Fear, loss, hope in ‘Writing Lives’

Beaven Tapureta Bookshelf
To read a selected spectrum of English short stories written by Zimbabwe’s best writers is to enjoy different imaginative trips into certain worlds from which you emerge “baptised”. “Writing Lives” published by Weaver Press, is one such odyssey into which you are led and shown new shades of colour in things you took as “the usual”.

Once you dive in, you get to taste the talent that Zimbabwe has when it comes to the short story. We have had legendary writers like the late Dambudzo Marechera, Charles Mungoshi, Alexander Kanengoni, the late Julius Chingono and others who explored the short story in unusual ways but in “Writing Lives” we have a contemporary crop of writers panel-beating the short story genre into various appealing shapes. No wonder why some writers such as Christopher Mlalazi eventually develop some of their short stories into long works.

Sometimes the seed in the short story visibly clamours for growth and its own extra stretch of the imaginative fibres.

As you drift quietly from story to story in “Writing Lives”, the characters’ attitudes, thoughts, activities and values keep tagging at your heart and mind.

A burst of laughter, a subtle universal lesson to be learnt, then you spin with a neutral feeling of grief and joy before a whole sadness envelopes you and you ask why.

Short story writing techniques abound in this anthology which features 14 stories. It is as if the writers deliberately let the contents take their own various natural forms, in doing so the stories are made to appeal to humanity with powerful lucidity and influence. As a reader, you witness at close range Tendai Huchu’s gift of fluency and imaginativeness in his short story “The Life After” in which the narrator has crossed over to “the other side”. Pretence and fear is blasted and exposed.

A sharp, almost hurting prod hits the reader to envisage what life will probably be edition, 2014), an anthology of short stories edited by Irene like after death. Huchu’s story has the narrator as a dead person, whose voice often shifts from the present “life after death” to the former earthly life and back to the present again without breaking or confusing the flow and the build up to the end. The narrator’s childhood dreams and innocence squashed by a limiting socio-economic milieu in his adult age entertain him as he waits in the long queue to the gate where “each of us must stand alone and be held to account on his own” (page 10).

Lawrence Hoba has always been the youngest author in anthologies especially those published by Weaver Press, and he is one of the consistent young published writers too. Hoba’s interest in child characters is strong. His solo award-winning anthology “The Trek and Other Stories” (Weaver Press, 2009) has such a child observer or narrator point of view running through some stories. Another writer who invests his works in childhood voice is Memory Chirere who does so with perfect innocence especially when one reads some of his Shona And English anthologies “Tudikidiki” and “Somewhere In This Country”.

Could these two writers be instigating a fresh look at ourselves?

Hoba’s short story “Our Freedom” in the anthology looks at two kinds of freedom. There is Freedom, a child who has died. This child’s name is prefixed with “our” to become “our Freedom”, implying deep reverence and possessiveness. Then there is general freedom, an idea which the writer spins along, in comparison and contrasts, the physical death of the child. Hoba juxtaposes concepts and human conditions and scrutinises them through the eyes of his characters.

It seems the editor’s inexplicit objective in coming up with this compilation was to look at “death” or “finality”  from different perspectives. And yet the reader, for want of relief from the gory scenes in Christopher Mlalazi’s short story “Tsano”, can turn the pages further to stories such as Daniel Mandishona’s “Better Build Boys Than Repair Men” or Farai Mudzingwa’s “Charara” or Sekai Nzenza’s “Mbuya, My Grandmother”.

Mlalazi’s “Tsano” is tearful and the reader needs nothing more to convince him/her that war, in whatever form, is not good. Mandishona is a cunning short story writer who uses a dream to convey a powerful message. A well-known criminal dies in a gunfight with the police.

At his funeral, the unexpected takes place. The dead criminal, who is nicknamed Square, sits up in his coffin during body-viewing and starts to walk away while dumbfound mourners stalk him from a distance. What he is up to nobody knows.

It is towards the end of the story that the reader realises that he has been tricked into believing a young boy’s dream but still, beneath the dream, there is a real point to consider – children need to be protected from psychological impact of crime in a society.

Nzenza’s short story “Mbuya, My Grandmother” is rich, educative. The reminiscences of a grown up woman about her late grandmother Mbuya vaMandirowesa make you wonder if in this modern day we can claim to be our original selves in terms of culture. Had young men and women the patience to read this story, they would know the true meaning of beauty, love, sex and marriage as it was in the good old days before cruel events however dismantled all that a people believed in. All we see now are diseases, marital misunderstandings, hunger and poverty, a generation culturally going nowhere!

In some of the stories there is deliberate omission of resolution after the climax, a feat which does some wonders in maintaining the suspense. Huchu, who also breaks chronological order of narration, does just that. Mlalazi does it too.

The stories keep unravelling in your mind long after you have gone to the next. Imagine living in a country where politicians live with computerized robots as their bodyguards or maids or garden boys! UK-based Fungisayi Sasa invites you to question the issue of power and technology in her story “We’re All Comrades Now”. No doubt that advanced technology, acquired through plunder of national resources, to some extent has separated greedy leaders from their own people.

Other stories in the anthology were written by Emmanuel Sigauke, Bongani Sibanda, Marko Phiri, Chiedza Musengezi, Blessing Musariri, Nevanji Madanhire, and Tendai Machingaidze. The standard of writing all these writers are showcasing in the anthology really re-captures the inventiveness our literature used to be known for.

The writers’ use of local settings and atmosphere with characters dialogue sometimes in indigenous language makes this anthology “Writing Lives” an insightful probe into what constitutes current Zimbabwean humanity, its past, its present, and its  future.

“Writing Lives” is the seventh of Weaver Press’ anthologies of short stories following “Writing Still”, “Writing Now”, “Laughing Now”, “Women Writing Zimbabwe”, “Mazambuko” and “Writing Free”.