Can books satiate a hungry individual?

Tanaka Chidora Literature Today

surrounded by a sea of books . . . Tendai Huchu, author of several novels including “The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician” (2014).

One of the saddest parts of a novel that I read narrated a character’s dislocation from the physical and social world of human interaction and his attempt to stitch back together his existence by [re]locating himself in the world of books. This part comes from Tendai Huchu’s novel, “The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician” (2014). The character is the Maestro.

The Maestro’s hunger is captured thus: “The scary thing, the Maestro realised, was not the falling, but what happened after the fall. Nothing, not even the nothing of the darkness of night or the nothing of emptiness; those were something at least, those were nothings that could be measured by the absence of a particular thing, and so they had an essence on them, a core beyond the event horizon. Not this, this was an incomprehensible Nothing, the nothingness of non-existence, beyond consciousness, a Nothingness that was not something … This for the Maestro was the reason he read these books, to try to make sense of life … (p. 43). This lack of essence, in himself, in the world and in the people that surround him, makes him befriend books.

The Maestro’s intimate relationship with books is captured thus: “Almost without thinking, he ran his fingers along the cold spine of a book. Of late, he found himself preferring the company of his books to the companionship of people. Tatyana was virtually his only friend, if he could call her that.

“Everyone else has forgotten him or given up on him once he’d withdrawn, almost as though he’d quietly sunk into quicksand that no one else could see … There was something safe in the white pages of a book. A book could be opened and set aside. It could be read and reread, each time a new, deeper meaning deciphered. People, well, people were harder to read. So much was hidden in the twitch of the brow, a sweaty palm, the tenor of the voice, subtle gestures, and the things left unsaid. People were moving, dynamic, inconsistent in a million ways” (p. 44).

The irony is that the satiation that the Maestro is looking for finds momentary fulfilment, but soon, like the essence that he is looking for, it too eludes him so that one day, after discovering that these books were just a “jumble of words with which he had no connection”, he burned them and “curled up on the carpet and cried himself to sleep” (p. 173, 175). The Maestro fails to find a place for himself in books. They fail to stitch him back by giving him back the essence, the elixir that he is looking for.

Elsewhere, we have such characters who try to recover that essence by creating books or by reading the books that others have created. In “The House of Hunger” (Dambudzo Marechera, 1978) writing seems to be the only “stitches” available to put back together the fragments of a disintegrating individual and society.

Thus, the poems the narrator writes are symbolic stitches: “Afterwards they came to take out the stitches from the wound of it. And I was whole again. The stitches were published. The reviewers made obscene noises. It is now out of print. But those stitches, those poems …” (p. 53). A lot of his friends, however, fail to make anything out of the stitches, echoing Harry‘s words of hopelessness: “What else is there?” (p. 22).

Philip tries to write a lot of negritudinal poetry but instead ends up with a melancholic and suicidal mood: “There were 15 poems in all; his own. They expressed forms of discontent, disillusionment and outrage. Clarity, it seemed, had been sacrificed for ugly mood. Even the praises of ‘Blackness’ had a sour note in them.

“One felt live coals hissing in a sea of paranoia. Gloomy nights stitched by needles of existentialism. Black despair lit up by suicidal vision” (p. 74). It looks like the narrator is the only one who succeeds in stitching together some poems and short stories whose style is like a million flying fragments. The hunger remains still.

To assuage his hunger, the narrator dives headlong into the world of books. The physical world has failed to end his soul-hunger. There is no security at home. When the narrator’s mother smacks him for speaking to her in English, and the father completes the violent cacophony of fists with a tooth-shattering punishment, the narrator’s alienation becomes even more profound. There is no warmth in human relations or from fellow human beings.

In this respect, art becomes a way of stitching together a fragmented psyche. Marechera seems to have constructed art out of the chaos of life. “The House of Hunger” seems to be a product of the chaos of the colonial experience. But it is more than that. It is also a product of a hungry and angry artist. There is a Fanonian tinge in “The House of Hunger”.

Art is also some sort of escape from a maddening reality. Words clashing on the pages of the novella work like the storm that exorcised the narrator of the maddening assault of the ghosts who constituted the narrator’s nervous breakdown:

“When Harry and I returned to the dormitories we went to the showers and there the miracle happened — I almost cried with glee. They had gone! I could feel it. They had erased themselves into the invisible airs of the storm. The demon had been exorcised and gone into the Gadarene swine. For the first time in my life I felt completely alone. Totally on my own. It is as if a storm should rage in one’s mind …” (pp. 47-48). It is, however, unclear whether the exorcism is permanent, just like the Maestro’s transient [re]location in the world of books.

An analysis of the style of the novella verifies this purging function of Marechera’s art. The syntax is disconnected and sometimes incomplete as if to represent the disconnectedness of the black Rhodesians in the colonial time-space they find themselves in.

I find myself feeling empty too. I find myself taking down cobwebbed and dusty scripts and tearing them apart in anger. Sometimes I find myself obsessed with the books that I read; other times I find myself wanting to run away from them. I try not to be a stranger to this world. I really do try . . .

From: The Herald, 18 June 2018

 https://www.herald.co.zw/can-books-satiate-a-hungry-individual/

Three Men, Three Stories, One Novel

Tendai Huchu's The Maestro, The Magistrate & The Mathematician reviewed in The Herald

Tanaka Chidora Literature Today

https://www.herald.co.zw/three-men-three-stories-one-novel/

Tendai Huchu

“The Maestro, The Magistrate and the Mathematician” is a dense novel. It’s that kind of novel whose publication makes you assume that the author has written his last book and would go on an eternal sabbatical.

It’s written in a way that makes you think that the author wanted to tell many stories at once: the story of Zimbabwe, the story of Edinburgh, the story of the Magistrate, the story of the Mathematician, the story of the Maestro, the story of a man trying to come to terms with all the books he has read and the emptiness of existence.

It is a novel that mixes soccer and bohemian excesses with very deep philosophies like those of Deleuze, Lefebvre, Derrida, Walter Benjamin and many other prominent thinkers, writers, politicians, artists and so on, sometimes without necessarily directly referring to them.

During the course of reading it, I had to visit some of the philosophies that the Maestro, one of Tendai Huchu’s intriguing characters, reflected on. My suspicion is that Huchu did a lot of research before writing this novel.

The novel is a story of three men who, throughout the course of the narrative, predominantly live separate lives.

The author seems to have no intention of making them meet, but when they finally do, the author makes sure that the meeting is mentioned in a nonchalant way, as if the author had not foreseen it, as if the meeting is of no consequence.

The covers of the Nigerian, German, American and Zimbabwean versions of the book

I actually liked this part. I liked the idea of three lives not being forced to be intertwined for the sake of telling a story. This makes it truer to life and less affected. I don’t like affectation. I don’t like it when I am watching soccer. I don’t like it when I am listening to the news. I even look forward to its absence in prayers and sermons. Lol!

So, we have these three men living in Edinburgh: one is a former Magistrate who, even though he is aware of the irony of the continued use of the title after his downward class traffic to the abject spaces of caregiving, has no qualms with being addressed as the Magistrate.

He is in a continuous search for somewhere to firmly plant his feet (physically and symbolically), an exercise that keeps him wandering, physically and mentally, along obscure paths of migrant life.

He only finds a modicum of purpose when he gets involved in the politics of the home he left behind, but this too is just fallacious.

We also have the Maestro: an enigma even to himself. His profuse love for books and cryptic philosophies makes those pages dedicated to him a thesis into the various philosophies that attempt to explain human life.

These philosophies are so deep that in the mind of the Maestro they even become more cryptic so that one day, the Maestro himself burns all the books and curls himself to sleep.

Then we have my favourite, Farai, a young man who dabbles in academic life and the bohemian mental and physical pleasures that it offers, especially when that academic life involves being a PhD student with research grants pouring into his account and rich parents back home (anxious about their son who is studying abroad) sending lots of money to him.

He is a likeable character, Farai. His presence in this novel allows Huchu to experiment with social media typography in a narrative of serious literary merit.

Another major highlight (for me) in the narrative of the Magistrate is that of occupying physical and symbolic spaces of Edinburgh by invoking the music of the home he left behind (Chibadura, James Chimombe, etc) and pasting it on the Craigmillar Rises of Edinburgh.

This demonstrates a level of creativity that comes when the writer is a reader.

To conquer vast swathes of space by just connecting rhythm to landscape is one of this novel’s major selling points.

Here is how the Magistrate does it: “He got on the bus, switched on his Walkman and caught a song halfway through. He laughed at the irony of Chimombe singing, ‘Zvikaramba zvakadaro, ndinotsika mafuta, ndiende Bindura, handina zvinoera.’

“Now this song would fix his memory to the 14 going past the Craigmillar high rises, which stood at the edge of the estate, a stone’s throw from Peffermill” (p. 71).

His sense of landscape does not only require this exercise, but also demands walking: “Travelling on the bus, he did not feel quite the same intensity traversing the city as he did while walking. It altered his perception of space at a mental and physical level.

“On his morning walks, he felt tiredness in his muscles, the full topographical awareness of how he was oriented on a gradient, a connectedness not possible at the same level of consciousness on the bus” (p. 48).

Huchu pulled this off effortlessly to the effect that I still suspect that he might have studied such philosophical iterations like those of Lefebvre, De Certeau and Walter Benjamin before writing this story.

I love reading narratives by writers who read and the truth is that Huchu is completely on another level. He reads. He writes.

My friend’s favourite is Alfonso. Alfonso is everything. He is the man to go to when you need a job in the UK. He is the man to go to when someone dies and no one knows what to do with the body.

He is the kind of man who turns up at your doorstep with a bottle of brandy in his pocket at a time when you are craving for some brandy. And oh, he is also capable of getting slain in the spirit and rattling of in that cryptic language of divine fervour right there in front of his drinking buddies whose wives can testify that Deacon Alfonso is a man of God. Lol!

I had read (and enjoyed) “The Hairdresser of Harare” before reading this 2014 offering. But the narrative strength and depth of “The Maestro, The Magistrate  and the Mathematician” came as a surprise.

This one is a completely different narrative and the way it was handled demonstrates Huchu’s versatility.