Women Writing - Zimbabwe, Edited by Irene Staunton, Weaver Press, 2008, 131 pp.

By Oskar Wermter SJ

Published in Mukai-Vukani Jesuit Journal for Zimbabwe No 48, May 2009, pp 27.)
© Mukai/Vukani

Naturally many of the stories focus on women. And how they deal with the men in their lives. Unfortunately, most relationships seem rather unhappy. In  “Dream over. Dream again”  (Wadzanai Mhute)  Muni experiences her separation from the father of her child, Natsai,  as an act of liberation. No more beatings for her. “As she stepped into the train, she breathed in deeply. … Free again. She would not even miss Natsai.” Going ‘south’ to escape from Zimbabwe – and its men.
Only the relationship between Obi, the anglicized Nigerian from the UK, and his white Zimbabwean girlfriend seems to work, despite a cultural and spiritual mix-up when the girl (“pale, freckled”) seeks her black nanny through the good services of a n’anga. Annie Holmes has depicted real people of some orginality in her story “Delivery”.  Whereas “Mr Wonder” (Sarah Ladipo Manyika) and his unhappy wife who, grieved by her husband’s unfaithfulness finds comfort in his money, seem mere stereotypes.  Hannah, in “The carer” (Chiedza Musengezi), seems to stand for countless bored, frustrated  suburban wives, battling it out with vamwene, her rural mother-in-law, labouring day-in, day-out through a loveless, empty routine, like a dung beetle she observes in her garden. “She felt for the little creature whose burden seemed at that moment, not dissimilar from her own”.  Hannah, as a person, remains lifeless, but her story seems to signal the frustration of middle-class women who have “made it” socially and economically, while being haunted by a big void in their lives.
The deep trauma of the “war of liberation” haunts  Eustina and  finally destroys her family, in “Tichafataona sleeps” (Blessing Musariri), one of the more memorable stories in this volume. We need more writers bringing out the dark side of the glorified violence of the war and of the subsequent peace which is mostly buried in the hearts of Zimbabwe’s silenced, gagged people.
Rumbi Katedza  in “Snowflakes in Winter” shares with us the experience of  the Zimbabwean diaspora. That too should be a rich field for Zimbabwe’s creative writers.  In perhaps the most original story of the book, “Everything is nice, Zimbulele” (Gugu Ndlovu), a Zimbabwean in South African exile loses his identity and is buried in foreign soil under a false name, a symbol of Zimbabwe’s alienation from herself, brought about, ironically, by her ‘liberartor’ clinging stubbornly to his ‘sovereignty’.  Such a story is remarkable, not because it is written by a woman, but because that woman happens to be an accomplished writer.