dyton mupawaenda
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 Musaemura Zimunya and Rino Zhuwarara’s notion of childhood as an innocent reflection of the vulnerability of mankind as having limitations on the nature of childhood and what constitutes resistance.
Although intriguing and evocative, Muponde’s critique exposes his own weaknesses, for he falls short on the reasons for anguish, 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).
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 misery, 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”, the critic 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, encumbering the individual. Interestingly, the characters in “Shadows on the Wall” are victims in one way or the other. How they find an elixir out of their conditions is crucial. Hence, the starting point is for them to identify themselves in the many sites availed through imagery and symbolism.
In his critique, 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 depersonalising imagery attached to his memory and person”.
After exposing the physical attributes of the father — “hawkish and hovering”, he captures the nature of resistance regardless of physical brawn, as the boy 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 “depersonalising”.
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 notes the boy’s “dehumanising vocabulary”, insisting 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”.
He maintains 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”.
The critic risks self-shooting by projecting the boy as a paragon of resistance, while immolating him by demonising him and glorifying the object of his sorrow.
Should victims be depicted as angels, then? Isn’t it possible for them to find vents of escape out of the quagmire they are pushed into?
Escape, as Franz Fanon argues in “The Wretched of the Earth” (1967), is always violent. Since resistance is a response to a particular situation, then, the source is equally at fault.
The boy in “Shadows on the Wall”, like most of the children in Memory Chirere’s “Somewhere in this Country” (2006), especially Keresenzia, Zhuwawo, and Raji, is rebellious.
However, who should be blamed for the collapse of the familial base, leading to rebelliousness in children?
Muponde somehow misses the point when he says the boy “demonised” the father and “denied him speech”, as 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, which Muponde affirms.
The imagery of the shadows is juxtaposed with the “bright sunlight”. The contrasting imagery used here is the source of conflict. The father kills hope and burns the boy’s dreams through his “hawkish and hovering figure”, which blocks the doorway, caricaturing him, or “demonising” him.
It is not the boy who denies his father the essence of speech, but the father’s relationship with him, as well as his attitude towards his wives. The way the father wants him to relate to the two women in his life robs 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 he 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 hinge on the father. The natural armoury that plays havoc on the familial base has its roots in the violent inclinations of the father — psychologically, physically, or emotionally.
The boy may not be physically oppressed, but the way the father exposes him to the vagaries of nature through neglect, as he pursues the women constantly running away from him, leaves the boy psychologically stranded.
This 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 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, 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 fantasising; 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 father constantly follows 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. The father selfishly pursues his neurotic outlet by alienating the boy from his mother, 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, killing 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 symbolically articulates what the boy wishes for— filial contact. It is this that his father robs him of.
Therefore, it is 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”.
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 didn’t 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”.
Exhibiting traits of neurosis in response to his situation, the boy in “Shadows on the Wall” exudes maturity beyond his age. He is able to circumvent his misery through interpretation of the many images that shape his being, availed mostly through his father and nature.
The child embodies collective resistance as 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 burdened.
The father, 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 solace of conversation in someone also seeking escape from the oppressive inclinations 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-Oberstein (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” escapes that interpretation.
He is able to circumvent his condition and insulate himself against further emotional assault. He is far from being evil, nor 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. Indeed, silence echoes, as Alexander Kanengoni shows in “Echoing Silences” (1997).
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