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Literature Today With Stanely Mushava
Book: Saskam Express
Author: Lilian Masitera
Publisher: Now I Can Play Publications (2013)
AROUND this time last decade, a teenage nerd rummaging through everything literary, I came across Lilian Masitera.
Scrolling back and battling to keep up, Stephen Alumenda, Chigango Musandireve and latter critics Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Eddie Zvinonzwa and Memory Chirere, whose instalments I faithfully followed, were not so much a source of fulfilment but frustration.
Each review meant one more book on my wish list but for all the eagerness, I only managed to access a fistful, hence the regular frustration.
One such book was “Now I Can Play” by Lilian Masitera. Back in the ‘90s, Masitera ditched traditional midwives to set up her own stable and live her dream.
More titles, “Start with Me,” “The Trail” and “Militant Shadow” followed from Now I Can Play Publications but I could not keep up.
Thankfully, Masitera recently turned up to give me a copy of her latest novel — eccentrically titled “Saskam Express!”
With “Saskam Express,” Masitera stakes her claim in the more wafer-thin serious contingent of Zimbabwe’s expansive writing community.
The journey motif is solicited to reconstruct the occasional sharp turns and near-fatal overhangs which Zimbabweans have had to brave and evade in the struggle to eke out a living against unsettling odds.
Saskam means crazy in colloquial parlance. The title refers to a journey where nothing is predictable or secure. Often, the express veers off-rail into cultural cesspits but the take-home message is to rise above, take flight and move on.
Set in the recovery stint, subsequent to the hyperinflationary era, the novel is an engaging account of impoverishment, disillusion and depression.
The story revolves around Laina Shana an early retiree who has to come to terms with overnight bankruptcy.
Masitera attaches readers to Laina, an embattled woman whose determination, resourcefulness and filial devotion knows no bounds even after losing her terminal benefits to inflation and losing her husband and only sons in a car crash.
An undercurrent of insecurity runs the thread of the novel as rules are prone to random change, to the constant disenfranchisement of the poor. The poor are, in Thomas Hardy’s diction, destiny’s playthings in the grip of an ironic will.
A parallel thread branches out when Laina meets Zira Zara. Zara tags himself into the former’s life with dark stratagems which involve an official front as a public relations officer for an estate agency to cover up his pimping manoeuvres.
Masitera must be lauded for transplanting her characters from a natural setting, instead of soliciting utopian figurines to portray a society in downgrade and determine the firmament between the real and the ideal.
The critical gripe is therefore to be directed against the society which Masitera is out to miniaturise — a society where double lives are the new normal.
Zara’s drift into a licentious lifestyle, ostensibly, in response to economic challenges may be a simplistic excuse but it is hugely subscribed.
After losing his job with Wild Life and Parks, Zara takes the easy way out and ventures into sex tourism.
Zara lingers about tourist resorts where he becomes an agent for men looking for cheap prostitutes, while he himself becomes the toy-boy for a much older expat social anthropologist.
Posh categories are conjured up for decadence. Man who pay prostitutes lavishly are called “mhene,” affluent women after toy-boys where called “tycoons,” while older men on prowl for students are called “vanamuseyamwa.”
Situational ethics, an occasional cop-out in the novel, has facilitated illicit industries including corruption, crime and prostitution, trends better truncated than silently tolerated.
Discontent is a constant at each step of the economic staircase. However, instead of yielding to the claims of the lower nature, one must live within their means while they extend their territory through judicious industry.
Taking power over others and what is rightfully theirs — which is what crime, corruption and adultery is essentially about — is gaining ground, unquestioningly legitimised by situational ethics.
For example, Zara, always on prowl for the next victim, breaks Laina Junior, the retiree’s well-to-do niece trying to find her feet in the world after losing both parents. This, more than desperate response to retrenchment, is taking power over other people.
There is an air of apprehension as the naïve Junior veers in the radius of Zara’s net. She ultimately plays into the latter’s bed, seduced by the material trifles of a total stranger.
She too represents a significant demographic. Materialism has become a defining feature, with reports now clichéd about university students who sell their bodies for petty gadgetry as if all they are ever taught is how to make a living not how to live.
There is a logical fallacy to this prevalence of sensuality over sensitivity and materialism over morality, even without looking beyond rampant STIs, abortions and related maladies among students.
Munya, a tenant at Laina’s house at the behest of Junior, his workmate at a hospital, comes across as humorous and level-headed, though he too exhibits ethical flaws. He accuses colleagues for being unduly resourceful as linen and pills disappearing for resale at the flea market.
Another taunt is directed at the doctors whom he says are quick to examine elderly patients, taking them through snap routines and dismissing them while young female patients are reserved for prolonged close-up examinations.
City life almost entirely comes across as false and distasteful. Laina’s respite to her rural home becomes a change of air in a setting where fraternity premises not on interest but humanity.
The backside respite seems to be Masitera in her element. Having been unsettled by the urban dislocation passages, I was spurred to nostalgic flights, perhaps because my solid village experience becomes a supporting format for the passages.
The passages, which Masitera may have well have written while listening to the forgotten classic “Kudendere” by Harare Mambos, starkly juxtapose the city passages, making the latter more visibly deficient of warmth and less fulfilling.
The rural folk, Mbuya Shana, the thatcher Uswa, Junior’s hard-working sister-in-law, Rutendo and her husband Rufaro, are a refreshing alternate given to cleaner and more industrious livelihoods.
Nether hovel as the city is, though, there is still a place for love and truth, a premise even for optimism. Not all men are ravenous wolves out to claim the last vestige of innocence from every woman.
Munya has genuine concern for Junior’s welfare, while Laina eventually meets her equivalent of the Korean drama prince, a man sincere in his love for her and disinclined to turn her financially precarious position to his advantage.
Perhaps the denouement is a vindication of hard work and resilience. Laina is constantly looking to the interests of others and eking out a living the honest way, including conducting private Mathematics tutorials, even if she is herself in dire straits.
Eventually, Laina lands a significant package in terminal benefits just when she is about to sell her house, which is all she has, having been dispossessed to ground zero by her late husband’s relatives.
The lump sum becomes a new lease of life both for herself and people she had committed herself to help while she was still struggling with penury herself.
One of Masitera’s more immediate achievements is the engaging use of humour throughout the novel. Laughter, which has become a way of making sense and senselessness of our situations, is extensively employed in the novel.
There are passages, however, where one feels Masitera could have maintained Imagist austerity to maintain a life-like touch to her novel.
The characterisation of Junior as a naïve latecomer to town, for example, borders on overt caricature as does Zara’s overnight changeover from a pimp to a benign suitor upon being unmasked.
Masitera is to be lauded for remaining significant to contemporary concerns without veering from art to NGO-speak as has become the case with most poets.
Stanely Mushava blogs at afrospection.blogspot.com
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