Reading Mungoshi’s child characters through Muponde’s eyes

Elliot Ziwira At the Bookstore

IN “Killing the Crow: Visions of Childhood in Charles Mungoshi’s Short Stories, in Charles Mungoshi: A Critical Reader”, edited by Memory Chirere and Maurice Vambe, Robert Muponde rebuts Zimunya and Zhuwarara’s notion of childhood as an innocent reflection of the vulnerability of mankind, as having limitations on the nature of childhood vis-à-vis adulthood, and what constitutes resistance.

Although intriguing and evocative, Muponde’s critique exposes his own weaknesses, because he falls short on the reasons for suffering, vulnerability and reactionary, or revolutionary tendencies, as will be explored.

Muponde focuses on two short stories, “Shadows on the Wall” and “The Crow” in Mungoshi’s “Coming of the Dry Season” (1972), the former being of concern herein.

With reference to David Oldman’s premise, he argues: “Opposition to adulthood, and the family is but one side amongst others in which this opposition finds expression”, (1994: 154).

Ignoring the fatalistic nature of other relations in the story (the others), the physical human and natural elements, as well as the spiritual space that aggravate suffering, Muponde concentrates on the boy-child narrator and his father’s relationship.

In a rather single narrative, tilting towards a binary reading of the story “Shadows on the Wall”, Muponde disputes Zhuwarara’s analysis, which inoculates vulnerability in both the boy and his father.

Vulnerability, in both instances, becomes a condition, or a state of being, an albatross around the neck of the individual.

It is interesting to note at this point that all the characters in “Shadows on the Wall” are victims in one way or the other. What is paramount is how they find an elixir out of their conditions. Hence, the starting point is for them to identify themselves in the many sites availed to them through imagery and symbolism.

Muponde argues that, “it is the father, a hawkish and hovering figure, who is ultimately vulnerable and hopeless when confronted both by the oppressive silence of the boy, and the unspoken depersonalizing imagery attached to his memory and person” (p82).

After bringing to the fore the physical attributes of the father; “hawkish and hovering”, Muponde captures the nature of resistance regardless of physical brawn, as the boy, in his small way, is able to retaliate through silence and the metaphysical.

Surprisingly, the critic uses brutal language to describe the boy’s resistance, which is rather inconsistent. He calls the boy’s resistance to such brute force “oppressive” and “depersonalizing”.

Muponde hits the nail on the head: “The father is consistently demonised by the son, but he has no opportunity to reply because he never gets to hear what the boy says. The son has denied him speech,” (ibid). Really?

Muponde goes on to talk about the boy’s “dehumanizing vocabulary”, that “the child wills the death of the father by disembodying him and recreating images that speak of the father’s alienation from the human world”; and that “the search for shadows is an attempt by the boy to make sense of his own world, to define it and give it shape and meaning for himself” (p81).

Muponde risks self-shooting by projecting the boy as a paragon of resistance to any forms of oppression at the same time immolating him through demonising him and glorifying the object of his suffering. Victims are never angels; they will always find vents of escape out of the quagmire they are pushed into.

The oppressed will always find means to escape from the claustrophobia that shapes their existence. And, that escape can never be far from being violent, as Franz Fanon posits in “The Wretched of the Earth” (1967). It is also true that resistance is a response to a particular situation. Therefore, the source is equally at fault.

The boy, like most of the children in Memory Chirere’s “Somewhere in this Country” (2006), especially Keresenzia, Zhuwawo and Raji, may be rebellious, but who is to blame for the collapse of the familial base?

It is rather missing the point for Muponde to say the boy “demonised” the father and “denied him speech”, because a close reading of the story reveals otherwise. As the story begins, we learn from the boy that he is “playing with shadows on the wall”, and that there is “bright sunlight” that “comes in through the doorway,” and his father “blocks most of it”. We are introduced to the boy’s escape behaviour as he recreates his world, as Muponde aptly points out.

The imagery of the shadows is juxtaposed with that of the “bright sunlight”. The contrasting imagery used here is the source of the conflict in that the father sutures hope and sets the boy’s dream ablaze, through his “hawkish and hovering figure”, which blocks the doorway, caricaturing him, or “demonising” him.

It is not the boy who denies his father speech, but the father’s relationship with him, as well as his attitude towards his wives, and the way he wants him to relate to the two women in his life, rob the boy of “the gift of language”, as Mungoshi writes.

The boy is only responding to a situation that was created over many years. If the boy can be said to be selfish, then there must be a new meaning for that word. The boy has learnt a new language, which the father is responsible for.

The paralysis, malaise and barrenness of relationships in “Shadows on the Wall” predominantly hinges on the father. The natural armoury that plays havoc on the familial base has its roots in the violent inclinations of the father, be it psychological, physical and emotional. There may not be physical violence on the part of the boy, but the fact that the father exposes him to the vagaries of nature through neglect as he pursues the women, who are constantly running away from him, leaves the boy psychologically stranded, which is akin to violence in the deeper sense of the personal and familial levels.

A close analysis of the barrenness of his father’s relationships with the two women in his life reveals dictatorial, selfish and brutal tendencies, which make the boy insulate against him and lose the essence of speech. As the other three characters are consumed in their own neuroses, the boy suffers. He remains a victim, albeit a calculating one.

According to Horney (1950), neurosis is a compulsive response to a situation, which the individual fails to understand. She posits that a child’s interpretation of the world is shaped by his or her environment as illustrated in the following:

“When summarized they all boil down to the fact that people in the environment are too wrapped up in their own neuroses to be able to love the child, even to conceive of him as the particular individual he is; their attitudes towards him are determined by their own neurotic responses” (Horney, 1950:18).

As Boeree, explains in “A Bio-Social Theory of Neurosis” (2002), neurosis, which is hereditary, refers to a variety of psychological problems involving persistent experiences of negative effect, including anxiety, sadness or depression, anger, irritability, mental confusion, cognitive problems such as disturbing thoughts and cynicism.

Thus, at an early age, the boy in “Shadows on the Wall” is exposed to a dysfunctional family, where he is exposed to his father’s carnal peccadilloes. He has not always been silent or imbued in shadows; escaping through habitual fantasizing; and constantly conjuring images of death, which are other aspects of neurosis (Boeree, 2002). He has not always been hostile as Muponde puts it. He is only responding to a neurotic world.

The boy’s father is always following after his wives; firstly, the narrator’s mother, who eventually goes for good, and his second wife, whom we are told he has had to cycle after four times.

The two women, like the boy, are victims, and remain vulnerable to the man’s whims. He is determined to keep them apart. By alienating the boy from his mother, the father selfishly pursues his neurotic outlet, seeking comfort from one of his victims.

The boy intimates: “He taught me to avoid mother…I was no longer happy in either’s presence. And that is when I began to notice the shadows on the wall of our hut”.

Using the divide and rule tactic, the father plays the boy against his mother, so that he kills affection in both of them, yet he wants the narrator to kowtow to his desire for comfort and consolation. Having robbed him of motherly affection, he wants him to call his second wife, who comes a day after his biological mother has left, “mother”.

He always sheds tears every time he thinks of the dove nestlings, which he found “dead in their nest because somebody had unknowingly killed their mother in the bush on her way home”.

The image of the mother here is symbolic in that it articulates what the boy wishes for; filial contact. It is this that his father robs him of.

It is, therefore, befuddling for Muponde to say “the father appears to me to be the victim of his son’s declared hostility, which at times spills into open confrontation like when the son refuses to be carried on his father’s back, or rejects his father’s attempt to get into conversation with him” (p82).

Calling the son “cruel” and “hostile” against a father, who emasculates him and robs him of motherly affection is misplaced combat. If he needs affection from his son he has to reciprocate.

That he refuses to be carried on his back is questionable, since he tells us: “At first father grumbled. He did not like to carry me and he didn’t like to receive orders from mother: she was there to listen to him always”.

The boy may not have liked to be carried by his father, because he is not keen on carrying him in the first place, not that he “refuses”.

Though exhibiting traits of neurosis in response to his situation, as postulated by Boeree (2002), Horney (1950), Freud (1904, 1923, 1930), and Jung (1961, 1989), like Shingi in Brian Chikwava’s “Harare North” (2009), and child characters in Memory Chirere’s “Somewhere in this Country” (2006), the boy-child in “Shadows on the Wall” exudes maturity beyond his age. He is able to circumvent his suffering through interpretation of the many images that shape his being, availed mostly through his father and nature.

That the child is an embodiment, not of individual resistance, but collective resistance to a bastion of oppression, is evidenced by his reference to the dove nestlings and the chickens, whose words he understands. He shares with them the pain of estrangement and abandonment, as well as the language of the oppressed.

The father, as a victim of his own folly, escapes from his talkative new wife through silence and morose behaviour, exposing his vulnerability, just like the dove nestlings and the chickens. However, that he should find the solace of conversation in someone, who is also seeking a vent out of the same oppressive inclinations which he brings on, is a mockery of patience and tolerance. He cannot eat his cake and still have it.

Why are the women running away from him, and why does he keep on pursuing his new wife if he brings him so much sorrow?

Unlike his mother and the other woman, the boy has nowhere else to run to; he has to remain put.

Although Muponde may be spot on, citing Karin Lesnik-Obertein (1994:26) that at times adults run the risk of “projecting ideals and ideas about themselves and the non-themselves,” thus robbing children of their voice, the boy in “Shadows on the Wall” beguiles that interpretation. He is able to circumvent his condition and insulate himself against further emotional assault.

He is far from being evil, neither does he remain innocently spiritually wounded as Zhuwarara (2001) puts it. He sets the tone for resistance in the face of colonial raging storms that pervade Charles Mungoshi’s “Coming of the Dry Season” (1972) and “Waiting for the Rain” (1975), where language is not always vocal. Silence, indeed, echoes, as Alexander Kanengoni shows in “Echoing Silences” (1997).