West with the Night, by Beryl Markham

1630 Words4 Pages

Beryl Markham’s West with the Night is a collection of anecdotes surrounding her early life growing up as a white girl in British imperialist Africa, leading up to and through her flight across the Atlantic Ocean from East to West, which made her the first woman to do so successfully. Throughout this memoir, Markham exhibits an ache for discovery, travel, and challenge. She never stays in one place for very long and cannot bear the boredom of a stagnant lifestyle. One of the most iconic statements that Beryl Markham makes in West with the Night is:
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. (Markham 131)

This quotation best represents her perspective by describing her ever-changing life. Moreover, Beryl is, for the most part, free of the typical confines of the era, primarily race, gender, and age transient lifestyle because of her persistence, the intermingling of African and European cultures, and above all else the support of her companions.
Markham, as a child, and then as a young woman, hunts with the native Murani people. Once while hunting for boar with Arab Maina, Arab Kosky, and her dog, Buller, Markham comes face to face with a dangerous, lone lion. In this section, Beryl is extremely descriptive and recalls the memory in a fashion that allows the reader to see the events unfolding through her eyes at a lifelike pace. “Buller and I crouched behind them, my own spea...

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...rs, is wisdom.” He means that every moment is a part of the journey that is life, and that living each moment to its fullest and taking advantage of everything that may come, is wise. Beryl Markham spends every waking moment of her life striving to do exactly that. She never wastes an opportunity to take a risk, discover something new, travel to another place, take a challenge, or prove someone wrong; and, without the support of friends like Tom Black, Arab Ruta, and Blix, she would not be able to do so. Her memoir West with the Night is a tribute to her free spirit and overarching thirst for all that is foreign.

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays: Second Series "Experience" 1844.
Markham, Beryl. West with the Night. San Francisco: North Point, 1983.
Kruper, Jackie. “Against Prevailing Winds- The Remarkable Life of Beryl Markham.” Chicago: Illinois, 2008.

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