Chronicle Editor
Stanely Mushava: Literature Today
Chenjerai Hove’s vastly diverting cast earned him worldwide regard but his characters hardly ever took the bus to town. The title roles in “Bones”, “Shadows” and “Ancestors” oscillate between farm and village, hardly ever hinting street orientation.The furthermost Marita ventures, she is disappointed by Government’s cold, bureaucratic ways and demands his address so she can knock some humanity into his head. Any other day, Hove’s cast is home on rural turf, not accidentally because the novelist attaches spiritual value to the land and maps his most ambitious work where his heart is.
It is Hove himself who first decisively leaves village for town, leaving behind communal warmth and a potential chieftaincy. Only, the lyrically agile chief’s son stays longer and sees further than Marita, setting the stage for the cynic wind that would later howl through his stories and poems.
I was delighted to stumble into the great writer’s startled impression of city life, “Shebeen Tales: Messages from Harare”, while wayfaring on Amazon recently.
The varied and freewheeling essay collection, published in 1994 by Serif, was originally put out in Dutch as “Berichten uit Harare” by Dutch publisher Jan Kees van de Werk’s “In de Knipscheer” in 1993.
The digital edition appeared in 2013 with additional material by the author. This column has consistently pleaded with local publishers to give the Zimbabwean canon a digital lease of life to enable the current generation to interact with works of interest that are no longer in print.
The restoration of “Shebeen Tales”‘ shelf life 20 years after the original version attests to digital technology’s underutilised capacity to preserve and promote Zimbabwe’s culture trove. It would be refreshing to see decades of Zimbabwean literature and other art forms likewise restored.
De Werk met Hove during the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF) in 1991 and commissioned to do a syndicated series of essays for Amsterdam daily “De Volkskrant” and “In de Knipscheer”.
Hove’s fiction had appeared in Dutch, German, Japanese, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish and De Werk was Hove’s Dutch publisher. In turn, he contributed a column for the now folded “Horizon” magazine, detailing his experiences as an outsider in Harare and his conversations with Hove.
“Chenjerai Hove writes his essays from the inside out; they are fluent impressions of Harare. He often quotes the work of his fellow writers, not merely because literature in Zimbabwe often cuts close to the bone of reality but also because he does not want to make any distinction between facts and fiction, feeling and intellect,” De Werk prefaces the collection.
“Hove has woven the themes of his fiction into his columns: the war of independence, the theatre of power, nostalgia for the land, alienation in the city, the experience of nature, tangible memory and intangible reality,” he says.
The brief essays include “High Fences, Neighbours and Dogs”, “‘First World’, ‘Third World’ and ‘Fourth World’ City”, “Never Mind, Sister, This Is Our Home”, “Shebeen, Where People Drink”, “Harare’s Sex Shops”, “Queueing for Death”, “Sorry Madam, No Offence Intended”, “A Walk Through Harare’s Sanitary Lane”, “Witches, Ghosts and Others” and “A Dance of Graduates and Illiterates”.
Hove’s principal turf is poetry and fiction but the signature attributes of his work including an eye for the negligible, humour, warmth and defence of the underdog read show through the essays.
“‘First World’, ‘Third World’ and ‘Fourth World’ City” is about the class-themed borderlines of Harare. “If I were a city father, I would have written ‘Welcome to the cities of Harare’, for there are many cities in one, with different flavours, or personalities if you want to put it that way,” Hove writes.
The homeless down and out feature eminently, starkly contrasted to the nose brigade, trendy, street-smart youths refining their English vocals like the latest speech application on Google Play and hopping between fast food outlets with omnivorous fervour.
In “Harare’s High Fences, Neighbours and Dogs”, Hove addresses the alienation and coldness of city life, ironically the theme that would run through his latter memoirs as a writer in exile.
For a writer consistently invoking the connectivity of land and spirit, the warmth and humanity of the village, Hove is disaffected with fenced and gated Harare.
Unlike leading Shona novelist Ignatius Mabasa who seems fond of dogs, making them the signature of his “Kwayedza” column, “Imbwa Haihukuri Sadza”, and novel “Imbwa Yemunhu”, Hove seems to hate dogs, deploying them as the symbol of discord between neighbour and neighbour in individualistic and materialistic Harare.
In the dystopian pitch today’s luddites use to chant down the rise of the robots, Hove talks of people spending more on their dogs than their servants, medical schemes being mooted for dogs where workers would be lucky to be on funeral policy, dog races coming up and other unlikely prophecies.
Hove weaves in the anecdote of his own son who takes the dog sign next door for an overstatement in his lonely quest for friends only to find himself with a torn knee, being tested for rabies the next moment.
“The (neighbour’s) wife was frantic, cursing and shouting me for not keeping my children to myself, in my own yard. Now the boy responds to the ‘Beware of the Dog,’ signs,” recalls Hove. In any case, risking rabies would not be necessary in 2016 where friends have changed from dusty age mates to slick gadgetry.
Occasionally, the chief’s son leaves the cold, listless city for Mazvihwa but does not fare any better. “In Never Mind, Sister, This Is Our Home”, Hove deplores malaria, illiteracy, poverty, skeletal cattle and the trip to be endured the old, solitary bus.
The village is no longer the city’s idyllic juxtaposition but illiteracy is silencing the people forever, and poverty enslaving them. But his mother, down with a terrible headache, will not trade the warm hearth of malaria country to stay in the city fence all the time like stalled livestock.
Towards the end of his life, Hove endured taunts of betraying his formative art to be a domestic rubberstamp of the Western narrative on Zimbabwe. Reading these brief essays, it is tempting for an ideology-themed critic to put down some of them to poverty porn but there is a lot of warmth and humanity to be redeemed.
Hove will hardly stand under the rigid rules of the new criticism which risks burying the living to plant flowers that affirm black pride, and erasing the underdog in the name of supplanting stereotype.
I am disappointed by Hove’s populist tendency in essays bordering on NGO-speak such as “Fires Burn, Books and Freedom Burn Too” but summatively rate his poetic scalpel into the frailties and foibles of his society.
He is probably unmatched in Zimbabwean literature as the champion of the underclass, especially for his formative strivings culminating in “Bones”.
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