Title: Strife,

Author: Shimmer Chinodya

Publisher: Weaver Press, Harare, 2006. 223 pages

ISBN: 13: 978-21-77922- 058-5 (Paperback)

Reviewer: www.complete-review.com 

The Complete Review's review:

Strife is a family saga, the story of the Gwanagaras, shifting between earlier generations' histories and that of the current one. Godfrey, called Godi ‘it definitely has no allusions to God or to freedom’, he immediately makes clear, narrates much of the book (and shapes, one imagines, the rest of the narrative). It is the story of him and his siblings, and his parents, that dominates – but the past weighs heavily on the present.

‘Oh, how strife can destroy rationality!’ is one of the cries in the novel, and several of the characters suffer from some form of irrationality. It begins with Godi's older brother, Rindai, felled by an epileptic fit on his wedding night, his life burdened by the unpredictability of the affliction hanging over him (and he doesn't help matters by being drawn to alcohol). Their younger brother, Kelvin, will also suffer from mental illness, becoming a full-blown schizophrenic:

Ping, pong. Ping, pong.

Kelvin and Rindai alternate illnesses. When Kelvin is ill, Rindai is not; when Rindai is, Kelvin is not. It is as if a roaming affliction has camped within our household.  

Chinodya shifts back and forth from the vividly imagined historic scenes of long ago, presented in language that tends towards the mytho-poetic, to the more traditional narrative of, for example, the father's earlier years, and how he got his job (starting as a shoe-salesman for Mr.Punjab, for whom he works for some four decades, as the business grows into: ‘one of the biggest wholesalers, departmental and supermarket groups in Gweru’) and wooed their mother. The consequences of the brothers' afflictions are one of the dominant threads; as consequential, ultimately, is the mother's death and the father's attempt to carry on. He has ambitious plans (‘Talk him out of it, our wives and sisters urge with feminine instinct’), but instead of expansion and growth only destruction follows, as yet another son-figure – Bramson, who helped around the house – brings self-destructive ruin with him.

The children – educated, doing well in their city-jobs – remain a more complicated presence. Except for the closer looks at Rindai and Kelvin Godi seems wary of telling – or is it admitting? – too much about them. Even when they are together, Godi doesn't get too much into specifics:  

Like mother's Bramson's death has afforded us, precocious siblings, starved of spontaneity, the opportunity to vent our souls upon each other. We argue back and forth, fiercely and bitterly, till our souls glow like heath-stones. We argue about everything – about Kelvin whom we have dubiously sought to reform by banishing to the streets; about father who has been ruined by trust and what we can only perceive as ambition. [...] Rindai entangles himself in vain hypotheses, I am hypocritical, Shuvai introduces a note of laconic naivety, Vimbai parades her saintly airs and domestic martyrdom, and Tendai stings us with a new smugness that has come with recent financial independence. Our wives smirk in the firelight.  

Godi is of Shimmer Chinodya's generation (and it's hard not to see much of Gweru-born (in 1957) Chinodya in his narrator), but one of the striking features of the book is how little is made of (or blamed on) the surrounding political situation. Been there, done that (in Harvest of Thorns, for example) is certainly one of the explanations, but it's still almost stunning to read: 

Now what year is it ?

1980.

Zimbabwe is newly independent; the war of liberation is over and a black government is in power; there is celebration in the air but we're already beginning to harvest thorns, blah, blah, blah ....  

Chinodya focusses on the personal, and it's often impressive – but Godi and most of the other siblings still remain too shadowy, as if he doesn't want to put the spotlight on them (or doesn't want to fully acknowledge what he's made of his life). It's the scenes that involve more of the family – when the mother is dying, when dealing with the father's situations – that are the strongest, but in falling back upon the irrationality as embodied in, especially, Kelvin it's almost like he's looking for a way out (or an excuse).

Chinodya sums up what he's been trying to show fairly creatively in the end, including in this exchange with a woman Godi picks up in his car: 

‘Think of the genes that run in your family; the similarities and differences over generations. The repetition of lives. Think.’

I think of hunters, artists and seers. Of flower-gatherers and plant-breeders. Of pontificators and peacemakers. Of believers and sceptics. Of the outspoken and the candid. Of saints and cuckolds. Of tears and laughter. Of madness unending.

Good God in the heavens, how clear the tapestry of our lives now seems! How related it all appears in its disparateness. How the repetitions, nuances and contrasts fall into place.

But in the novel they don't fall quite so neatly in place (hence, presumably, also the need for Chinodya to hammer home his message in this way). A final stage-piece – a mini-drama – isn't quite as obvious, and thus a more interesting turn on events (and again lets Chinodya display his versatility), but in the end it adds to the feeling that the book isn't quite sure of how to convey its message.