adminLovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
The hunger motif is a recurrent feature on the Zimbabwe literary landscape both in the pre and post-independence era. It is often employed to describe the debilitating environment outplaying at a particular historical epoch and also as a literary device that has become some kind of avant-garde in
canonising African literature.
Hunger can be defined as the desperate need for food, a general absence, a loss, or quest and both the two books – “House of Hunger” (1978) by Dambudzo Marechera and Petina Gappah’s “An Elegy for Easterly” (2009) – focus on what is absent and how the nation or individuals are hungry.
In both presentation and style, the two books typify some kind of hunger or physical deprivation but the source and motivation of the hunger is in some way variant.
“House of Hunger” exemplifies a ‘house’ that is in dire need of nourishment and in a broader sense is the hunger that has afflicted not just Vengere Township but the whole Rhodesian landscape. The hunger, either in terms of real physical deprivation of food or the quest for a new dispensation is thus a colonial creation that racially segregates, dehumanises and literally induces hunger on the African populace.
Metaphorically, the hunger depicted in the “House of Hunger” refers to the lack of opportunities, social mobility and the search for new alternatives of existence different from the repressive colonial system.
It seems the whole idea of freedom was to form the hallmark of the author’s later writings.
His aversion to oppression and the need for personal freedom is aptly captured in the writer’s interview with Alle Lansu in “Escape from the House of Hunger: Marechera Talks About His Life’ in Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book On his life and Work: “. . the very thought that someone has got enough power to organise thousands of people’s lives, whether he makes a mistake or not, really horrifies me.”
The craving for freedom is further exemplified by the narrator in “The House of Hunger” who says, “The freedom we craved for . . . was so alive in our breath and in our fingers that one became intoxicated by it even before one had actually found it.”
The seemingly arduous task of collectively dealing with their debilitating predicament creates some kind of prison in the inhabitants of the house of hunger as exemplified by Vengere Township in general and the narrator’s family house.
Out of frustration, the narrator’s father who is dehumanised at work vents his anger on his wife the he physically abuses to ‘stein’ and the wife in turn beats the child narrator who often-times finds escape in books but has his cat ruthlessly killed and thrown at him by neighbours. It’s a vicious circle.
Although the inhabitants of the house of hunger are conscious of the white colonial system being responsible for their despondency they seem powerless to collectively confront it.
More like Vincent Naipaul’s “Miguel Street”, the inhabitants of “House of Hunger” are struggling to adjust to a system that deprives them of their humanity. The hunger motif visible in “House of Hunger” is clearly targeted at colonialism and all its vagaries of repression. The inhabitants are in constant search of an exit point of their ‘gut-rot’ poverty.
It must be noted that the narrator of “House of Hunger” deliberately creates such a ‘gut-rot violent ridden, poverty stricken, bloody’ setting so as to heighten the awareness of the Mother Country to the devastating effects of colonialism on indigenous Zimbabweans.
The author alludes to this need to bring awareness to the Empire when he went into a fit of rage after winning the Guardian Fiction Prize in England, poking at the hypocrisy of his white audience for their pretentiousness in understanding the problem of Rhodesia.
Ironically, it is the depiction of poverty, chaos, immorality, rape and senseless violence that fits the imagination of the same white audience that were celebrating Marechera’s achievement in depicting the Rhodesian environment in so far as it relates to black people.
The hunger in “House of Hunger” can be described as revolutionary while some critics may describe the hunger depicted in “An Elegy for Easterly” as reactionary.
Marechera’s revolutionary hunger is reflected through his questioning of the liberatory nationalistic discourse and the whole essence of the envisaged nation something that Grant Hamilton (2013) calls “revolutionary ethics (that) damns exclusionary epistemological and ontological models. Indeed, he refuses to play the game demanded by Manichean models so often employed by sitting governments and, perhaps more worryingly, cultures.”
The underlying message in The House of Hunger is that it’s not enough just to change individuals. What is needed is to uproot a whole system. The narrator’s deep-rooted pessimism finds expression in the notion of the ‘gut-rot’ which makes everything turn into a ‘stinking horror’ of ‘white shit’. At the core of his disillusionment lies the notion of having lost not just the past but also the future:
There’s hungry people out there. There’s homeless people out there. There’s many going about in the rags of their birthday suits. And they’re all mad. They’s all got designs….There’s clouds of flies everywhere you go. There’s armies of worms slithering in our history. And there’s squadrons of mosquitoes homing down the cradle of our future. What do we do? Clutch and drown each other, that’s what, and if we can’t do ourselves in properly there’s congregations of missionaries and shrinks to do it, and they have on their side cops and soldiers and Australia and New Zealand and China and the USA and France and the bloody Germans. The poor are not the only ones who’ve got designs! (59-60)
The narrator in House of Hunger is also yearning rather desperately for a credible nationalist leadership as he writes: “Where are the blood heroes?” (29). The absence of the credible leadership is illuminated by Immaculate, a prostitute who dares to dream or hunger for a better future. As put by the narrator, ‘She made me want to dream, made me believe in visions, in hope. But the rock and grit of the earth denied this.’
It seems however, that the obsession with the barrenness of the African environment, poverty, senseless violence and the general hunger graphically depicted in The House of Hunger hankered on in the post-colonial era even in the attainment of the freedom forecasted by Marechera. The recurrent hunger motif in An Elegy for Easterly takes multifarious complex dimensions where the source or instigator of the hunger is no longer colonialism but the new black elites.
The hunger depicted in Gappah’s short stories is a manifestation of the frustrations that have come out of the post-colonial set-up characterised by the betrayal of failure by the leadership in fulfilling liberation ideals. There is the national hunger for electricity, hope, democracy, a vision and also individual hungers like longing for identity, sense of self and peace
Central to the notion of hunger or absence is mourning or yearning as exemplified by the story- Sound of Last Post, where the widow left behind by his prominent politician husband is repulsed the outlandish exaggerations of state pageantry. Everything seems artificially rehearsed serving no purpose except formalisation of the event. The narrator also hungers for a past gone by, a past that has since been defiled by the new rulers. “There are almost no whites in the country now,” (page 4) the narrator says as an indication that their presence would have made the situation better.
Another story that also shows some kind of hunger is In the Heart of the Gold Triangle, which is about the fate of so-called ‘small-house’ who is pampered by her old husband or partner who is never present. The economic situation leads desperate women to search for a good life and riches that in turn corrupt the society. Inward unhappiness is as a result of the lack of presence and the perennial fear of having contracted Aids because the husband is always on the hunt for more small houses.
Maid from Lalapanzi typifies the futility of quenching the hunger or aspiring for a better life. Sisi Blandina is a model maid, who has a brutal past but wants to make amends by working hard and be able to support her family. But her dreams are dashed as she is duped by Mukoma George Simbarashe who ditches her after falling permanently. She tragically commits suicide as she could not face the prospects of facing her parents in Lalapanzi.
In Aunt Juliana’s Indian, it is clear who has caused the hunger as hopes of a better Zimbabwe are dashed when Prime Minister Mugabe wins the elections. His first reconciliation speech managed to calm the restless whites including Indians. While Mainini Juliana landed her dream job of a typist, her early death betrays the aspirations she had for a new Zimbabwe.
The hunger for a new environment or rather for exile is exemplified by My Cousin Sister Rambanai a story about the dilemmas of leaving the country. The trials and tribulations that people endured in getting travel documents enabling them to leave the country for greener pastures. The family dislocations caused by being abroad.
The general desolation and the struggles depicted in Gappah’s short stories are as much a reflection of the physical hunger as illustrated in The House of Hunger in as much as they are a yearning for a new dispensation different from the one allegedly “corrupted” by new African nationalist leadership.
While Gappah’s stories can be described as candid depiction of the period Zimbabwe’s economic meltdown, the cynicism that threads through the whole text fall into the same dictum of the stereotypical image held by erstwhile colonisers of the inept black leadership.
The post-colonial discourse about Africa in most Western and non-governmental organisations is dominated the questioning of the competence of the black man in governing him or herself and his or her penchant for corruption.
This is essentially depicted in An Elegy for Easterly where while the figure of President Mugabe does not feature prominently in all the stories it always lurking in the background through background supersize picture frames and at Heroes Acre.
The hunger typified in An Elegy for Easterly is both a physical hunger induced by the economic meltdown of 2000 largely as a result of the land reform programme. It is also a new hunger for a new political dispensation different from the present which is identified as the sole architect of the social, political and economic malaise.
A good example is Easterly Farm, which is a microcosm of the general decay that has taken hold the whole country due to a system that gratuitously portrayed as heartless and incompetent. All the inhabitants of Easterly Farm yearn for a new life but seem to be caught in a web of unending poverty which has created a lot of vices. Everything within the Easterly community is restless and people literally live from hand to mouth.
The sheer incompetence of the new leadership is further exemplified by another story titled Our Man in Geneva Wins a Million Euros who exposes himself as not being technologically savvy and his thirst for quick riches leads him to be duped by conmen men and losses a lot of money in the process.
While Marechera in House of Hunger contextualise his hunger within the historical framework of colonial deprivation, the same is not present in An Elegy for Easterly. This lack of concrete historical awareness and reference gives credence to the books reactionary aspect in that it simply highlights the symptomatic decay of the society but lacks human agency.
There is a clear disconnection of the historical circumstances that have contributed to the predicament of the people depicted in her short stories. There is no attempt at referencing the ballooning population of the previously marginalised black population in desperate need of social services. There is no cursory reference to drought, the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP)- itself a Western induced economic model as contributing factors of the meltdown.
Most characters in Gappah’s short stories are hungering for a new way of life, for democracy, for a change in their economic circumstances and sadly in most of the stories their efforts to change their situation are futile.
The hunger motif gives way to the exile motif where Zimbabweans are portrayed leaving the country in droves to seek greener pastures abroad. In general, the hunger in the pre-colonial was straightforward. It was against colonialism which was seen as the source of all problems.
The post-colonial hunger manifests in different manifestations. The hunger for a new political dimension, the hunger for a new meaning of independence, the hunger for an experience outside the confines of the borders of Zimbabwe. It is also a hunger for universal identification and acceptance as cultural or traditional norms in An Elegy for Easterly are caricaturised.
The criticism often levelled against contemporary Zimbabwean literature is tied to this obsession with the hunger motif, which is often contextualised within the framework of good African literature. The hunger motif becomes some kind of label or tag within which good Zimbabwean literature is judged.
Most of the short-stories in an Elegy for Easterly are lacerated with cynicism. It is made up of stock figures, stereotypes and predictable themes that validates Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina’s observations in his satirical essay; How to Write Africa, in which he laments that most contemporary stories are always expected to have;
“Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering.”
The problem with the hunger motif in An Elegy for Easterly is that it compartmentalise African literature as “commodities” without a value. The primary market for such “stock” characters is obviously not Africa but Europe and North America that have a fixed idea of what constitute authentic African literature.
While no one denies the existence of hunger in post-colonial Africa, it is the manner in which it is depicted usually by writers in exile that has become problematic. A good example is An Elegy for Easterly, whose author is domiciled in some white capital and is therefore looking at his fellow countrymen from a pedestal of someone who has meaningfully escaped the hunger.
The cynicism that runs through the book is shown by buffoonery characters wallowing in ignorance and poverty unable to collectively overcome their dire circumstances. The narrative follows the thread of Vincent Naipaul’s Miguel Street, who believes that nothing productive can meaningfully come of the Caribbean.
Unlike George Lamming’s In The Castle of Skin, who believes that the Caribbean share a common history of slavery and colonialism and it is from that history that they can salvage a positive future, Naipaul believes that the Caribbean is domed.
In conclusion, perhaps critics need to take stock of Tanaka Chidora’s sentiments in The Zimbabwean House of Hunger (2013) in which he calls for a review of the idea of taking our independence as empty and the end of it all.
“To see it as the beginning is the beginning of a positive process towards consolidating it. To see the struggle as continuing beyond independence verifies the conclusion………that in spite of all these contradictions, we did not harvest thorns at independence. Independence is a great achievement and it is not something we can discard as useless. Despite all the contradictions we have seen, there is a chance that if African people, and not just leaders, use this independence to start to grapple with the heritage of objective material conditions and social relations, they have reconnected to the upward thrust of history.”(pge 162).
Chidora further posits that the withdrawal of direct and military control of the coloniser was critical before any new way could be found and so the forging of new systems is not instant but something that is a process. Post-colonial literature has to tread cautiously so as not to be seen pandering to the whims of those who were the architects of Marechera’s House of Hunger but now claim to be champions of human rights, democracy and rule of law.
Perhaps what is lacking in Gappah’s exceptionally aesthetic narrative is what Ngugi wa Thiongo (1981) calls “a liberating perspective within which to see ourselves clearly in relationship to ourselves and to other selves in the universe.”
How an author views an issue is fundamentally depended on where one stands in relation to the thing. There is no denying the fact that Gappah’s use of the hunger motif is couched within a critical realist perspective which in essence is Eurocentric something that Basil Davidson (1978) says is typical of people ‘married to colonial attitudes, structures, and values” who suffer the self-contradiction of mocking the visions of the past.
An Elegy for Easterly may have been independently inspired but ‘white’ approval seems to have been the overarching factor in its success. It is for that reason that the recurrence of the hunger motif in the post-independence era is motivated by the fact that Western publisher have set aside a slot for African stories hinging on ethnic cleansing, child soldiers, human trafficking, dictatorships and rights abuses.
Online Reporter