over-programmed. There was little time to think or contemplate.

My writing background before Monique and the Mango Rains was: folk songs about nature and animals when I was ten years old, love poems in high school to my football-playing boyfriends, sporadic journals while in college (I tended to start them in excruciating detail “had Apples & Cinnamon instant Oatmeal for breakfast before brushing my teeth” then simply stop after day four, and a master’s thesis entitled “A Feasibility Study to Determine the Need for a Free-standing Birth Center in NE Detroit”. Not exactly a recipe for successful a memoir. But I AM a natural communicator, and when I feel deeply about a subject, I want to tell the world.

Only after your second trip to Mali – when news of Monique’s death in the throes of childbirth reached you – did you begin to write your book in earnest. Yet it was a trip that some might say would have been easy to avoid, since, officially, your obligations in that part of the world had been met. Why was it so important for you to reconnect with Monique’s family and culture? What did you hope – or perhaps fear – you would find?

Yes, my official obligations had been met long ago, but Monique and my friendship continued to deepen. Monique had written me about her pregnancy and asked me to research ways for her to stop having children as she had had to go off the birth control pill. We were discussing (through letters – there was no phone or email then) the options when she died. Though her family wrote to us with the news the day after she died, we didn’t get the letter until three weeks later. The moment we got it, I knew my husband John and I were going back (John served in the Peace Corps with me and also knew and loved Monique). If your sister dies, you go to the funeral. It’s not something you question – your heart pulls you towards it. I wanted to mourn her death with the people who knew and loved her, to find out what the hell had happened – how could this fabulous midwife die in labor, something she had saved so, so many women from? - and to make sure her three children were going to be okay. Monique always wanted her kids, especially her daughters, to have a chance at an education that she never had (she had to drop out after 6th grade), and John and I were committed to ensuring they stayed in school. I feared that I wouldn’t get her husband’s permission to keep the kids in school. And, more deeply, I feared that time and distance had made me a stranger to her family and they wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing their feelings or thoughts about her passing with me. I needn’t have worried.

What was your perception of Africa as a girl in Granville, Ohio? What, of that preconception, still lingered when you touched down in Mali? What, when you departed, had flown out the window?

My perception of Africa during my youth was vague —more random images (Sahara desert, people in robes, ramshackle houses) than feelings or knowledge. Remember, Africa was not in the news like it is today! An exchange student from Cairo, Egypt lived with my family during my senior year in high school, so I learned much about her world. I didn’t generalize this to “Africa” as I knew that Alya came from an upper class family and was more accustomed to luxury than I was. As a young person, I was very concerned with animal rights and environmental health, hence I absorbed some information about the environmental problems facing the continent, but little about the people.

My first impression when I arrived in Mali was that I’d walked onto a National Geographic Magazine cover – red earth, mud brick huts huddled together under and immense sky. It looked and smelled exactly how I thought it would. Within a few days, I was learning new cultural rules, speaking Bambara, and working and studying alongside the Malian people. The 2-dimensional page that I had walked onto suddenly became a multi-dimensional life, thanks to the people in it. I had no idea that it would feel this way so quickly. The people were so much friendlier than I had expected, perhaps because we are not always so welcoming to “the other” in the U.S. In Mali, foreigners are always greeted congenially, welcomed into the rituals, celebrations, and seasonal rhythms of the year. It is a cultural value to be a good host – despite differences in language, religion, and skin color. Living in Mali showed me that we all want the same things: enough to eat, a place to rest, the love of family and friends, and the right to lead a life that holds meaning.

You are the mother of two boys. How has your relationship with Monique affected your own parenting style?

Bad hair days became meaningless after knowing Monique! In other words, I don’t sweat the petty things. I know how lucky I am to have the means and the decision-making power to care for my children’s health and their education. Would that every mother have such luxury.

Monique also seeded my desire to analyze my own culture: to not consume an idea or practice whole, but to chew, to swallow bit by bit, take a sip of water if needed, and spit some out. For example, Monique questioned the practice of female circumcision and excision (a practice performed on 96% of girls in Mali) because she did not see any health benefits. When I gave birth to my first son, I questioned the practice of circumcising him on the same grounds (though make no mistake, the female version can be much, much more severe). Monique instilled in me the ability to question assumptions. Every day, I try to be less righteous about what I believe. I don’t assume I know what is true. I listen a little more to others’ ideas and decisions, to take gratefully from their best thinking — even when it seems that we are worlds apart — and combine it with my own. This is how I try to parent, and to live (imperfectly I’m sure, but with great commitment!).

What were some of the challenges you faced as a Westerner writing about Africa?

I was worried that I would not do Monique’s story justice due to my own cultural lens. I certainly never thought of Monique as my “black” friend. Skin color was the least of our differences. We didn’t speak the same language, didn’t come from the same socioeconomic class, didn’t have the same schooling, and came from completely different cultures. But I realized that if I didn’t write a book about her, no one would. And when I listened to her family and friends and their stories of her life and her death, they resonated with truth. Each time I spoke with someone, I thought, “yes, yes, this is the Monique I knew as well.” These conversations gave me confidence that I had come to love, admire, and know Monique as everyone had, that the “truth” of her was, indeed, a shared one.

What are you currently working on? Any concrete plans for a second book?

Right now, I’m still very involved with book events, especially in the academic community in the United States. It ain’t over yet! It’s so inspiring to talk with undergraduate students in anthropology/women’s studies/sociology/nursing, about Monique’s life and my time with her; they get what she was about. John and I will return to Mali this December for the first time since Monique’s death. We will visit Monique’s family, and check in on Clinique Monique, a rural health clinic started by her cousin in her honor. A percentage of the proceeds from sales of Monique and the Mango Rains fund the building of this clinic as well as the education of a dozen children in Monique’s circle of family and friends. So far, we’ve raised over $15,000 for the work! Our dollars make such a large impact. For example, schooling a child in Mali for one year costs less than $10 per month; midwifery training is less than $25 per month. Click here to Learn more about Clinique Monique.

As for a next book, I have ideas, but nothing concrete yet. Between work (I work for a wonderful study abroad organization, the Center for International Studies), kids, and our new puppy, my plate is deliciously full. Not sure when the hunger to write again will come, but I bet it will.

If you could meet any African artist – author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer, designer – who would it be? Why?

Wow that’s a tough one. I’d have to say, Ousmane Sembene, who died this past June at the age of 84. His biographer, Dr. Samba Gadjigo (a friend and a professor at Mount Holyoke College) said, “he was a revolutionary artist… His work was aimed at promoting freedom, social justice, and at restoring pride and dignity to African people.” I agree. If you haven’t seen his film Moolaade, about the rite of female genital cutting, you simply must. It is in Bambara (the language I spoke in Mali), is aimed at African audiences, employs an all-African cast, and was filmed in Burkina Faso. I would have liked to take several rounds of tea with him under a straw hangar on a late, hazy afternoon, and absorb his deep commitment and awesome ability to give voice to the lands and peoples of Africa.