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Elliot Ziwira-At the Bookstore
In his short stories published in the timeless collection, “No More Plastic Balls and Other Stories”, which he co-edited with Clement Chihota, Robert Muponde explores how man is capable of bringing anguish on both himself and others in his quest to conquer the world.
Using powerful symbols and metaphors drawn from his own experiences and nature, the intellectual artist adeptly portrays man as equally a predator and prey.
Through characterisation and realism, he highlights the way humanity is imbued with sadism, reducing everyone to quarry.
A master of metaphor, imagery and symbolism, which he morphs into the ordinate and inordinate alike, Muponde creates characters whom the reader feels like hugging, caressing, haggling with, kissing or strangling.
The way he uses conventional setting hoists the reader onto a therapeutic pedestal, or infectious nostalgia, depending on the mood.
Effortlessly, he takes you along into his space by reflecting on shared experiences, thus making his story a communal one.
Muponde draws you into his storms, leaving you both aghast and nostalgic, as he slides you back and forth along his time travels.
That way, he makes you locate yourself in the varied physical, emotional and psychological sites, which the fictional experiences depicted, bring forth.
He runs riot with your experiences as if they were his own. Well, he tells his story as if he were telling yours. In his stories in “No More Plastic Balls and Other Stories”, the metaphors of the storm, darkness, madness, barrenness, and death purvey a sense of hopelessness, which leaves the reader dejected.
The fictional experiences poignantly interact with the reality of lack and emasculation of expectancy.
The use of the first-person singular voice authenticates the struggles the individual endures in his quest to disentangle himself from the complex web of his existence.
Gomango, the narrator in “The Storm”, feels hard done by the storms stalking him as a university student of the 1990s when demonstrations were the order of the day.
To him, “tomorrow was waking up in the morning, clenching Dream’s fortune in gnarled hand”.
Through the dream motif, Muponde examines the barrenness of expectation to a man seeking hope in the benevolence of others, yet his own inward storms remain raging against him and others.
Gomango laments: “So many things have happened; I am not responsible for their happening much as I am not responsible for the darkness of any night. Why does darkness fall on me? Cried night one night.”
The hopelessness permeating the story begins and ends with the narrator himself. His first line is, “It was dark in my mind”, and likens “dawn” to “pain” and “difficult questions”.
As his university life hangs in limbo, Gomango is evicted from his rented room for failure to pay rentals and his rather violent inclinations, especially towards Hilda. He may not be physically violent to her, but the storms within him meet their match in Hilda’s, as she feels she cannot be used for intimacy and discarded.
The torrential nature of the tirades they exchange exposes a far-reaching problem, even beyond them. The barrenness of Gomango and Hilda’s relationship is juxtaposed with the sterility of their expectations, hence igniting the couple’s dreams into flames.
Like Ronald in “Broken Strings” and “Touched”, the narrator finds himself questioning the essence of love in the absence of sustainability.
Tragically, love is sacrificed for the stomach and other material gains believed to exist elsewhere.
The unfruitfulness of relationships in Muponde’s stories is worrisome in that it dooms prospects of regeneration. Owing to lack of ideological vision, young people are left groping in darkness in their efforts to find direction.
The storms that the characters wade through, or unleash on others, consciously or unconsciously, are contrasted with the rain, which somehow points to hope. However, because of lack of an informed identity and clarity of vision, the life-giving rains become other storms threatening to shred the fabric that should keep society intact.
Gomango, Ronald, Elijah, and Maurice, the narrators in “The Storm”, “Touched”, “Broken Strings”, and “At the Window”, respectively, may be read as the young man in James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”.
Their tragedy is not that they are oppressed; physically, emotionally, psychologically or otherwise, but they do not know how to respond to their condition.
They try to seek an elixir out of the storms, which they are also responsible for, through intimacy, protests, violence, and alcohol, without looking closely at their own shortcomings.
They simply look through the window for solutions from their own apparitions, which is the tragedy of today’s youths.
Ronald’s cords in “Broken Strings” are severed, not because he is unlucky in love, no!
The fact that he lives beyond his means cannot be blamed on his girlfriend, Linda, who is under pressure to extricate him from debt through promiscuity. In the end, the bubble in their love is blown.
Ronald is unable to satisfactorily explain why he keeps two rented rooms in Harare, yet, as a teacher, he has free accommodation at his workstation in Sanyati.
Clearly, the storms that he wades into are predominantly of his own making.
In “Touched”, Elijah leaves the reader wondering whether the oppressed should suffer in silence or take up arms, and how.
It is the skill that Muponde uses in the opening lines of the story that draws the reader in: “He died with his mouth open. Maybe trying to shout, to warn, or to give a clue to the source of things.
“It began when he said he was tired of silence.”
It may suggest that his death is linked to his open mouth, since he dared the authorities, which may aggravate misery as speaking out is considered detrimental in one way or the other. However, a close analysis reveals otherwise.
Elijah betrays the people whom he purports to be fighting for, because of lack of self-introspection. That he understands the concept of anguish is beyond question. His conviction that remaining silent is even more painful than the whipping storms is not in disarray, also.
However, it is his lack of ideological vision in the fight against whatever he feels burdens him and his generation which is worrisome.
His struggle to locate himself in the different sites of the familial, communal and national platforms alienates him from high school, through college, to Sanyati where, finally, he finds himself as an insecure teacher following his expulsion from university.
Living his life like a moving encyclopaedia of quotes depicting oppression and sorrow, though inspiring, clouds his vision. In the end, he is no longer sure who his enemies are.
He fights everything and “everybody”.
Elijah’s protests at university yield nothing, his brutal killing of Katsanga, a policeman, over Viola, a woman of questionable morals, exposes the violent storms that have always been raging within him. And, his striping to show those around that he is, indeed, a man, is an adventure out of context.
Such heroic antics are no longer in vogue to a society too impatient to pay attention to yet another visionless lunatic purporting to take them to Utopia, yet exposing them to even more turbulent storms.
Sadly, Elijah dies mysteriously.
It may be by his own hand; just maybe, but what is clear is that death becomes the ultimate winner. As is the case with Maurice in “At the Window”, his death becomes a window through which other characters view their own storms.
Online Reporter