The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble Page B

many family problems, or so it seemed to Jess. They had no children. (Anna did not count.) Sweden, as Jess did not then know, as not many people in Britain then knew, practised compulsory sterilisation of those with learning difficulties until 1975, which seems a long-lasting anomaly in what is rightly held to be a tolerant, liberal egalitarian society.
    Anthropologists are a strange breed. Jess didn’t like it when outsiders made fun of them, but she couldn’t help noticing that some of the most celebrated anthropological narratives have curious gaps in them. You read hundreds of pages of observation and analysis, and are suddenly made aware that the observer was, all the while, not embedded lonely in an alien tribe living on worms and bats and insect stew, as he appeared to be and indeed as he frequently suggested he was, but living near by in semi-comfort with his wife and a servant or two in a de-luxe tent or a mobile home, with access to the highway or the helicopter. Much work, of course, has recently been done on deconstructing anthropological narratives, and it is sometimes hard to tell which revisionist readings are true, and which malicious. But some primary and very famous accounts are, for sure, misleading.
    Living amongst the Nambikwara in Brazil, Lévi-Strauss describes a meal consisting of a few fruits, two fat poisonous spiders, tiny lizards’ eggs, one or two lizards, a bat, palm nuts and a handful of grasshoppers. He claimed that the group gobbled these up cheerfully, and that he happily shared the repast.
    Maybe so, maybe not. When his wife developed an eye infection, she was evacuated very promptly to the nearest hospital.
    However hard we stare at Lévi-Strauss’s photographs of the Nambikwara, we can never read them. Are they human? Are they of the same human species as ourselves, are they of the same branch of the family of man? What did these people make of Lévi-Strauss and his low-profile but attendant wife? We stare at them as adolescents in a more sheltered age used to stare at photographs suggesting or partially disclosing nudity: hungry for knowledge, hungry for revelation. As Jess as a child stared at her father’s kid-bound booklet, as Jess as a mother stares at the photographs in Lionel Penrose’s classic books on Mental Defect. She gazes at the High-Grade Feeble-Minded Girl, so demure and pretty with her dark dress and wide lace collar, at the physically less appealing Laurence-Moon syndrome man with retinitis pigmentosa and six toes on his right foot. But you can never penetrate the photograph. They do not reveal more, however long you stare at them. They remain static, frozen, sealed. They do not, cannot move. They cannot speak to us.
    On the new medium of television, to which we were all beginning to succumb, the images moved. They seemed to tell us more. They seemed to be three-dimensional, those animals in the savannah, those tribesmen in their shacks and huts, those patients with rare diseases, those travellers in the outback. But you can’t believe anything you see on television, ever. You seem to see more than you see in an old-fashioned ethnological photograph, but you don’t. We all know that now. Look for the shadow of the cameraman. Look for the footprint of the cameraman.
    It wasn’t quite as bad as that in those early days. Television wasn’t either as smart or as stupid as it is now. It was simpler.
    Katie’s Jim in the sixties and seventies worked in television for Granada. He directed a current-affairs programme. He worked very hard. Those were the heroic days of Granada, when it was inventive, investigative, radical. Katie worked part time at Bush House for the BBC World Service, reviewing new poetry from the Commonwealth and chairing a poetry quiz. This was a characteristically gendered division of labour in those days.
    Both their lives are very different now.
    Jess’s one and only African journey was to the shining lake, where Livingstone died. She remained