A bus trip from Harare to Bulawayo takes you through the drama of Zimbabwean fiction. Harare has some of the plate-glass sheen of a metropolis. Bulawayo is more laid back, with the wide avenues and porticoed walkways of a century ago. Zimbabwe’s books tell of transitions between old and new, village and city, seamed with family ties and ancestral resonance. Writing in England abandoned such themes when Thomas Hardy switched to poetry.
I was in Zimbabwe to run writing workshops for the British Council, marking the end of the ”Crossing Borders” project teaming British and African writers. It’s a tough time to be a writer in Zimbabwe. It’s a tough time to be anything. A line of people waits at a petrol station, but not for fuel. No petrol stations have fuel. They are queuing for the ground maize that is the staple diet. Dawn and dusk turn the road between Bulawayo and the townships into a John Steinbeck novel, workers hiking kilometres for occasional employment.
Shona is the majority language of Zimbabwe, and Ignatius Mabasa, a powerful performing poet, novelist and storyteller, is acknowledged as its top new voice. He explained to me the three generations theory of Zimbabwean writing: the first generation were the teachers, educated in missionary schools, writing with didactic zeal; the second generation wrote to praise the second chimurenga, the civil war for independence — and then dealt with post-independence disappointments; the third are the ”born-frees”. They are emerging from the chrysalis of the 20th century, blinking, self-consciously modern, hoping the world will pay them some heed.
Bulawayo’s writers enthused about Virginia Phiri’s Desperate, a new set text in teacher training colleges. About women sex workers, the book was selected for its ”good writing” — and because it was in English. In Ndebele (the local language, a dialect of Zulu) it would have provoked a storm. Writers use English to filter out a conservative society’s expectations. I met Phiri in Harare. An accountant and expert on orchids, she seems far removed from the active ”comrade”, who would have been killed in the 1970s liberation war without the protection of prostitutes. The book is her tribute to them. ”Most sex workers are the breadwinners. One said to me: ‘I need to buy a ticket for my niece to get to London.’ I am not encouraging prostitution. I am bringing out the way things are. I believe in speaking for those who can’t speak for themselves.”
Publisher Irene Staunton of Weaver Press is passionate about fiction. Funds from the Dutch humanist organisation Hivos help an impossible commercial situation. Book prices are raised every three months, in line with a 250% inflation rate. Most submissions are rejected — ”pulpit writing from people who never read but want to write”. Staunton still mourns Yvonne Vera, who died of HIV/Aids in 2005. ”She was a brave writer, confronting infanticide, abortion, incest and the brutalities of war. Her manuscripts were scrupulous.”
Weaver author Shimmer Chinodya agrees that younger writers do not read. He has a different hero though, Zimbabwe’s enfant terrible Dambudzo Marechera, an HIV/Aids casualty from 1987. ”I love Marechera. I love his sense of the moment and sense of words. His crystalline vision and his boldness. He tells you what he thinks, unedited. The younger generation don’t understand him, they just ape his bohemian life. They don’t have the sense of the word which he intended, that erudite voice.”
Chinodya’s novel Chairman of Fools was a must-buy for Zimbabwe’s literary elite in 2005. ”War is inevitable in most Zimbabwean writing,” he began. ”It’s so much a part of our psyche.” Chairman fits closer to his other theme. ”I write about the psychology of being a writer — being a writer in Zimbabwe.”
He ”clipped” his prose style at university in Iowa. The new book is a brave foray into the writer’s condition, a journey through the hell of bipolar disorder.
”I’m a colonial victim. They forced me to speak in English. My writing is an act of revenge — all that grammar they shoved down my throat, I’m going to use it and create something totally hybrid. The voice must shock you. My use of English must show the complexity of the African thought processes. I’m trying to salvage the African mind from decades of abuse and misconception.”
Where do you find the African mind? It’s in family ritual and the near tangible presence of ancestors. ”Come to a wedding in the villages or in the city, and I’ll show you the African mind.”
I attended a book launch at the Book Café. Every public event at this enterprising venue needs police permission. Being private, this book launch sidestepped that, but the first arrival was a policeman. Fay Chung, a former education minister, was launching her wartime memoir Re-Living the Second Chimurenga. A fellow comrade introduced her with a 20-minute diatribe, picking out the book’s faults. Speaker after speaker then rose with lengthy statements in lieu of questions.
Zimbabwe’s writers puzzle at colleagues who have chosen exile. Reading is such a minority interest that writers pose no real threat. Chinodya wrote Chairman on a residency in Italy. ”But I must think my book out here and talk to people. Things change so quickly in Zimbabwe you can’t stay out too long.” – Guardian Unlimited Â