The Peace Corps—Our Story Alone To Write

During the 1950s, two societal impulses swept across America. One impulse that characterized the decade was detailed in two best-selling books of the era: the 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and the non-fiction book, The Organization Man, written by William H. Whyte and published in 1956. These books looked at the “American way of life” and how men got ahead in their work and in society. Both are bleak takes on the corporate world.

These books were underscored by Ayn Rand’s ideas as expressed in the novel Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957. Her philosophy of Objectivism proposed reason as man’s only proper judge of values and his only proper guide to action. Every man, according to Rand, was an end in himself. He must work for rational self-interest, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. Objectivism rejected any form of altruism.

Then in 1958 came the novel The Ugly American, by William Lederer and Eugene J. Burdick. This book went through fifty-five printings in two years and was a direct motivation in creating the Peace Corps according to Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman’s history of the early Peace Corps, All You Need Is Love, published by Harvard University Press in 1998.

The hero in The Ugly American is Homer Atkins, a skilled technician committed to helping at a grass-roots level by building water pumps, digging roads, and building bridges. He is called the “ugly” American only because of his physical appearance. He lives and works with the local people in Southeast Asia and, by the end of the novel, is beloved and admired by all of them.

As a US Senator, John F. Kennedy responded to what Lederer and Burdick had to say about the ineptitude of American foreign policy and, in January 1959 Kennedy sent a copy of The Ugly American to every member of the Senate. A year later ideas expressed in the novel would be used by his aide, Ted Sorensen, when crafting the speech Kennedy gave on November 2, 1960, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, six days before the presidential election. It was JFK’s last major speech of the campaign, and in it Kennedy called for the establishment of a Peace Corps, using that name for the first time. America, Kennedy said in San Francisco, was “full of young people eager to serve the cause of peace in the most useful way.”

A New Frontier

Kennedy’s call to serve and his campaign theme of a “new frontier” appealed to the romantic impulse of many early Volunteers. While social historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared that our frontier was closed by the 1890s, America still responded to the notion of a hero, a lone hero standing up to a corrupt world. This lone hero was dramatized during the 1950s in two classic western movies, “Shane” and “High Noon.” And like Alan Ladd in “Shane,” Peace Corps Volunteers could, in a sense, ride off into the sunset, saddlebags packed with idealism and a yearning for adventure. And the literary types among these Volunteers could use their overseas experiences in their prose and poetry.

Writing from experience

The first book to draw on the Peace Corps experience was written by Arnold Zeitlin, who had volunteered for the Peace Corps in 1961 after having been an Associated Press reporter. That book, To the Peace Corps, With Love (1965), detailed a year of Zeitlin’s life in Ghana as a PCV.

Two years later, in 1967, Simon & Schuster published An African Season, by Leonard Levitt, another journalist. This memoir covers Levitt’s first year (1964) of living and teaching in a rural upper-primary school in Tanzania.

In 1969, Moritz Thomsen (Ecuador 1965-67) published what is considered by many to be the classic Peace Corps memoir: Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle. Thomsen, who had a farm in the state of California, became a Peace Corps farmer in Ecuador at the age of 44, and lived out his life in that country.

Paul Theroux served in Malawi from 1963 to 1965 and used his Peace Corps material in three of his novels: Girls At Play (1969), My Secret History (1984) and My Other Life (1996).

Michael Tidwell’s (Zaire 1985-87) The Ponds of Kalambayi: An African Sojourn, published in 1990, is a passionate and resonant recounting of the author’s tour as a fish extension worker in Zaire; Sara Erdman’s (Cote d’vpore 1998-2000) Nine Hills to Nambonkaha tells the story of a young woman coming of age in Cote d’Ivoire and was published in 2001; Peter Hessler (China 1996-98) published River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, in 2000, and then went on to write two other books based on his time living in China. Recently, Matthew Davis (Mongolina 2000-02) published When Things Get Dark: A Mongolina Winter’s Tale.

Novels Inspired by the Peace Corps Experience

The first published “Peace Corps novel” was Lament for a Silver-Eyed Woman, by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith (Cameroon 1965-67). It was published in 1988. Smith’s novel was followed in 1991 by Richard Wiley’s (Korea 1967-69) Festival for Three Thousand Maidens, a novel Wiley built around his experience serving in Korea. Leaving Losapas by Roland Merullo (Micronesia 1979-80), also published in 1991, was based on his tour in Micronesia. Marnie Mueller’s novel (Ecuador 1963-65), Green Fires: Assault on Eden, A Novel of the Ecuadorian Rain Forest was a 1994 novel about a PCV who returns to her host country, Ecuador.

Using their experiences of foreign countries and cultures as the raw material for their fiction and non-fiction, these ‘Peace Corps Writers’ and their writing – by token of the subjects and themes and sensibilities present – show what a profound influence two years of Peace Corps service had on what they wrote.

Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963), in his Introduction to Sunrise With Seamonsters: Travels & Discoveries 1964-1984, recounts how he found his creative material while volunteering in Africa. He describes the moment he realized he had a motherlode of material thanks to the Peace Corps.

“I remember a particular day in Mozambique,” Theroux wrote, “in a terrible little country town, getting a haircut from a Portuguese barber. He had come to the African bush from rural Portugal to be a barber . . .. This barber did not speak English, I did not speak Portuguese, yet when I addressed his African servant in Chinyanja, his own language, the Portuguese man said in Portuguese, ‘Ask the bwana what his Africans are like.’ And that was how we held a conversation – the barber spoke Portuguese to the African, who translated it into Chinyanja for me; and I replied in Chinyanja, which the African kept translating into Portuguese for the barber. The barber kept saying – and the African kept translating – things like, ‘I can’t stand the blacks – they’re so stupid and bad-tempered. But there’s no work for me in Portugal.’ It was grotesque, it was outrageous, it was the shabbiest, darkest kind of imperialism. I could not believe my good luck. In many parts of Africa in the early 1960s it was the nineteenth century, and I was filled with the urgency to write about it.”

In Korea, Richard Wiley recalls: “As I started to learn Korean I began to see that language skewed actual reality around, and as I got better at it I began to understand that it was possible to see everything differently. Reality is a product of language and culture, that’s what I learned.”

The late novelist Maria Thomas (Ethiopia 1971-73) said of time in Ethiopia, “it was a great period of discovery. There was the discovery of an ancient world, an ancient culture, in which culture is so deep in people that it becomes a richness.”

Poet Margaret Szumowski (Zaire 1973-74) & (Ethiopia 1974-75), puts it this way:

“The visual shock and splendor of Africa is enough to keep the poet writing for the rest of her life – take as an example, the baobab. I’d never seen such a strange and magnificent tree, one that blooms at night, harbors night creatures such as lemurs, and provides food for humans from its fuzzy pods. I’d never seen donkeys in the streets laden with their loads, or a woman dancing around our house, rags tied to her feet as she cleaned the floor as in Addis Ababa. I’d never seen soldiers with their guns pointed at us, as I did in Uganda. All of these experiences gave me enough to think about and absorb for the rest of my life. ”

It is the gift of language that these poets find most useful and beneficial. Poet Ann Neelon (Senegal 1978-79) learned a great deal from her experience that she is able to sum up in one word: “foreignness.” In an essay for our newsletter Peace Corps Writers, she writes:

“Foreignness is important to a poet because it teaches humility. Humility is important because without it there is no mystical experience. In Senegal, I gained many things useful to a poet. These included hours of direct exposure to the oral tradition via West African griots, caches of exquisite bush and desert images, and French and Wolof syllables, but none of these can compare with the opportunity to have Africa erase who I was. Only after losing myself could I find myself as a writer.”

John Givens (Korea 1967-69), author of three novels published in the 1980s, says that the Peace Corps “suggested that experience was not limited to the mores and expectations of central California where I grew up. The ‘wideness’ of the world came home to me vividly in Korea, and I’ve been exploring the world ever since.”

Novelist and short story writer Eileen Drew (Zaire 1979-81) makes the point that writers with Peace Corps experience “bring the outsider’s perspective, which we’ve learned overseas, to bear on the U.S. We are not the only writers to have done this, but because of the nature of our material, it’s something we can’t not do.”

And finally Bob Shacochis (Eastern Caribbean 1975-76) pinpoints how Peace Corps writers are in step with writers from previous generations:

“We are torchbearers of a vital tradition – that of shedding light in the mythical heart of darkness. We are descendants of Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and scores of other men and women, expatriates and travel writers and wanderers, who have enriched our domestic literature with the spices of Cathay, who have tried to communicate the ‘exotic’ as a relative, rather than an absolute, quality of humanity.”

What America has gained through the writings of these Volunteers are methods of understanding the parts of the world and the cultures most Americans never see. By writing about the developing world and emerging democracies, Peace Corps Writers have broadened the landscape of American literature, enriching the national cannon with internationally flavored prose and poetry. Peace Corps writers have come of age as literary persons. Peace Corps writers tell the stories of life in the developing world. It is perhaps a small claim to make in the world of literature, but it is ours alone to make.

John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962-64)

First published in Peace Corps Writers in December 2010