An Elegy for Easterly
Petina Gappah
2009: pp. 227; 215 x 136mm, London, Faber and Faber (Distributed in Zimbabwe by Weaver Press)
ISBN: 978 0 571 24693 9
5th June, 2009
Reviewer: Percy Zvomuya for the Mail and Guardian, Supplement A
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Where Fiction takes Form
The publication of Petina Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly (Faber and Faber) and John Eppel’s Absent: The English Teacher (Jacana and Weaver Press) means that the fiction games in Zimbabwe have begun in earnest.
For years it seemed that Zimbabwe fiction writers lay helpless, confounded by the enormity of the crisis in their homeland. The tomes upon tomes that came out were largely non-fiction, written mostly by foreign journalists. Christina Lamb wrote about the fate of specific victims: a farmer and his domestic worker; British journalist Martin Meredith, making extensive use of the wonder that is called the internet, also put out a book on how Zimbabwe went down; and so did Heidi Holland, whose biography of Robert Mugabe is much acclaimed.
Zimbabwean responses were minuscule. The more significant came from nationalist Edgar Tekere who produced a biography; journalist Geoff Nyarota wrote his memoirs; Geoff Hill, already looking ahead, wrote about what needs to be done to get Zimbabwe working again; Judith Todd, using letters, dairies and other documents, wrote an insightful book about how Zimbabwe was reduced to a shell of its former proud self.
Besides Gappah and Eppel, Brain Chikwava’s Harare North and Nyaradzo Mtizira’s The Chimurenga Protocol, were also recently published. I have also started reading architect Daneil Mandishona’s The Sound of Dreams, still in manuscript form, which will be launched at the Cape Town Book Fair.
Gappah’s collection of 13 short stories has been covered quite extensively in the western media. Perhaps this is because of the topicality of Zimbabwe as a post colony that got it horribly wrong. At the launch of her book in Johannesburg, Gappah admitted that the west’s reaction to her work is mostly informed by how it views Mugabe and Zimbabwe.
I found most interesting the stories that had nothing to do with Zimbabwe’s politics. The Annexe Shuffle, about a mentally ill law student, is easily the best. Although its tone is dispassionate, its voice is sympathetic. The narrator is not pretentious, and is to be commended for her refusal to resort to easy solutions.
The story I disliked the most is At the Sound of the Last Post, about the widow of a former minister about to be buried at the Heroes Acre, the country’s national shrine. The choice of voice is rather unfortunate – its easy-going accents not appropriate for such a subject. Perhaps the main problem with the story is its lack of distance from the actual events. Because it’s so close to the events the author is writing about, it feels like lazy political commentary and one feels obliged to criticise it not as fiction but as journalese.
The narrator describes a minister’s suicide after the infamous Willowgate Scandal, a car scam involving ministers, as a “supremely self-indulgent act”. Maurice Nyagumbo, one of the more principled men in a Zanu PF that was increasingly materialistic, committed suicide after being implicated in the scam.
Suicide is never easy; the narrator in Graham Greene’s book The Comedians said it was, “the clear-headed act of a mathematician, (for) the suicide has judged by the laws of chance – so many odds against one that to live would be more miserable than to die”.
Then there are the stale jokes. The one about the disappeared pearly gates in heaven and another about the country itself: “before the president was elected, the Zimbabwe Ruins were a prehistoric monument in Masvingo Province. Now, the Zimbabwe Ruins extend to the whole country.”
I felt that the author is at her strongest when writing about the lives of individuals. This is apparent in stories such as Something Nice from London and Aunt Juliana’s Indian (perhaps a nod here to Chimurenga 14: Everyone Has Their Indian). Here the author is not regurgitating urban legends or forcing her opinions down the throats of her characters. These stories are true to life with no stereotyping: these are real people faced with real problems.
At her best the Switzerland based Gappah has a unique vernacular voice, unearthing the pains and sorrows of the ordinary. In many ways she can’t be from anywhere but Zimbabwe.
Right from the cauldron that is Zimbabwe comes Absent: The English Teacher. Its author was born in South Africa but grew up and lives in Zimbabwe, where he is a teacher. His book is about a white English teacher who loses his job at a private high school in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second largest city. His pension, after 40 years of service, is enough only to buy two doughnuts and a tomato.
By a wicked stroke of bad luck his car crashes into a Mercedes Benz belonging to the mistress of a minister. The out-of-court settlement involves a post-colonial role reversal in which he gives up his suburban house and moves into the servants’ quarters to work as a houseboy.
This is a novel that attempts with varying degrees of success to relate the white Zimbab-wean/ Rhodesian to the space we call Zimbabwe. Early on, as the teacher is being interrogated by a cop after being arrested for “causing alarm and despondency among the aboriginal peoples of Zimbabwe”, he replies: “with respect, the bushmen are long gone.”
While in police custody he meets an Ndebele man who tells him: “They hate you because you are white; they hate us because we are Ndebele. They call us the dissidents”. Those who came first, he seems to be saying, hate those who came later. Ndebeles, led by Mzilikazi, came into Zimbabwe in the late 1830s and whites came decades later.
This small book, almost a novella, erudite and intelligent and to appreciate it you must have done a fair amount of reading. The teacher a fastidious gramatarian, talks in a conversional tone about Andrew Marvell, John Keats, Shakespeare, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and others. But there isn’t a hint of pedantry in this entertaining, intellectually stimulating book. Not even when the author talks about words from the poetic lexicon, such as pentameter, catalectic, trochee and so on, does he alienate the reader.
In many ways, Absent: The English Teacher is about a specific white man, a species the narrator calls, “part of the sub-culture ... almost extinct”, who knows the landscape and its plants, who first lived in “fascist Rhodesia” and then in “Marxist Zimbabwe” and who finds both dispensations woefully inadequate.
The narrators in the books by Gappah and Eppel have a lot to dislike about Zimbabwe. None does for the same reasons and neither should. Gappah’s view is that of a black woman living in Europe and looking in; Eppel’s is that of a white man living in Africa and gazing at his homeland from within. Both takes on Zimbabwe are equally valid, deeply felt and have a certain poignancy. Both stories should live side by side – perhaps that way we will begin to understand the true meaning of being Zimbabwean.
