Weaver Press

Strife: Tombstones as milestones or “Am I safe in the home that my father left me?”
Strife
By Shimmer Chinodya
Harare: Weaver Press, 2006.
ISBN: 10: 1-77922-058-8
13:978-1-77922-058-5
223 pp.

Shimmer Chinodya’s latest novel, the Noma Award winning Strife, could easily have been titled Ancestors after Chenjerai Hove’s. It is the story of a multiply haunted boyhood and manhood, and a multiply dis-eased family, whose roots stretch back across a century of turbulence. Because of its sense of ultimate loss it could have been titled Harvest of Thorns, after Chinodya’s earlier novel. And because of its quest for understanding and speech, and the numbingly horrifying experiences it portrays, it could easily subsist under another of Chinodya’s titles, Can We Talk and Other Stories. It is certainly, in a negative teleological way, the ultimate vision of dystopic experiences, after the rather pastoral idylls of his earlier novel, Dew in the Morning. Strife is a carefully rendered remembering of the untenability of what Chinodya consistently evokes as ‘the dew-in-the-morning’ days of his life and society. I would have titled the novel The Voice, not after Gabriel Okara, but after the experience of the power of history and the dead exerted on the Gwanangara family. But all these are not mere speculations, they are complexly embodied and invoked in the novel, which is in itself an attempt at arriving at a holistic, though dis-eased, self.
Strife is fundamentally a novel of strife and illness. As the narrator says of his siblings: “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” (135).  This is a novel of the end times of a particular family and lineage, and, more generally, of Zimbabwean fatherhood and manhood. As the family progresses into a successful but tenuous black middle class, it counts more tombstones than milestones in its evolution, and is on the verge of being wiped out completely by the forces that once gave it roots and cohesion. One family inmate, Bhudi Tavengwa, shouts irreverently during a ritual to bring home the spirit of a long lost ancestor: “And am I safe in the home that my father left me? Am I safe?” (108). This time, it is not the liberation struggle, nor the brutal Rhodesians that are to blame for unravelling the African family. It is the inability of the African family to negotiate the passage of the past, and the crossing into the present. It is the inability to sustain the once convenient binaries of past and present, colonizer and colonised, modernity and tradition, and so on, as more and more of these categories meet in a vortex of experience that must still be harnessed and forded.
I want to limit my comments to the idea of a dysfunctional inheritance that is at the core of male dis-ease in Strife. The Gwanangara family, whose roots spread into the fabled humus of precolonial times, appears to be the quintessence of a settled clannish identity, complete with totem (‘porcupine’) and great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers. It possesses the vital totemic and figural resources necessary for self-insertion in history, land and nation in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. But the Zambian origins of the narrator’s mother’s parents, as well as the cross-ethnic marriages within the Gwanangara family, set it apart from a hermetically sealed identity.

The idea of adapting and adopting is central to the aspirations of Dunge Gwanangara, the narrator’s father, who, through sheer hard work, pulls his family from a nondescript unknownness to the status of a plot-holding, middle class, educated family.  Dunge Gwanangara is an ideal provider and protector, self-abnegating materially and sexually in order to feed and uplift his children. That success, however, is based on a denial of the self and of the family’s past, as well as of the more resilient residues of a spiritual and cultural cosmos that the new middle class family is ill-equipped to handle. When he teaches his children to leave the dead alone because “The more you worry about them the more you get entangled with them” (209), he is cutting the present both ends, setting his children up to endure an anomic experience of unrootedness. He limits what it is possible to inherit from a father, and, in spite of his endeavours, succeeds in passing on a haunted townhouse to his children. It is a house in which a stranger, Bramson, hanged himself, and which a son visited only to die. It is a house of dissonant and deranged spirits, hardly the foundation for a surefooted masculine patriarchy.
Dunge’s own brother, Babamukuru Tachiona, is a sorry spectacle of a siring patriarch, because he is burdened with the shame of having to carry around his bags of urine, a result of biological dysfunction. Tachiona, a failed tearful man, adopts his young brother’s son Godi as his heir. Godi, the narrator of the story, is Dunge’s writer-teacher son, the one whose own interesting mental confusions are hilariously fictionalised in Chinodya’s novel Chairman of Fools. Godi is Tachiona’s favoured heir “Because he came to find me in the hospital where they fixed me up with these plastics [the urine bags] ten years ago and he said, ‘Babamukuru [uncle], here is twenty dollars’” (70). But Godi fears the inheritance he is promised by Babamukuru Tachiona, as it is a shameful one.  The name “Gwanangara”, inflated with clannish self-importance, becomes a cause of mockery and fear, as clan and totem link the fate of one individual to that of the community. But the constitution and evolution of the Gwanangara clan is disabled at root. Mhokoshi, an older Gwanangara and a wandering warrior-hunter, is a recluse and non-marrying man who cannot pass on his legacy upon death because his hunting weapons could not be recovered. He becomes a terror to his own family, rather than to those who mislaid his weapons. Without his weapons, he is not a man, he cannot live.  His attempt to reach and speak to his clan through spiritual possession is chaotic and traumatising. There is disorder throughout the ritual ceremonies where Mhokoshi is supposed to speak, as he fails to possess any proffered or chosen medium. There is no credible claimant to his spiritual estate. Only Kelvin, Godi’s younger brother, and a university drop-out, is able to mimic Mhokoshi. But he succeeds only because he suffers from multiple-personality disorder. Here one senses the death of the dead, so to speak, because there is only the passing on of death and confusion. Tradition dies at source.
When Kelvin is diagnosed as an avatar of spiritual dis-ease, he becomes an assemblage of a miscellany of spiritual forces, claiming that he is possessed by everyone he can remember, from living dorm-mates at university to current ZANU-PF politicians such as the maverick Edgar Tekere, whom Robert Mugabe expelled twice from the ruling party. The ritual is dead at root, and the inheritance is shambolic and vexatious to the extent that it can only be diagnosed as witchcraft. Kelvin becomes a petty thief, having been diagnosed as mildly schizophrenic. He dies suddenly, having caused much despair to his family, and having been disowned by his father. But Kelvin is not the only son to be burdened with a schizophrenic inheritance, whether from the past or the present (however each is defined). Rindai, Godi’s more successful and ambitious brother, is stricken with epileptic fits on the day of his wedding, and every other day of his life, and his mother is forever condemned to watch the waxing and waning of the moon in order to protect her son throughout his married life. The mother herself, called ‘the moon huntress’, suffers an undeserved fate, as she succumbs to cancer and dies a rotten heap of foul-smelling flesh. The father also dies, having suffered an unpredicted stroke. Kelvin’s death follows hard upon his, and Tapera, another son, succumbs to heart failure. The bodies of dead males, including Babamukuru Tachiona, are milestones on the path to destruction. In this novel, the body count is greater among the menfolk.
By the end of the novel, another death is waiting to happen, that of Rindai, Godi’s brother. When news of his brother’s impending death reaches him, Godi sighs: “I’ll go. God, I’m tired. I’ll finish this story first; then I’ll go” (215). This is a bond he is no longer keen on. Nor is he safe without first writing  his story down, because the past continues to haunt him. As his friends tell him: “Your ancestors are trying to tell you something” (214). His response is:  “To be honest, I don’t know what I believe in any more. Science, bones or Bibles?” (214). But the history of the family and its firm promises of doom are inescapable and dogged. When a strange fortune teller meets Godi in a hotel room, she insists that he should convert the tragedy and skills of his warrior-hunter ancestor Mhokoshi, who died in the mountains and came back to haunt his clan for his lost weapons, into those of a writer (210). “Think of the genes that run in your family; the similarities and differences over generations. The repetition of lives. Think” (211), she urges him. But all he could think of, inter alia, is “Of madness unending” (211). The options out of this culturally defined role are limited, but reside in a more brutal and frank assessment of  interlinked existential categories of his life, which include  the sickly, mournful and misty eyed ‘tradition’ (216); the well-to-do belly and shiny cheeks of ‘Patriarchy’, who rides on the backs of women (217); the fat old woman called ‘Fatalism’ (217); ‘Shame’, a “hermaphrodite, neither man nor woman” (218); and finally, and more importantly, ‘Modernity’ and ‘Education’ (both seen as women!) and ‘Medicine’ (styled as a young male doctor). It seems that the mortal combat is between them and newer traditions of education and modernity, from which explanations of the present and prognoses of the future could be made, as they hold the stage when the curtain draws at the end of the novel. But the onus is on Godi –– to ‘Explain!’.. We conclude with the beginning of new rootings of an alienated and tottering Gwanangara clan, with less male illness, and on the verge of unsettling the dis-ease of history and masculinty in times of crisis. In Godi one finds rolled in one body the strivings of Janifa (of Hove’s Bones) and Zhizha (of Yvonne Vera’s Under the Tongue) to recuperate a voice and bearings in the wake of the devastations visited upon the person by society and history, as well as by failed, violent males.
--- Robert Muponde, University of Witwatersrand

References
Chinodya, Shimmer. 1982. Dew in the Morning. Gwelo: Mambo Press.
- - -. 1990. Harvest of Thorns. Oxford: Heinemann.
- - -. 2001. Can We Talk and other stories. Oxford: Heinemann.
- - -. 2005. Chairman of Fools. Harare: Weaver Press.
Hove, Chenjerai. 1996. Ancestors. Harare: College Press Publishers.
- - -. 1988. Bones. Harare: Baobab Books.
Okara, Gabriel. 1970. The Voice. London: Heinemann.
Vera, Yvonne. 1996. Under the Tongue. Harare: Baobab Books.