Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Ignatius Mabasa in conversation with Philani Nyoni about the translation of Mapenzi and its publication in English as Madmen

 Reproduced from South Africa's Litnet  (https://www.litnet.co.za/from-mapenzi-to-madmen-a-conversation-with-ignatius-mabasa/)

From Mapenzi to Madmen

A conversation with Ignatius Mabasa



Ignatius Mabasa (Photo: supplied)

In 1999, a 28-year-old, Ignatius Mabasa, wrote a novel that would not only stake its claim in the Zimbabwean literary canon, but go on to receive international recognition in the form of the Times Literary Supplement calling it “one of the most significant books to have come out of Africa”. It was rumoured that Tanaka Chidora would translate it into English, but sadly that did not come to pass. It is not all gloom, however. In 2025, amaBooks Publishers will publish Tsitsi Mutiti’s translation of Mapenzi into English under the title Madmen, while the University of Georgia Press is set to release the translation in North America. Philani A Nyoni talks to Ignatius Mabasa about this new lease of life on his iconic multi-award-winning book, and what it means to him and the zeitgeist after a quarter century in circulation.

You recently translated Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions into Shona, and have been a strong advocate for the preservation of native tongues, especially your indigenous language, Shona. You must admit there’s a certain irony to your book being translated into English. What gives, milord?

Irony, because Mapenzi has been translated from its original language into English, and not vice versa – I actually see the translation into English as a gain against Western hegemony, because the mountain has come to Muhammad to acknowledge his existence. Instead of an African story being forced by the capitalist world system and globalisation into English, the translation is a sign of respect to Shona people in wanting to understand their worldview and the issues that trouble them. The Mapenzi story is important for my people’s pedagogy and emancipation, because it encapsulates the historical, cultural and social identity of a nation. It is a kind of extension of Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger and a version of Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. Getting Mapenzi translated into English is a coup, because our efforts and works in our own languages are a way of refusing to let the world dominate and silence us ideologically. The Mapenzi translation is giving a bird a branch to perch on, but the bird truly belongs and finds meaning, rest and peace in the nest of its mother tongue.

In 2021, the Times Literary Supplement named Mapenzi “one of the most significant books to have come out of Africa”. In your opinion, why has it taken so long to have it brought to a wider audience in the form of translation?

Personally, I think it has taken this long to have Mapenzi brought to a wider audience in the form of translation because it is not a light read. It reeks with the experiences of marginalised people dealing with issues of poverty, violence, disintegration, fear, coloniality and dejection. It paints huge murals of the brutal nature of African life in the postcolonial era. Such socially realistic issues are like Third Cinema – they don’t sell and are uncomfortable for Western readers, because they are indicators of the long-term impact of colonisation.

Are you worried something might be lost in the process of translation? Something particular and nuanced that may be part of the book’s immortal soul? I mean this in the context of your having said that the lines always come to you in your mother tongue, and that you have found difficulty in translating the words when they come.

Certainly I am. There is something deeply ingrained in the language of the people who are telling their story in Mapenzi. There are issues which don’t need translation, because they are at home in the nest of the language that is telling the story. However, there were cases where the beauty and richness of the Shona idiom, metaphor and way of expressing issues presented a real struggle. It was like trying to get a stubborn donkey to move – you can pull and pull, but it simply will not move, digging its hooves into the ground. Under such circumstances I felt for the translator, because the message that was coming across was, as somebody clever once said, that “each language has its own language”. Mapenzi is a story of ordinary folk in the ghetto who may understand English, but English doesn’t quite define, explain or get tickled by the witty and clever use as the original language.

How involved were you in the process of translation? Did Tsitsi Mutiti and Jane Morris engage you during the process, or did you leave the process to their professional discretion?

I got heavily involved only in the end when I had to work with the editor, who did a fantastic job in pointing out ambiguities and things she felt had the potential to confuse foreign audiences. I also had the task of reading the translated story three times, as we kept discovering things and had to make difficult decisions.

It has been about a quarter of a century since Mapenzi was published. With the time that has passed in your personal and professional life, what does this text mean to you today, now that you are a different man in a different epoch?

I tell you that this was the biggest challenge for me. Literature is shaped by the conditions of the time in which it is created, but it is also influenced by the level of development that the author is at. Mapenzi is my first novel, written when I was aged 28, and I feel that, if I had proper guidance, I would have paid more attention to developing my characters and story. Actually, if I were to be given the opportunity, I would love to rewrite the story, paying more attention to what I now consider amateur ways of handling the story. This is something Tendai Huchu observed and struggled with when he at one time helped me. However, major improvements would have had implications for the original story. I consulted widely, and the sentiment was that if I were to rewrite or embellish the story as the mature writer that I am now, I would be destroying the popular Mapenzi, which was well received and loved with the “flaws” that I was now noticing. Although the TLS called it one of the most significant books to have come out of Africa, Mapenzi also shows how much indigenous literature has potential but requires support. As a budding writer at the time, I benefited immensely from studying the Shona novel as a course for my BA general degree. It was through that course that I understood that for most indigenous books, a sincerely told story matters more than the style. There is a lot of work that still has to go into the aestheticisation of Shona writing. Anyway, I am glad that while Mapenzi may be from a different epoch, it still remains relevant in terms of the themes and issues it deals with.


Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Feedback about Bryony Rheam's All Come to Dust from bookseller Kristin Prout on Netgalley


 


Ultimately, I enjoyed this story very much. It became heavier than I had expected and dealt with some issues I am still processing. If you are looking for a mystery with what I would almost describe as a character study of Zimbabwe this is for you. It was intriguing and unusual and I can't wait to read more from Bryony Rheam!


Buzz Magazine: Explore the realities of life in Zimbabwe with WHATEVER HAPPENED TO RICK ASTLEY?

 Megan Thomas reviews Bryony Rheam's short story collection in Buzz Magazine (https://www.buzzmag.co.uk/whatever-happened-to-rick-astley-zimbabwean-stories-review/)



An intriguing title that matches the short stories that follow, Bryony Rheam’s Whatever Happened To Rick Astley? opens a window to allow readers a glimpse of life, in all its forms, in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. The collection opens strong with the story of a young man, a modern Sisyphus in some ways, who has the self-appointed task of filling the potholes on a road every day, despite how they return… until a high profile politician is due to move nearby. Then, of course, the road is fixed professionally. Luckily – or probably unluckily – there is always a potholed road in Bulawayo.

The stories that follow take us from the dusty streetside to lush gardens, filled with characters facing different but constant challenges and experiences. Each story forms a piece of a larger, mismatched-but-realistic puzzle of the fluctuations of life in a country that mirrors these ups and downs in different ways. 


As a well-rounded and gratifying short story collection should, Whatever Happened To Rick Astley? is both an anthology of tiny worlds, each compact and consumable on their own, but they also form part of a bigger collection of work which, on finishing, feel inseparable from one another.

Monday, August 19, 2024

An Authentic Zimbabwean Voice | Nhlanhla Dube reviews Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? by Bryony Rheam in Brittle Paper

 Bryony Rheam's short story collection Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? reviewed by Nhlanhla Dube in Brittle Paper (https://brittlepaper.com/2024/04/an-authentic-zimbabwean-voice-a-review-of-whatever-happened-to-rick-astley-by-bryony-rheam).


Bryony Rheam’s latest collection of short stories is a striking book. Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? shows just how prolific Rheam has become. This is her third book after This September Sun and All Come to Dust, and is a valiant attempt at understanding Zimbabwe.

In her fiction, Rheam is unrepentant about being Zimbabwean. The figure of the white Zimbabwean writer has caused significant discomfort in Zimbabwean literary circles. Zimbabwe’s strained race relations have meant that contributions to the canon by white writers have often faced extra scrutiny. Scrutiny in order to ascertain relevance, aesthetic fit, and maybe most worryingly, patriotic allegiance. Through her books, and more specifically this latest one, Rheam proves that she is an authentic Zimbabwean voice.

In Whatever Happened to Rick Astley?, Bryony Rheam demonstrates an acute awareness of the Zimbabwean landscape and its people. The first story in the collection, “Potholes”, is a beautiful ode to suburban Bulawayo. Gibson Sibanda, the protagonist in that story, fills the potholes that are found along most of suburbia’s roads. In performing this thankless duty, Gibson represents the humdrum nature of life in Zimbabwe. Daily toil without material comfort, Gibson’s duties are a Sisyphean act, but they are nonetheless performed with feverish zeal. Passing motorists don’t acknowledge his hard work – “Hardly anyone stopped to say thank you or toss him a couple of coins”. The story is deeply political. It comments on the political climate because the road Gibson fixes is eventually revealed to be one which leads to the Vice President’s house. City Council funds are eventually directed to fixing the road properly. Rheam generally shies away from overt political commentary in her work. However, this story shows that literary political commentary can be done in subtle ways. Ways which do not provoke the establishment, but which are still perceptive and nimble.

Rheam is often at her strongest when she writes about Zimbabwe’s diaspora. Migration has greatly shaped, to a considerable degree, the Zimbabwean narrative of the past two decades. In “Last Drink At The Bar”, Zimbabwe’s white diaspora is brought into focus. William Floyd moves from Bulawayo to Wales in order to escape what has become the tragic image of Zimbabwe’s elderly whites. White aged Zimbabweans often meet their demise at old people’s homes, abandoned by their children who are overseas and with no family to care for them. William Floyd makes a life for himself in the UK. Returning home often is a way to ameliorate the fact that despite material comforts, the United Kingdom is a bleak, cold and desolate country. “He tried pub after pub after pub after pub, but never did he find anywhere quite like The Bar in Bullies”. There is a spatiotemporal shift that occurs whilst William is abroad. The home he returns to is not the home he left. More so, the people he left behind have changed. William no longer fits in. This is not the first time Rheam has explored this theme. Her novel This September Sun charts this same problem. Once a person leaves home, that home is lost forever.

Rheam has a talent for observing small situations. Seemingly unimportant interactions between characters are focused on, to reveal that there is much more going on beneath the surface. Rheam thus appears to be a writer who follows the molds left by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. In this collection, the focus is not on fast action or big things, but rather minute detail. The titular short story “Whatever Happened to Rick Astley?” demonstrates this abundantly. In that story, a mother reflects on the passage of time and her grown-up child: “It seemed like just the other day that she had held him as a baby; just the other day that she had lain awake at night, rubbing her swollen belly, contemplating the years that lay before them both”. The central theme of the story is that time moves forward and it waits for no one. Rheam’s central point is that there is a line of connection between generations. Life repeats itself. The young become old, and youth is fleeting. In the story, Rick Astley’s music signifies the passage of time. A musician once at the center of popular culture has now faded into obscurity.

These stories from Rheam are decent for the most part. However, Rheam struggles with consistency in quality. Throughout the collection, there are some stories which are notably underwhelming. “The Colonel Comes By” is one such story. This is a story about family bonds and a tenuous father-and-daughter relationship. One is not sure whether it’s meant to be a children’s narrative, a ghost story, or an exploration of quack new age mysticism. Whatever it is meant to be, Rheam fails spectacularly in demonstrating her point to the reader.

Another deficient story is “The Piano Tuner”. It takes place in Ndola, Zambia. This is an unusual setting far from Rheam’s usual Bulawayo. Leonard Mwale is the piano tuner hired by an Asian couple to do some work. The story seems to hint at racial tension and bigotry but it never quite makes this exposition. Rheam over-deploys her subtlety. The result is that the story’s thematic exploration is unfulfilled. The reader is left with innuendos and hints that are never explained. I pity the undergraduates who will be forced to analyze this story in some English 101 introductory class at university.

Another exception, albeit a minor one, I take with this collection is the inclusion of “The Queue”. This story was earlier published in the “Short Writings From Bulawayo” anthology. Including it in this latest collection is unfair and the publisher should have done better. There is no value for money for the book buyer if they are paying just to read stories they have come across before. To be fair, Rheam is not the only writer to do this. However, seeing as this is her first collection, it would have been wise to use the opportunity to publish only new stories readers have not come across before.

Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? is a welcome book. Rheam’s writing career is progressing. With many publishers closing shop in the country, we should welcome any new books that aim to qualitatively add to the canon. Zimbabwean literature benefits from voices such as Rheam’s. However, Rheam is now becoming an established writer and the critical acclaim of her first trailblazing novel This September Sun has long worn off. This collection was a chance for her to show off her ambidexterity when she writes between the novel and the short story form. Although there are some glimpses of excellence, I’m not convinced that she has demonstrated her literary excellence through these short stories.


Nhlanhla Dube: Contributor

Nhlanhla Dube is a native of Harare,Zimbabwe. He holds a PhD in English Studies from Stellenbosch University. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. His research interests are Geocriticism, Spatiality, Literary Bulawayo and John Eppel. He has published peer reviewed papers on Law and Literature and Literary Pornography.



Thursday, February 22, 2024

Parthian Books a finalist in The British Book Awards


Congratulations to the Welsh publisher Parthian Books for being selected as a finalist in The British Book Awards in the Small Press of the Year category. We have worked with Parthian on five titles featuring Zimbabwean writers - the short story anthologies Where to Now? and Moving On and Other Zimbabwean Stories, and three titles by Bryony Rheam: the award-winning novels This September Sun and All Come to Dust, and the short story collection Whatever Happened to Rick Astley?.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

'Whatever Happened to Rick Ashley?' nominated for National Arts Merit Award


Bryony Rheam's short story collection Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? has been nominated for the Outstanding Fiction Book category of Zimbabwe's premier arts awards, the National Arts Merit Awards. The awards celebrate the achievements of artists across a wide array of categories, from music, literature and visual arts to film, theater, dance, and journalism. This year, for the 22nd edition, a record-breaking 1,280 entries were received. The winners will be announced at the awards ceremony, to be held in Zimbabwe's second city of Bulawayo on 24 February. 

Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? is co-published by Zimbabwean publisher amaBooks and Welsh publisher Parthian Books. The two publishers have cooperated in publishing four other titles: two short story anthologies, Where to Now? and Moving On and Other Zimbabwean Stories, and two novels by Bryony Rheam, This September Sun and All Come to Dust. This September Sun won Best First Book at the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Awards, and All Come to Dust won the best fiction categories in both the Bulawayo Arts Awards and the Zimbabwe National Arts Merit Awards.
Reviews of Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? have all been positive including that of Eluned Gramich in Wales Arts Review: 'Rheam writes beautifully and skilfully about people whose lives have been affected by waves of migration and immigration; of the generational ebb and flow of people coming to, and leaving, Zimbabwe.' 
Derek Workman of The Kalahari Review, writes: 'Bryony Rheam’s collection of short stories, Whatever Happened to Rick Astley?, is a stunning group of stories that shows the Zimbabwean writer’s range and formidable control of language and tone. The stories move through situations that are at once so real and palpable that you can feel a hot road beneath your feet and smell flowers in the garden. Yet they are sprinkled with the small serial thoughts and moments that make up our lives.' 
And in Zimbabwe's NewsHawks, Ignatius Mabasa adds: 'This is a very important voice in Zimbabwean literature. Through her sensitivity to race and class struggles she allows African readers to see white people struggling with the very same issues that also affect black people. The stories therefore become a window and an intercultural dialogue of some sort.'

Bryony Rheam is currently working on her third novel, The Dying of the Light, which is set in Bulawayo at the time of the rise of the Rhodesian Front.

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Wales Arts Review of Bryony Rheam's 'Whatever Happened to Rick Astley?'

Reproduced from https://www.walesartsreview.org/whatever-happened-to-rick-astley-by-bryony-rheam/


Eluned Gramich reviews a vibrant new collection of short stories from one of Zimbabwe’s leading writers in the form, Bryony Rheam.

‘The afternoon hangs suspended in the drowsy heat of late October. The house is quiet with the softness of sleepers.’ So begins ‘Music from a Farther Room’, one of sixteen stunning stories in Zimbabwean writer Bryony Rheam’s collection, Whatever happened to Rick Astley? The themes of the story are echoed throughout the book: isolation, loss, and a profound dislocation; of not knowing whether it’s the place or the people that truly create a sense of belonging. This particular story focuses on Julia, an elderly woman sharing a house with her son and English daughter-in-law, newly arrived in Zimbabwe from the UK. It moves deftly between the two women’s perspective, full of curiosity and understanding for both points of view. It’s not simply a generational divide that complicates their relationship, but cultural and social differences too, leading to a profound loneliness for both of them. Rheam’s smooth, resonating prose captures the increasing solitude thus: Julia’s ‘children are scattered throughout the world, not one on African soil. They’ve all asked her to live with them … but she always shook her head and gave a little laugh. Gradually, they stopped asking.’

Bryony Rheam

Rheam writes beautifully and skilfully about people whose lives have been affected by waves of migration and immigration; of the generational ebb and flow of people coming to, and leaving, Zimbabwe. One story in particular, ‘The Last Drink at the Bar’, sees a man visiting his homeland over the years from his job teaching in Wales, and each time he feels as though he is being pushed away, alienated, from the culture and community in which he was raised. His old drinking mates are suspicious of his desire to return; after all, shouldn’t he have everything he wants in the UK? Rheam explores the idea of belonging and un-belonging further by revealing the tensions in travel and tourism: ‘His was the oblivion of the tourist who sees only himself, the pivotal figure around which everything else revolves’, she writes of one character during his visit to Bristol, heavy with its history of the slave trade, its ‘Whiteladies Road’ and ‘Black Boy Hill’. In ‘The Fountain of Lethe’, a woman insists on bringing her family to a beloved holiday spot in Bulawayo, but the visit does not turn out to be what she had hoped: ‘What was it, that particular feel of hotel rooms? That mixture of holiday excitement and disappointment one wavered between.’ There are countless moments like these in the collection: sentences, wonderfully wrought, that illuminate everyday life.


This is Rheam’s third publication in Wales – following two successful novels This September Sun and All Come to Dust, both of which received major prizes. I enjoyed her novels, which are expansive and wide-ranging, but entering into the compact, complex, emotionally layered world of her stories, I was amazed by Rheam’s ability to move, and to create a deep sense of place, and character, in only a few pages. For me, one of the strongest stories is ‘Dignum et Justum est’, which follows two immigrant English teachers in Bulawayo as they travel towards very different fates: the story spans decades, yet it succeeds in giving a detailed portrait of the lives of these teachers, and the society to which they adapt – or fail to adapt. Rheam does this by employing a ‘light touch’; by never saying too much, or too little, which shows what a consummate writer she is. As for what happened to Rick Astley, you will have to read the collection, right to the last story, to find out.

Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? is available to buy in the UK here.


Whatever Happened to Rick Astley? is co-published by amaBooks and Parthian Books.