Failing Forward In Saarland

Failing Forward in Saarland is the memoir of a transplanted Canadian with Caribbean roots, venturing with her husband and their daughter into Saarland, Germany. The memoir describes the year the family spent in this small forested land tucked away in the western corner of Germany on the border to France. Her teenage daughter made the daily commute to attend a lycée in France and her husband spent most days doing research in labs and forests. What was the mother and wife left to do in the Saarland with next to no knowledge of the German language let alone the Frankish accent? As a career teacher, the author’s life had never before been reduced to awaiting the daily home-coming of daughter and husband. During her year in Saarland, she did much more than that. This book is an entertaining and informative account by an experienced Black teacher of what it means to transplant a family into a foreign country and how to enjoy a welcoming culture.

Most significantly, this memoir is a meaningful addition to the literary corpus focusing on strangers in a strange land. Even though the author is intimately familiar with the notion – she has lived most of her adult life in Canada, far from her Barbados birthplace – she immediately faces the challenges of adjusting to the customs of a new land and, especially, learning to communicate in German. And her story is anything but ordinary – it’s a moving, often amusing, and sometimes humbling account of the author’s adventures and learning experiences in a largely unknown country without the benefit of fluency in the local language. As the title indicates, the author comes to view these challenges – and even failures – as positive “life lessons in adaptability, strength, and resilience” – failing forward.