Writing Still: New Stories from Zimbabwe

(Edited by Irene Staunton), reviewed by Annie Gagiano

With this 2003 Weaver Press collection Irene Staunton, a highly active presence on the Zimbabwean publishing scene, has put together a fascinating variety of perspectives on life in the country that is home to (or, in a few cases, former home to) the contributors. Do not be misled by the somewhat featureless cover design of the text - the stories are vividly detailed and in almost all cases so skillfully written that they make up a truly colourful social, historical and geographical mosaic which confirms yet again the paradoxical truth that troubled societies somehow produce some of the most interesting writing available.

Low life and high life; urban events and rural activities; political affairs and intimate relationships; the colonial past and the immediate present all feature in these tales that are remarkable for their candour about tricky subjects such as the damaged economy, the quality of governance, the Matabeleland massacres, lingering racism, white "awkwardness", and class divisions in this society.

The stories are alphabetically arranged, which assists the reader's impressions of unpredictable transitions, from one story to the next, into entirely different spheres within the overarching Zimbabwean social scene. That said, one might add that there is little evidence here of literary experimentalism (in contrast with several novels by Zimbabwean authors) - the stories are tales, each of which enacts (almost "performs") the settings, circumstances, experiences and feelings of recognisable and easily identifiable characters. This is by no means a weakness, as it gives the collection a connectedness within its diversity. Of course, issues of access to publishing result in a degree of under-representation of, for instance, Shona women writers, but the presences in the stories themselves are a market crowd of voices and personalities, or a portrayal of quieter domestic scenes in which such women (and many others) are abundantly portrayed.

In the wonderful, penultimate (sketch-like) story by Yvonne Vera, the narrator tells us that when she completed her journalism course in Harare, her grandmother enquired about her professional future - "(W)hen I said I was going to write important things down she said, 'The things which are not written down are also true'" (242). This can be taken as a key quotation, applicable to the collection as a whole and a clue to the value of the seemingly straightforward realism of most of these stories - for what they give us are the mediated, considered and evaluated experiences that do not make it into newspaper articles or reports, history books or (in many cases) novels. And since the setting is Zimbabwe, the characters' resilience - the way they cope with and occasionally succumb to the stresses and challenges resulting from their recent history - is what is especially interesting, and often inspiring.

There is, for instance, Gugu Ndlovu's story "Torn Posters", in which school children daringly "attack" the Zanu-PF posters put up during the run-up to the 1984 election. They do so uttering "earsplitting war-cries … to encounter the enemy" (on the posters), because they are children whose families have been the victims of the deliberately orchestrated Matabeleland terror campaign conducted against Ndebele villagers and blamed on "dissidents" (179-180). The child narrator's father is one of those unjustly imprisoned and persecuted; when at last the family is allowed to visit him, he is aged and emaciated, but his words inspire the narrator not to succumb to despair: "(T)here would be no checkmate while I was alive," she vows (189).

Similarly, but contrastingly, the story called "The Winning Side" shows a boy who had to watch the rape of his mother and the violent killing of his parents and siblings (during what one assumes is the same atrocity). The child makes his way to the city where his mother's brother lives in obscene luxury - because this uncle is part of the oppressive regime, as the expression of his ruthless determination always to be on "the winning side". The guilt money that this uncle hands over to the boy is used by the latter to aid his new friend, a street child suffering - perhaps dying - from TB. Such stories show the adult choices forced upon children in high-stress situations and evoke not only compassion but also respect.

Another compelling story - by Charles Mungoshi, an esteemed author - is called "The Sins of the Fathers". It, too, concerns a child (in this case, an adult son with children of his own) who at last confronts the corrupt sources of his influential father's power - but at the cost of the death of his own two daughters and that of his father-in-law, whom he had loved and respected. The son is a weak man, his spirit broken early on by his intimidating father; but the worm begins to turn as the full extent of the old man's perfidy emerges. The dimensions of the plot are somewhat melodramatic, but the story is finely imagined and a searing indictment of misplaced pride and the abuse of sectarian political might.

This story might be contrasted with Derek Huggins's account, in "The Revolutionary: a brief encounter", of the involuntary respect felt by a callow but decent young Englishman for an older Zimbabwean man who (during the first stirrings of the second chimurenga against British rule) was caught transporting guns. Intending to interrogate the prisoner, he finds himself conversing with an articulate and committed leader of impressive dignity - even when stripped of clothes and power - and he never forgets him. Alexander Kanengoni, another well-known writer, also presents us with an encounter between a white man of British settler origin and a Zimbabwean (ex-) combatant; in this case, the white man is the elder, but the conversation is also about ownership, land and power, now in the post-colonial context. Without sentimentalising the old white man or airbrushing his lingering colonial mannerisms away, Kanengoni in this brief sketch shows an increased acknowledgement of both colonial injustice and of the need to work out a mutually accommodating structure of land use in Zimbabwe, among the former settlers and the new occupants.

Rory Kilalea's "Mea Culpa" is an over-long and somewhat inept depiction of the pain of cross-race gay sexuality overwhelming its ecstasy and liberatory potential - even though the ineptitude of the telling may have been intended as a reflection of the awkward, scarcely post-adolescent narrator's personality.

Surprisingly, AIDS features in few of these tales and often only fleetingly, though a husband's nearly forgotten infidelity returns as a nemesis threatening his family's health and their trust in him in the story "Homecoming" by Vivienne Ndlovu.

Other uncomfortable topics are raised elsewhere - such as the torture and sexual abuse of enthusiastic young volunteers to the freedom struggle ("That Special Place"); urban squalor and starvation in the "new" state of Zimbabwe ("The Grim Reaper's Car"); class exploitation and humiliation by wealthier citizens ("Maria's Interview"); crime and "faceless" violence ("The Wooden Bridge"); compassionless hypocrisy and vicious - eventually violent - snobbery ("Mermaid out of the Rain"); familial love and loyalty versus nasty prejudice ("Mukoma Amos"); and sexism and self-pitying complacency ("Queues"). The latter story is by the admired writer Shimmer Chinodya and is one of the more experimental pieces; however, it is to my mind one of his less successful pieces.

An excellent story is the one called "New Mourning" by Mary Ndlovu; in it, the narrator (a smart young woman who has, in her own eyes, successfully escaped the squalor of her mother's rural household) discovers the extent to which she had overlooked and underestimated her (now late) mother's quietly heroic courage and social commitment as well as her enterprising, interesting personality.

A story in which just such an enterprising woman is honoured and foregrounded is the opening sketch of the collection ("Universal Remedy"), told from the perspective of a white, divorced mother of young children and centring on the quiet strength of the black woman who comes to her aid. The latter is an example and an encouragement to the narrator when she is found already working in the garden early in the morning of the day following her own traumatic rejection from her home - "'I have slept,' she said in a breathless voice. 'Now I must dig'" (3). Another such "digging" and planting woman is depicted in Memory Chirere's "Maize" - but here the protagonist is joined in her work by an attractive male stranger. It is a teasing, ambiguous narrative that leaves one in doubt whether the stranger is a land-hungry predator or a trustworthy, potential spouse.

Then there is Yvonne Vera's "Sorting it Out" (alluded to earlier), a story in which both the stresses and strengths of women's lives are vividly and movingly portrayed, across three generations.

A different kind of enterprising woman is the ageing prostitute Fiso of "Seventh Street Alchemy" by Brian Chikwava - a satirical and sardonically humorous story of urban life. In it we read that "In spite of poverty's glorious march into every [Zimbabwean] household, the will to be dignified by underpants and socks [however threadbare] remains intact" (17). In the same story, the narrator refers to the contemporary powers that be as "a State whose methods of governance involve incessant roguery" (18)!

"The Kiss" by Clement Chihota is another amusing tale: a love story with a wickedly ironic twist. In it, a manically ambitious husband addicted to fishing in the troubled waters of the central African economies gains possession (by obviously nefarious means) of a valuable "blood diamond" - only to lose his beautiful and highly intelligent wife to a far more handsome man of evident integrity.

"When Samora Died" by Annie Holmes portrays the pain of a brutally severed relationship - forever marked in the protagonist's mind by the coincident date of Samora Machel's death in an air crash. Responses to the news show up another kind of betrayal - moral and political in kind.

An accomplished story by Alexandra Fuller (known for her recently published memoir) is to some extent a parallel to the previous story in its depiction (within the context of Rhodesian settler society) of a little girl beginning a process of racial reorientation by recognising something of the cruel shallowness of her social group's value system.

The final story, Chris Wilson's "The Twelve Chitenges", similarly demonstrates - with convincing vividness and cutting irony - the very tentative joining of racially distinct forces united in indignation against the irritations caused by bad rulership and a deteriorating economy.

All in all, this is a highly worthwhile and entertaining - as well as mind-broadening - collection of stories, by means of which the reader feels as if she or he has personally encountered some of the realities, ironies and variety of Zimbabwean life.

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