Can we speak of a “new
wave” of Zimbabwean fiction? Maybe I’ve just accidentally discovered the novels
that have appeared recently, but 2018 seems to have been a particularly
fruitful year. Notably, these are only novels internationally published and
available to me; works produced within Zimbabwe are harder to obtain, including
those in Shona and Ndebele. So this toe-dip is no basis for generalisation, but
certain features of this batch are interesting.
Some names are new,
some better established. Many have been incorporated into an intriguing little
compilation by Tinashe Mushakavanhu and Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats
(2018). This is an eclectic collage of grainy-chic photographs in brick-red and
yellow, extracts and how-to-write homilies from Zimbabwean writers old and new,
ranging from Doris Lessing to John Eppel, Yvonne Vera to Faith Nyamabuya, and
dozens of others. Mushakavanhu, working out of New York and Johannesburg, has
been producing other samizdat publications, too, and is set to field a
re-evaluation of 1970s bad boy of literature, Dambudzo Marechera.
Marechera’s wildly
talented influence on the younger set is not at all reflected in the novels I
discuss here, perhaps precisely because they are ‘mainstream’, published
outside Zimbabwe. Almost all of these
writers live abroad now, or have done so for long periods. I wonder how this
affects how they write, and what kind of editing attention they receive. As
with some slightly earlier novels, such as Panashe Chigumadzi’s Sweet Medicine, and short story
collections like NoViolet Bulawayo’s We
Need New Names (2013) and Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory (2015), there seems to be a notional list of
approved ‘national issues’ or tropes – the violent and/or unfaithful husband,
the incestuous uncle, the AIDS sufferer, the lure and pressure of the
transnational, the teenage pregnancy, and so on – which must be ‘ticked off’
before the closing page. Which is not to say these problems don’t exist, or
that it’s not vital to probe them, or that these books aren’t good at doing so.
But it does tend to make these fictions just a bit (to use a sophisticated
lit.crit. term) samey.
Most interestingly,
I find, is how all these novels treat racial questions and presences.
Consciousness of colonialist racism and material culture is recognised as
pervasive, but it’s treated with a kind of ecumenical, or perhaps multicultural
touch, a decentralised inclusiveness beyond or outside the angst and
aggression, victimhoodery and oversimplification characteristic of so many race
exchanges in South Africa and, right now, the (Dis)United States. It’s a tone
established by earlier novels like – to take just one example – Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare (2010), in
which a white client of said hairdresser, a woman displaced by the farm
seizures, is depicted with the same empathy as any other character. This has
become easier, perhaps, where numerically whites have dwindled to a miniscule
minority.
Though all these
novelists are thoroughly ‘internationalised’, the only genuine ‘outsider’ is C
B George. This is the closely-guarded pen name for someone said to have worked
in southern Africa for some years and now living in London. He/she describes The Death of Rex Nhongo (Quercus, 2015) as
a “loose-limbed thriller”. The primary crime question – who, if anyone, did
kill the real-life Rex Nhongo, aka Solomon Mujuru, in 2011? – is neither really
central to the novel, nor is it any more resolved than it has been in real
life. (Anthropologist Joost Fontein has explored and theorised this in
exhaustive detail in article in the journal Kronos.) George’s story rather weighs in on the
interlinked intimacies of five married couples, all of whom are touched one way
or another by the passage of a gun which may or may not have been used in the
Mujuru murder. The characters range from poor to rich, from Shona to English
and African-American, from taxi-driver to Central Intelligence Organisation
officer. It’s cleverly plotted and authentically observed, unfolding against
the backdrop of economic collapse and Mugabe’s oppressive regime. It’s a cool
outsider’s view in some ways, not allowing one’s sympathies to settle on any
one character for long. It comes down particularly hard on foreigners, pretentious
embassy wallahs and cushioned NGO operatives – more so than on the regime
itself. Domestic dynamics are parsed more analytically than politics. Perhaps
the closest it comes to the latter is the British Jerry Jones’ self-critical
impulse to “reorder the inexplicable into a Western equation of coincidence,
autosuggestion and psychological trauma”, making sense within “an eloquent and
meaningful narrative”, such as one that “explains” Mujuru’s death. “This latter
story is not Jerry’s own, but it can also be appropriated. It doesn’t matter
who owns what any more: small but elaborate lies are necessary to underpin the
megalithic icebergs, which necessarily remain mostly below the surface.” A fluid and deceptive world. With the
exception of odd interpolations in the voice of one small girl, whose invented ‘pidgin’
feels awkward and largely irrelevant to the plot, it’s a strong and readable
novel.
A clutch of novels
emanate from Bulawayo. The only one published in Zimbabwe, by the only author
of this batch still resident, is the ever-prolific John Eppel’s The Boy Who Loved Camping (Weaver, 2019).
It’s a more mature-audience story than it sounds, an affecting but slightly
uncharacteristically bland story that was eviscerated (Eppel tells me) by his
editors of his usual raunchy humour and savage satire. In its economical sweep
from a 1950s childhood, through the liberation war, into a transnational later
life, the protagonist Tom’s life in some respects parallels the author’s.
Landing up in England, Tom experiences alienation every bit as intense as any
back in liberated Zimbabwe; such alienation is not necessarily predicated on
race or racism.
In contrast to Eppel,
Graham Lang was born and raised in pre-independence Zimbabwe but subsequently
emigrated to Australia; he now practices art in Tasmania. I’ve written
elsewhere about his robust novel of the post-2000 farm seizures, Place of Birth (2006), and have
belatedly caught up with his next novel, Lettah’s
Gift (2011). As in the previous work, a white ex-Rhodesian returns to the
country of his birth, finding a very different situation from what he remembers
from his childhood. The premise is less dramatic than in Place of Birth: Frank Cole has to deliver a bequest from his
deceased mother to erstwhile beloved family servant Lettah. It’s a kaleidescopic
portrayal of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, very much about the self-defeating ambiguities
of memory and attempted redemption. Characters ranging from the ugly, cryptic
policeman Chombo to the conservative and equally dubious white farmer Brak, are
portrayed with satisfying ambiguity. In both novels the protagonists’ emigré
status (reflecting the author’s own) enables rather more robust, not to say
embittered, critiques of both colonial and present governmental abuses than we
find in most other fictions.
Modern Bulawayo is depicted
from a different angle by Sue Nyathi, who was raised and educated there (Eppel
was one of her teachers). Her first novel, The
Polygamist, which I haven’t read, has been described as “pulp”. The Gold-diggers (Pan Macmillan, 2018) is
a cut above that, I think, though the romantic and action bits do drift towards
the Mills & Boon end of the stylistic spectrum. The sentences are short and
texturally ordinary, digestible as Smarties. It’s interestingly premised,
however, on the passengers of a single minibus trip, whose varied careers, unfolding
between Bulawayo and Johannesburg, crisscross through the novel. There’s some
rich detail of both cities, and a strand of biting critique of the metaphorical
“gold-diggers”, the venal and the shameless profiteers of contemporary society,
trailing misery, success and deprivation in equal measure.
The minibus driver’s
family was slaughtered in the 1980s
massacres of Ndebele civilians known as Gukurahundi. Gukurahundi, overlaying the
effects of colonialism and civil war, haunts all these novels, complexly integrated
with the backdrop of post-independence misgovernance, hyperinflation,
electricity and water shortages, and so on. But the focus is rather on domestic
and family affairs, on individual fortunes as the characters swim through
modernity. Little overt judgement is
passed either on past racism or present ills: not that critique is absent, but both
aspects seem to just take their place amongst many cultural issues that must be
negotiated.
At the foot of the
cover of Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s intriguingly-titled The Theory of Flight (Penguin, 2018) appear two hands, one dark-skinned, one pale. This
reflects the (excuse the phrase) even-handed fashion in which race is (ditto)
handled. There is so-called miscegenation, and mixtures of generosity and
meanness on all sides. Postcolonial anxieties persist, to be sure, but politics
is deliberately displaced into the realm of the everyday: “Real revolutions
happen on farms, in workshops, in garages and in basements, usually in the
middle of nowhere, propelled simply by the need to realise a dream.” The
central dream here is one character’s quixotic desire to build an aeroplane and
fly. This first novel won the Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in 2019, the judges
charmed, I imagine, by its injection of South American-style magic realism, its
sly humour, and the clever interlacing of its sundry characters’ lives. As with
The Gold-diggers, perhaps too many
characters: the eye and the empathy can’t settle, and it feels as if Ndlovu is
aiming for an epic reach on too small a canvas. Underlying grimness is rather defanged
by the arch levity of the delivery and a somewhat irresolute plot. Still, an
enjoyable read from a writer who, one hopes, will continue to take flight.
Another promising
debut novel, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s House
of Stone (Atlantic Books, 2018) shows some similarities. It’s also set in
Bulawayo, and also revolves largely around a disappearance during Gukurahundi. There
is another white man fathering himself upon black women, muddying the racial
waters. There is a similar panoply of characters, and a plot which spirals
repeatedly and fragmentarily through past and present. This is very mod, and
might at a stretch be said to reflect the shattered national consciousness, but
this old man wonders: Whatever happened to telling a good old story from A to B? In this case, some potential
suspense is lost, with characters still chewing over questions already answered
a hundred pages earlier. Tshuma’s tone is more sombre than Ndlovu’s, her
critiques of both colonialism and post-independence misgovernance a bit sharper.
Tshuma writes, not very originally but succinctly: “The past was an
overpowering presence, too present and not past, as it should have been,
cannibalizing our present, mutating our future.” Yet the writing itself seems
to have moved beyond such entrapment, even if the future looks less than rosy. House of Stone is a substantial piece, no
question, but I wonder if any novel could live up to the overweening hype the
PR machine has generated. If Tshuma gets better, as she well might, there will
be no adjectives, because the superlatives have all been used up. Not to
mention the rather self-congratulatory introduction and interview included in
this edition. This kind of thing does young writers few favours, in my view.
Tsitsi Dangarembga
isn’t exactly new on the block: her rightly acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, was published way
back in 1987. After pursuing a career in film production, she eventually
followed up with The Book of Not,
which took the life of the first novel’s protagonist, Tambudzai Sigauke, into
adulthood. Now, Dangarembga extends this fictional biography into a third
novel, This Mournable Body (Jacana, 2018).
We follow the tribulations of Tambu and her extended family into her early
middle age under Mugabe’s regime, with its perpetual undercurrents of neglect,
corruption and patronage, electricity and fuel shortages, and disruptive farm
seizures. It’s generally indeed a mournful and mournable situation as Tambu
flounders between jobs in an ad agency, teaching, and tourism business,
collapsing more than once into near-psychotic breakdown – another ‘nervous
condition’ meant slyly, perhaps, to reflect the muddled breakdown of the
country in general. As in the other novels I discuss here, direct and overt critique
of the government is avoided: I don’t think Mugabe himself is mentioned once. We
still await, as far as I know, a substantial novel that really gets at the core
of that regime with forensic courage.
Neither The Book of Not nor This Mournable Body quite match up to the sharpness of postcolonial
critique and psychological focus of Nervous
Conditions, and the first half of Mournable
feels distinctly meandering. Instead of the conventional first- or third-person
narration, Dangarembga has chosen the rarely-used second person “you” – as if
Tambu is speaking to herself as an other. It takes some getting used to, but
eventually seems appropriate to Tambu’s self-suffocating inner disjunctions:
the passages describing her hallucinatory breakdown are I think the most
arresting in the book. There are other moments of brilliance, too: she
describes Tambu’s mother’s gnarled joints as “thick as bulbs ready for planting”;
“the tongues of discoloured tennis shoes loll forward as though from a throat”. Postcolonial racial issues are present – the older
generation critiques Tambu’s dodgy acquisition of “Englishness”, making her potentially
“nothing but a foreigner visiting”; her tourism boss is a white school contemporary;
her cousin Nyasha has married an edgy German; the echoes of white rule and
culture pervade society, variously accepted, adapted, and resisted. But the
racial aspects are again just one of many ambient problems, neither more nor
less remarkable than many others, neither ignored nor centralised. All this is
particularly fascinating in the context of the world-wide post-George Floyd
anti-racism protests; it’s as if Zimbabwe, while in some ways regressing to
forms of medieval warlordism and impoverishment, shot through with threads of
techno-modernity, has already moved past all that; as if, persistent cultural ambiguities
notwithstanding, a certain egalitarianism has been achieved – one all might
aspire to.
All the above novels
suffer, if that’s the word, from a certain issues-driven studiousness, a
constraint reflected in the mode of social realism. Forays beyond this
mirror-of-society style remain rare. But one writer who is proving more
adventurous is Petina Gappah. She exhibited considerable deftness in her
earlier collections of short stories, The
Book of Memory (2015) and Rotten Row (2016).
She showed herself capable, for instance, of thinking her way, not without
empathy, into the headspace and argot of Rhodesia’s last white hangman. Now she
has published a novel which she regards as the culmination of her writing
career: Out of Darkness, Shining Light
(Faber, 2019). This is narrated from the points of view of two of the 69
people, almost all Africans, who chose to transport David Livingstone’s decayed
remains from Ujiji, where he had died, to the East African coast, a gruelling
trek, so that he could be taken home to England to be buried. It’s in any view
an instance of extraordinary cross-racial loyalty and self-sacrifice for a
personage often regarded as a harbinger of colonialism, despite his antipathy
to the slave-trade. Gappah imagines into the light the personalities, struggles
and arguments of the bearers themselves, otherwise all but lost to history. She
deploys an English-language voice for her Zanzibari main narrator Halima which,
if just occasionally too derivative of the Cockney “innit”, the Ulster “so it
was”, and other ‘working-class’ quirks, is innovative and convincing. The
characters are vivacious and complex, the background research self-evidently
intensive, the implicit critiques razor-edged but even-handed, the language
bewitchingly rich, as this opening paragraph shows:
It is strange, is it not, how the things you know will happen do not
ever happen the way you think they will happen when they do happen? On the
morning that we found him, I was woken by a dream of cloves. The familiar,
sweetly cloying smell came so abruptly to my nose that I might have been back
at the spice market in Zanzibar, a slim-limbed girl again, supposedly learning
how to pick out the best for the Liwali’s kitchen, but really standing first on
one leg, then the other, and my mother saying, but, Halima, you don’t listen,
which was true because I was paying more attention to the sounds of the day –
the call of the muezzin, the cries of
the auctioneers at the slave market, the donkeys braying in protest, the packs
of dogs snarling over the corpses of slaves outside the customs house, and the
screeching laughter of children.
That sets up the
story with beautiful economy. And it’s refreshing to find a Zimbabwean taking
other parts of the globe as her creative stamping-ground, beyond the generally
claustrophobic preoccupation with ‘being Zimbabwean’, without necessarily
abandoning relevant themes.
There may be
something in Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s observation that much Zimbabwean writing
remains insufficiently “introspective”. And it would be naive, of course, to hope that
racism is, or ever will be, somehow eradicated. Yet the confident, well-read
intelligence of all this writing in itself seems to me to indicate a move
beyond the conventional, the sloganeering obsession with racism, into a more
secure and nuanced sense of selfhood, even as the future is depicted as still
mired in uncertainty.
*****
