In Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), unhappy home for newly-married Muriel Spark from 1937 to 1944, the central tension within the colonial community was between Africa and Europe. They didn’t quite belong in either, but were tied to both.
Spark’s African short stories were the making of her as a writer. The Seraph and the Zambezi won the Observer short story competition in 1951, and propelled her into print. The Go-Away Bird is more ambitious, broken into three parts, set in Africa, London, and back in Africa. Daphne du Toit is the displaced protagonist, haunted in Africa by the call of the grey lourie, ‘go-‘way, go-‘way’, and in London by a caged budgerigar that repeats the same message.
First published in The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories, Macmillan, 1958 and collected in The Complete Short Stories, Viking, 2001
A Personal Anthology 