Online Reporter
Elliot Ziwira-At the Bookstore
“A dog is a dog. The average African dog is less than that.”
Shimmer Chinodya’s opening provocation in the timeless short story “Strays”, from “Can We Talk and Other Stories”, remains as unsettling today as it was at the turn of the millennium.
In an era saturated with motivational slogans, therapy speak and relentless digital chatter, Chinodya insists that talking is not the same as communicating, and that proximity does not equal intimacy.
Chinodya’s nomenclature of dogs is not really about animals at all. It is about class, history, inheritance and the invisible cages we normalise. There is Kutu, the nameless African dog, whose life is a continuum of hunger, boredom and kicks — barely tolerated.
There is the European dog, fully enrolled into the economy of affection. It is named, insured, budgeted for, and bequeathed. And then, there is the suburban African dog of the aspiring middle-class household, hovering somewhere between privilege and neglect, imitation and inheritance. This one is more of an appendage than a companion.
Dogs are dogs, we are told.
Yet Chinodya precisely points out that the said sameness is a lie we tell ourselves to avoid confronting inequality.
Background matters and environment shapes appetite, temperament and expectation. One begins to suspect that the dogs are standing in for men — and perhaps for nations.
We have a saying for this: men are mangy dogs. A drunk is a drunk, we insist, even as we catalogue the species.
Chinodya quietly asks: what are people drinking away from? Who taught them silence before they learnt speech?
“Can We Talk and Other Stories” interrogates these questions with an insistence that feels prophetic today. The collection tracks the Zimbabwean subject from childhood to adulthood, mapping how silence metastasises into habit, and habit into destiny.
First published by Baobab Books and relaunched by Weaver Press in 2017, the anthology has aged into a mirror for a society now negotiating inflationary fatigue, digital alienation, collapsing marriages and the hollow comforts of prosperity theology.
Chinodya, a master of the autobiographical mode, invites us back to Hoffman Street in Gweru. It is a dusty, intimate, and somehow humbling street.
The author skillfully avoids romanticising childhood. To him it is fraught with fear, misunderstanding and punitive authority. Though present, children are unheard. They are visible yet no one sees them.
Their ghosts announce themselves through bedwetting, reverie and withdrawal. The society that produces them has no language for vulnerability, but only discipline.
Central to the collection is the politics of communication — not just speech, but listening. Chinodya’s characters are haunted not by the supernatural, but by things never said aloud. The terror is domestic, familiar, and intimate. Families fracture not because of spectacular violence, but because of everyday emotional neglect.
“Strays” distils this tension through the parallel lives of Sam and his dog, Sango. Sam, a “hard Mashona” man, is professionally lifted out of the ghetto by architecture and post-independence opportunity.
He acquires a house in a leafy suburb, works alongside whites, and performs the rituals of success. Yet the ghetto remains lodged in him, becoming an internal geography his wife Ndai cannot renovate.
Sango, meanwhile, is imported from a white household — a European dog with European sensibilities. He refuses food, recoils from touch, and wears his alienation openly.
Two males from incompatible worlds are yoked by circumstance. Both are displaced and become defensive. Both man and dog are aching for recognition but are unequipped with the language of tenderness.
Sam cannot touch anything. Not even his wife, his daughter Nyasha, and his dog. Affection feels like betrayal of masculinity, culture, and the hard shell that survival demands.
Ndai urges him to walk the dog, speak to neighbours, and acknowledge need. He only hears accusations where invitation exists.
Chinodya exposes how class mobility without emotional re-education breeds estrangement. Sam has escaped material deprivation, but not the training in silence that came with it. Like the narrators in “The Waterfall” and “Can We Talk”, he is afraid of home, not because it is hostile, but because it demands presence.
Sango begins to dig under fences, then graduates to the gate. Sam begins to drift into drinking spaces in high-density suburbs, nostalgic for Hoffman Street. Both seek fellowship where it feels unregulated, and unjudged. Their pact is unspoken but binding: do not ask me to stay if you do not know how to love me.
“It was almost as if he found his own sense of alienation mirrored in the dog’s behaviour,” Chinodya writes.
Man and dog become co-conspirators in escape. Freedom, however, comes at a cost.
The more Sango roams, the more danger he invites. The more Sam drinks, the more his marriage erodes. Silence does not preserve peace. It weaponises misunderstanding.
Read sequentially, the stories in “Can We Talk” form a Bildungsroman of emotional paralysis. The child narrators of “Hoffman Street” and “The Man Who Hanged Himself” grow into adults who have mastered survival but not intimacy.
A society that polices curiosity and punishes vulnerability produces adults fluent in avoidance. They want to be heard, but distrust the possibility of being understood.
By the time we arrive at “Can We Talk”, loneliness has become philosophical. The estranged narrator’s question to Alice at Mereki — “Do you think friends can meet in death…as ghosts…and love as ghosts?” — is less romantic than tragic. Her response is devastating in its clarity: “You are a lonely man. A very lonely man.”
The ghosts of childhood return, rebranded. Women flee into Pentecostalism, alcohol, or precarious intimacy. Men baptise themselves in beer, transactional sex and bravado.
Consequently, communication becomes performative and marriage collapses under the weight of unarticulated resentment. Children and pets absorb the fallout, learning early that affection is conditional and silence strategic.
Chinodya anticipates the dog-eat-dog ethos that now defines late capitalism and its local mutations. Individualism is marketed as freedom and materialism as fulfilment. Hypocrisy flourishes. The vulnerable are scapegoated. Victims become monsters, and the cycle renews itself with bureaucratic efficiency.
What makes Chinodya enduring is not nostalgia, but craft. His use of stream of consciousness, metaphor and conversational language creates an intimacy that disarms.
The autobiographical impulse grounds the stories in lived texture, resisting abstraction, and becoming case studies in emotional miseducation rather than morality tales.
Today, when we talk endlessly, be it online, in slogans, or in sermons, “Can We Talk and Other Stories” insists that dialogue is an ethical practice, not a technological one. Chinodya argues for communication at every level: personal, familial, communal, and national. Without it, progress is cosmetic, mobility hollow, and freedom performative.
Straying out of hostile enclosures, he suggests, is not enough. Claustrophobia is not only architectural but it is psychological and emotional. Escape without reckoning merely relocates the prison.
Chinodya’s challenge to the contemporary reader is deceptively simple. He implores the reader to learn to talk before learning to flee.
The idea is learning to listen before learning to accuse. Otherwise, like Sam and Sango, we will keep mistaking movement for freedom and silence for strength.
• For an immersive reading experience, visit the Typocrafters (DigiHub) retail shop at Herald House, corner George Silundika Avenue and Sam Nujoma Street in Harare.
