Sketches of High Density Life - Review by Memory Chirere

reviews

Sketches of High Density Life
Wonder Guchu
72 pp
2004: 205 x 136
ISBN 1 77922 031 6

Review from The Southern Times
9 January, 2005
Reviewer: Memory Chirere

I have always been waiting for Wonder Guchu’s book. Any book by him on anything. You will know why and, maybe understand. Wonder Guchu has just published a short story collection in English called Sketches of High Density Life but I am not surprised. I have always been waiting for something from him. You will understand.

I am also waiting for anything; a play, novel, film, song… anything substantial from the likes of Robert Muponde, Stanley Mupfudza, Nhamo Mhiripiri, Zvisinei Sandi, Eresina Wede, Thabisani Ndlovhu… This is a whole generation of fine and brave writers who have been caught up in a literary drought sparked by ESAP of the early 90’s.

That drought has remained with us, offering only chance reprieve to a young writer or two. After Nevanji Madanhire’s success, a certain kind of jinx fell on younger writers immediately after him and if you are not Mungoshi or Chinodya, or Hove or Zimunya or Nyamufukudza or Vera… then you can’t write! You can’t publish.

The hard times of the past one and half decades have trained the local publishers to be incestuous and the song goes on; Hove, Vera, Mungoshi, Hove, Vera, Mungoshi…They are determined. They will not experiment with a new voice. They will work only with trusted hands of international acclaim. The economy is stupid. Their song does not haunt them and it continues relentlessly; Hove, Vera, Mungoshi, Hove, Vera, Mungoshi…

I started waiting for something from Wonder Guchu from the first time I saw him. It was at one writers' workshop in Bindura’s Chipindura High School. He was in a heavy crimson jacket and green oversize trousers that trailed on the floor. He peered alternately at the resource person and at something out in the school grounds and seemed disinterested and bewildered. At break he ambled to a corner and cracked a dog-biscuit (they were hard!) On being introduced, much later in the day, the unsuspecting budding writers were pleasantly surprised to be in the company of a popular Sunday Mail magazine short story writer! Then the Sunday Mail, unlike today believed and knew that a Sunday paper worth its name must have a short story somewhere. You searched for The Sunday Mail in order to read a short story and it went down well with a Sunday tea and biscuit. Wonder Guchu and the late Stephen Alumenda wrote short stories for the nation every Sunday in turns.

The Wonder Guchu story tended to be about clever township fellows who fell into carefully set traps.

The Alumenda story was about anything, but always had a somewhat unbelievable ‘twist of the tale.’

I suspected the two were friends and Wonder admitted it.

But Wonder Guchu was not very happy. Sipping his tea and between bites of the stony biscuit, he volunteered that he was looking for a ‘new form’. Something that approaches the story ‘from inside’. I honestly thought he didn’t know what he meant and his slight stammer didn’t help matters.

I thought he would write a long novel – like Dostoevsky because I thought he looked severe, energetic and also wayward enough. Much more enigmatic than his contemporaries Ignatius Mabasa and Ruzvidzo Mupfudza!

Guchu’s Sketches of High Density Life is thankfully very experimental and bound to change the meaning of ‘short story’, at least in Zimbabwe.

Trailing a long way behind current literary traditions, the editors have named it ‘Sketches.’ Which is slightly unfortunate. Sketches? What Sketches? These are deeper and finer narratives than sketches.

These are ‘flash’ stories. That they are short –short does not mean they are not ‘serious’. In fact each of these stories here have a ‘haiku’ effect.

Dwelling on one seemingly insignificant feature of humanity – a person, a subject… the stories invite the reader to feel, sniff and stew in sensual experiences.

The writer’s intention here is to bore a tiny-tiny hole with a needle in order to make you howl.

The intensity of each of these stories pays you dearly and makes up for the physical brevity and ‘abrupt’ departures and arrivals.

There is something about Hughes’ ‘Thank You Mum’ and Hemmingway’s ‘Up In Michigan’ that our literary community have to appreciate. The short story has fast retreated from being a novella. The short story is fast approaching the intensity of ngano and subtlety of a joke well told.

The sense of ‘mischief’ in Wonder Guchu’s stories comes closest to Stanley Nyamufukudza’s ‘Curious Cows’, although the language and sense of aura is clearly moves towards Charles Mungoshi’s. Guchu has done well to choose particular locale – the city of Harare and its downtrodden ‘fellas’. Here, as in Laguma, Gordimer, Mphahlele and others, ‘writing’ the high-density suburb calls for a ‘hurrying’ style. People and place are glimpsed and only become whole in their collective bewildering monotone. This is ably executed in ‘The Wooden Bridge’. There is a realistic sense of place and you are not ‘reading’ but you are there:

I heard footsteps – four or five behind me. Breaking into a trot… No footsteps approached. The road was deserted. The night was still. A few neon lights flooded the dark streets with an assortment of colours. Streetlights, some choked with dead insects, flickered on and off.’

There is a very silent theory here. It is the world painted that demands a special kind of brush, stroke and a certain texture of canvas. These are not ‘sketches.’ This is how this ‘world’ has to be presented if it has to be true.

If a prize will be given, it should be for Guchu’s ability to ‘hurry’ and create pathos at the same time. Usually narratives about the city as in Laguma’s rarely achieve immediate pathos but Wonder Guchu’s does. Though sneaky and measured, ‘Fading like a flower’ is underlain by very poetic echoes:

It’s the children. Then ask too much. And every time they ask, I force a smile. But I tell them that it’s alright …They believe me. Later, I sneak into the bedroom because I do not want them to see my tears because they will then know that I’m lying…’

In a very short space and with very few words, the writer manages to peg down the reader, causing almost the equal amount of depth and force which would take Dickens or Dostoevsky acres and acres of print.

The intensity of these short-short stories sometimes comes through the ‘photographic’ style used. ‘Size 4,’ for instance, reads like a film script – the sense of staccato, the deliberate over-visualisation and the move toward the twist in the tale. A shoe is thrown into a room – but you don’t see the man who throws it. You see a man’s feet walking – but you don’t see the full frame of the man. A man dies and the suburb watches the police collecting the carcass and the aura attacks the reader like a sharp adze.

But there is one aspect of a Wonder Guchu short story which I fail to define however how hard I try. It is the idea of ‘the dead body’. In many of these stories there is a dead body. The urban violence is almost a machine churning out dead bodies at the rubbish dump, the river, the bridge and even right on the road between the rows of houses.

I am generally unnerved by dead bodies in stories or film but each of Wonder Guchu’s dead bodies tends to be metaphorical. Like in William Golding, each dead body is a kind of ‘harvest’. Each dead body is as anonymous as the crowd of onlookers. Always its face is deformed or hidden from the view of the crowd. Looking for lunch, one meets a dead body in the park. These stories dwell on the fragility and temporariness of the body. The dying is as easy as taking a cup of tea. These stories are set in Harare and they tend to challenge a certain blind love for the city young Africans often have. In these stories Harare is a giant which man built but now Harare escapes man’s grip, forcing man and fate to perform a curious art. One senses that there s a sick God on the loose. The pursuer and the pursued dash in a certain madness doomed to catching or being caught. Even at midnight sleep is pretence and death is next door.

Wonder Guchu achieves a certain description of city people that does not render them visitors or passers-by. These people here trap and are trapped by the city. The brutalities do not make them less human. They still love, listen to music, and laugh and one identifies with their fears and desires. In ‘the dollar’ a man helps strangers look for a dollar coin one of them has lost, yards and yards into the tall grasses until he is mugged. In ‘The Township Fella’ a man turns into a witty beggar-conman and he laughs with pride as he does it. Recently Wonder Guchu won a prize as the country‘s leading music reporter. In most of his reports the short story writer is very evident. He brings out the life of the singers and you actually touch their souls. Alongside Robson Sharuko, Lovemore Banda, Ruzvidzo Mupfudza, and Mabasa Sasa’s, Guchu reports rank among the best one can read in the Zimbabwean papers. And for Guchu’s close buddies and contemporaries Sketches of High Density Life signals the end of a jinx that had threatened a whole generation of writers.

© The author/publisher

TOP