Early on in my blog, I confessed that I absolutely loved literature from Zimbabwe. I couldn't quite explain why and I still really can't quite explain, but what I do know is there is something that reading books from Zimbabwe does to my soul. Well, here are 25 works (in English) from 11 different women writers from Zimbabwe.
NoViolet Bulawayo (We Need New Names)
Darling and her friends live in a shanty called Paradise, which of
course is no such thing. It isn’t all bad, though. There’s mischief and
adventure, games of Find bin Laden, stealing guavas, singing Lady Gaga at the
tops of their voices. They dream of the paradises of America, Dubai, Europe, where Madonna and
Barack Obama and David Beckham live. For Darling, that dream will come true.
But, like the thousands of people all over the world trying to forge new lives
far from home, Darling finds this new paradise brings its own set of challenges
– for her and also for those she’s left behind.
Panashe Chigumadzi (Sweet Medicine and These Bones Will Rise Again)
Sweet Medicine – Panashe Chigumadzi’s first book - takes place in Harare
at the height of Zimbabwe's economic woes in 2008. Tsitsi, a young woman,
raised by her strict, devout Catholic mother, believes that hard work, prayer
and an education will ensure a prosperous and happy future. She does well at
her mission boarding school, and goes on to obtain a scholarship to attend
university, but the change in the economic situation in Zimbabwe destroys the
old system where hard work and a degree guaranteed a good life. Out of
university, Tsitsi finds herself in a position much lower than she had set her
sights on, working as a clerk in the office of the local politician, Zvobgo.
With a salary that barely provides her a means to survive, she finds herself
increasingly compromising her Christian values to negotiate ways to get ahead.
Chigumadzi’s second book, These Bones Will Rise Again,is a long-form
essay that combines both reportage, memoir and critical analysis and sees
Chigumadzi reflecting on the ‘coup that was not a coup’, the telling of the
history and manipulation of time and the ancestral spirits of two women – her
own grandmother and Mbuya Nehanda, the grandmother of the nation.
Tsitsi Dangaremgba (Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not and This Mournable
Body)
Nervous Conditions is the story of Tambu, a young girl in colonial
Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), and her quest to educate herself.
Throughout her childhood, Tambu longed to learn but was hampered by the
men in her life - her father, Jeremiah, who felt education was wasted on women,
as women couldn’t cook books, and her brother, Nhamo, who treated her badly and
found it funny that she longed to go to school. She finally gets her chance,
when her brother’s death leads her uncle Babamukuru, to sponsor her education
in the missionary school where he is a headmaster. Here, Tambu is introduced to
an affluent and more western lifestyle and finally gets the education she longs
for. But her new life with Babamukuru is far from rosy and through her thoughts
we get a glimpse into her education, her life and her view on gender and
society.
The Book of
Not traces
Tambu's continuing quest to redefine the personal, political and historical
forces that threaten to destroy the fabric of her community - and reveals how
its aftermath still bedevils Africans today.
In This Mournable Body, Tsitsi Dangarembga returns to the
protagonist of her acclaimed first novel, Nervous Conditions, to
examine how the hope and potential of a young girl and a fledgling nation can
sour over time and become a bitter and floundering struggle for survival. Anxious
about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job, Tambudzai finds herself
living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. For reasons that include
her grim financial prospects and her age, she moves to a widow’s boarding house
and eventually finds work as a biology teacher. But at every turn in her
attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation,
until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily
reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point. As a last resort, Tambudzai
takes an ecotourism job that forces her to return to her parents’ impoverished
homestead. It is this homecoming, in Dangarembga’s tense and psychologically
charged novel,that culminates in an act of betrayal, revealing just how toxic
the combination of colonialism and capitalism can be.
Danai Gurira (In the Continuum and Familiar)
In The
Continuum (co-written with Nikkole Salter) dramatises the
devastating problem of AIDS among African and African American women. Living
worlds apart in South Central Los Angeles and Harare, Zimbabwe, two young women
experience a kaleidoscopic weekend of darkly comic life-changing revelations.
With the two playwrights/actors playing dozens of roles, In The Continuum envelopes the audience in its story
of parallel denials and self-discoveries. See why critics and audiences have
been raving about this funny and engrossing work.
It’s winter in Minnesota, and a Zimbabwean family is preparing for the
wedding of their eldest daughter, a first-generation American. But when
the bride insists on observing a traditional African custom, it opens a
deep rift in the household. Rowdy and affectionate, Familiar pitches tradition against
assimilation, drawing a loving portrait of a family: the customs they keep, and
the secrets they bury.
 |
| Familiar via Hollywood reporter |
Petina Gappah (An Elegy for Easterly, The Book of Memory and
Rotten Row)
In An Elegy for Easterly – Gappah’s debut short story collection, a
woman in a township is surrounded by dusty children but longs for a baby of her
own; an old man finds that his job making coffins at No Matter Funeral Parlour
brings unexpected riches; a politician's widow stands quietly by at her
husband's funeral as his colleagues bury an empty casket. Petina Gappah's
characters may have ordinary hopes and dreams, but they are living in a world
where a loaf of bread costs half a million dollars - a country expected to have
only four presidents in a hundred years.
Memory, the narrator of The Book of Memory, is an albino
woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe,
where she has been convicted of murder. As part of her appeal her lawyer
insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it. The death
penalty is a mandatory sentence for murder, and Memory is, both literally and
metaphorically, writing for her life. As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that
she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted
father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his
death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers? Moving between the
townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between the past and the
present, Memory weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness
of fate and the treachery of memory
In her second story collection, Rotten Row, Petina Gappah crosses the barriers of
class, race, gender and sexual politics in Zimbabwe to explore the causes and
effects of crime, and to meditate on the nature of justice. With
compassion and humour, Petina Gappah paints portraits of lives aching for
meaning to produce a moving and universal tableau.
Nozipo J. Maraire (Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter)
A mother in Zimbabwe writes a long letter
to her daughter, who is on the way to America to study at Harvard, tracing the
family's role in Zimbabwe's struggle for independence and what it means to be
an African woman.
Sue Nyathi (The Polygamist and The Gold Diggers)
The Polygamist weaves a tale about four women whose lives become
intertwined as a result of their love for one man. Set in modern-day Zimbabwe,
the story is narrated through the four female protagonists. Joyce is the
legitimate first wife of Jonasi Gomora; Matipa is an ambitious, educated high
flyer with an eye for the good things in life. Essie is the girl next door from
the poverty-stricken township where Jonasi grew up in. Lindani is a beautiful
young girl who has nothing going for her but her greatest assets: her beauty
and her body. Sue Nyathi takes readers on a journey beyond the bedroom door of
a polygamous man and his four Mrs Rights.
In Nyathi’s second novel, The Gold Diggers, it’s 2008 and the height of
Zimbabwe’s economic demise. A group of passengers are huddled in a Toyota
Quantum about to embark on a treacherous expedition to the City of Gold.
Amongst them is Gugulethu, who is hoping to be reconciled with her mother;
Dumisani, an ambitious young man who believes he will strike it rich,
Chamunorwa and Chenai, twins running from their troubled past; and Portia and
Nkosi, a mother and son desperate to be reunited with a husband and father they
see once a year.They have paid a high price for the dangerous passage to what
they believe is a better life; an escape from the vicious vagaries of their
present life in Bulawayo. In their minds, the streets of Johannesburg are paved
with gold but they will have to dig deep to get close to any gold, dirtying
themselves in the process.
Bryony Rheam (This September Sun)
Ellie is a shy girl growing up in post-Independence Zimbabwe, longing for
escape from the confines of small-town life. When she eventually moves to
Britain, her wish seems to have come true. But life there is not all she
imagined. And when her grandmother Evelyn is brutally murdered, a set of
diaries are uncovered spilling out family secrets and recounting a young
Evelyn's passionate and dangerous affair with a powerful married man. In the
light of new discoveries, Ellie begins to re-evaluate her relationship with her
grandmother, and must face up to some truths about herself in the process. Set
against the backdrop of a country in change, Ellie burdened by the memories and
the misunderstandings of the past must also find a way to move forward in her
own romantic endeavours.
Irene Sabatini (The Boy Next Door and Peace and Conflict)
In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, there is a tragedy in the house next door to Lindiwe
Bishop--her neighbor has been burned alive. The victim's stepson, Ian McKenzie,
is the prime suspect but is soon released. Lindiwe can't hide her fascination
with this young, boisterous and mysterious white man, and they soon forge an
unlikely closeness even as the country starts to deteriorate.
Years after circumstances split them apart, Ian returns to a much-changed Zimbabwe to see Lindiwe, now a sophisticated, impassioned young woman, and discovers a devastating secret that will alter both of their futures, and draw them closer together even as the world seems bent on keeping them apart. The Boy Next Door is a moving and powerful debut about two people finding themselves and each other in a time of national upheaval.
Years after circumstances split them apart, Ian returns to a much-changed Zimbabwe to see Lindiwe, now a sophisticated, impassioned young woman, and discovers a devastating secret that will alter both of their futures, and draw them closer together even as the world seems bent on keeping them apart. The Boy Next Door is a moving and powerful debut about two people finding themselves and each other in a time of national upheaval.
In Peace
and Conflict, ten-year-old Robert knows many things. He knows all about his
hometown, Geneva, with its statues and cannons and underground tunnels and the
Longest Bench in the World. He knows about the Red Cross and all the places his
dad has been on his missions. He knows that his mum is writing a book about
vampires and how long his older brother spends practicing his 'swag' poses in
front of the mirror. He knows all about animals, too, because his Auntie
Delphia is a vet in Zimbabwe.
But still he has questions. Is his
neighbour, Monsieur Renoir, really evil? Why did he leave a Victoria Cross
medal on Robert's doorstep? And why has Auntie Delphia disappeared? In the
'Peace and Conflict' unit in school, Robert learned all about wars and heroes.
But as the lives of his friends, foes and family unfold, he discovers what it
really means to be a hero . . .
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma (Shadows and House of Stone)
In Novuyo Rosa
Tshuma’s first collection, Shadows, consisting of a novella
and five short stories Novuyo sketches, with astounding accuracy, the realities
of daily life in Zimbabwean townships and the peculiar intricacies of being a
foreigner in Johannesburg. Vivid, sparse and, at times, tragically beautiful,
Shadows is the work of a major new African voice. In the novella, Mpho, a young
artist, wanders the streets of Bulawayo, wondering at the savagery of his
neighbours. Their drive for survival has turned them into animals. Jobless,
powerless and angry, he watches his ugly, ageing mother leave each night to
prowl the streets in search of Johns, of love and of youth. When his mother
dies alone in a hospital of AIDS for which the clinic could not provide ARVs,
Mpho flees to Joburg to search for his girlfriend Nomsa. He finds her doing
what he so hated in his mother taking off her clothes in front of strangers for
money. She wants jewels, diamonds, nice cars. Things he can t provide. He
returns to Bulawayo and is charged with insulting and undermining the authority
of the President of the republic of Zimbabwe and causing prejudice to the creed
of the state as a whole for his unwittingly controversial paintings. Standing
trial for treason, Mpho wants nothing than to join his mother in the
shadows."
In House of Stone, Bukhosi has gone missing. His father, Abed, and his mother, Agnes, cling to the hope that he has run away, rather than been murdered by government thugs. Only the lodger seems to have any idea. Zamani has lived in the spare room for years now. Quiet, polite, well-read and well-heeled, he's almost part of the family - but almost isn't quite good enough for Zamani. Cajoling, coaxing and coercing Abed and Agnes into revealing their sometimes tender, often brutal life stories, Zamani aims to steep himself in borrowed family history, so that he can fully inherit and inhabit its uncertain future.
Yvonne Vera (Why Don't You Carve Other Animals?, Nehanda, Without A Name, Under The Tongue, Butterfly Burning and The Stone Virgins)
In Why Don't You Carve Other Animals?, the place is
the white-ruled Rhodesia of the seventies (now Zimbabwe), the exile the African
in his own land. Young men and women flee their villages to join the freedom
fighters in the forests. These stories, set during the years of the armed
struggle, tell of the other struggle, that of survival of those who stayed
behind.
In Nehanda, in the late nineteenth century white settlers and
administrators arrive to occupy the African country of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia).
Nehanda, a village girl, is recognized through omens and portents as a saviour.
The resulting uprising by the Africans is brutally crushed but looks forward to
the war of independence that succeeded a century later. Told in lucid, poetic
prose, this is a gripping story about the first meeting of a people with their colonizer.
In Without a Name, in Zimbabwe, in 1977, in the midst of the guerrilla war
raging against the white minority regime, a young woman escapes her war-ravaged
village to go to the city, Harare. But the city has its own perils, and takes
away considerably more than it offers. A moving, uncompromising novel, written
in Vera?s graceful poetic style, about the horrors of war and oppression in the
modern world and their effects on the individual soul.
In Under the Tongue, the adolescent Zhizha has lost the will to speak. In lyrical fragments, Vera relates the story of Zhizha's parents, and the horrifying events that led to her mother's imprisonment and her father's death. With this novel Vera became the first Zimbabwean writer ever to deal frankly with incest. With these surprising, at times shocking novels Vera shows herself to be a writer of great potential.
Butterfly Burning brings the brilliantly poetic voice of Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera to American readers for the first time. Set in Makokoba, a black township, in the late l940s, the novel is an intensely bittersweet love story. When Fumbatha, a construction worker, meets the much younger Phephelaphi, he"wants her like the land beneath his feet from which birth had severed him." He in turn fills her "with hope larger than memory." But Phephelaphi is not satisfied with their "one-room" love alone. The qualities that drew Fumbatha to her, her sense of independence and freedom, end up separating them. And the closely woven fabric of township life, where everyone knows everyone else, has a mesh too tight and too intricate to allow her to escape her circumstances on her own.
Vera exploits language to peel away the skin of public and private lives. In Butterfly Burning she captures the ebullience and the bitterness of township life, as well as the strength and courage of her unforgettable heroine.
The Stone Virgins is story set against the civil unrest of Zimbabwe in the early 1980s finds two sisters from the country town of Kezi struggling for survival in the face of terrible brutality and struggling with the rival temptations of town and city life.
*Side note: I always struggle on where to put Doris Lessing, who lived in Southern Rhodesia between 1925 and 1949, and had many novels set in, or about, Zimbabwe. Her first novel, The Grass is Singing examined the racial divide in Rhodesia and follows the tragic love affair between Mary Turner - the wife of an unsuccessful farmer - and Moses - a black 'servant', and it was part of the African Writers Series. Then, there's The Golden Notebook, which weaves together four notebooks, including one notebook - the black notebook on Anna Wulf's life in Southern Rhodesia before and during World War II. Also, Martha Quest from the Children of Violence series grew up in Southern Rhodesia. There's also Doris Lessing's short story collection, African Stories which includes every story Lessing has written about the time she spent living on the African continent including stories from her first collection This was the Old Chief's Country, as well as stories from Five, The Habit of Loving and A Man and Two Women. As well as Mara and Dann - an epic SFF story set in the future in a re-imagined Africa and following an orphaned brother and sister travelling in search of water during a new ice age. The Sweetest Dream is set in London and a fictional African nation, Zimlia. This, of course, is not all of Lessing's cannon, which is extensive, including novels, short story collections, memoirs, poetry and more.
