kwaChirere reads Huchu's second novel

The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician by Tendai Huchu

from http://memorychirere.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/kwachirere-reads-huchus-second-novel_10.html

Published by ámaBooks, 2014,
isbn:9780797495005

I don't know why I initially found it difficult to find time to do a nonstop read through Tendai Huchu's second novel, The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician. Months! Going. Stopping. Going. Stopping- then I was happy to be finally going on forever for the rest of last week!

I was even able to read through Tinashe Muchuri's new Shona novel, Chibarabada- in between The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician. Maihwe-e! I was carefully feeding into their different feel for life, place and people. 

I was even emotionally flattered to learn that there is a character in The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician itself, who reads two or more novels at the same time, before he starts to lose his bearings and decides to burn books! Kikikiki! That is the maestro for you. The reason: after reading many books nonstop, he finds that “each of these books was just a jumble of words with which he had no connection…” And after burning them, "he curled up on the carpet and cried himself to sleep.”  

There is a way in which The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician asks you to go slowly, crosschecking details, underlying whole passages for closer reading in another time and place... It allows you to use the page marker and do other things, read other things even, until you are able to 'return to the source' and take another dose to last you another whirl wind tour. The references to Geography, Music, History, Architecture etc are laden with nuggets that demand further contemplation and investigation.  

What I am telling you is that this novel is compact. I had a similar experience with Bryony Rheam’s This September Sun and Allende’s The House of The Spirits. The book tells you: You can’t deal with me in one gulp because I was written slowly, over time and… you can never really go away forever from me…

Now that I have finished reading it, I feel that I have been paid. I chat with friends at home and abroad about this novel and they marvel at the comments I make. I admire the parallel process arrangement of this novel. Three separate stories running together like three fine novellas from one shelf, only ‘confluencing’ together at the very end. Running dutifully together like three weaving cords. Maybe in that regard, this is the first novel of its type by a writer from my country, Zimbabwe.

Now that Alfonso is not exactly what I thought he was in the beginning, I have learnt a lot about the power of holding out a key detail. I must now go through this whole story again, mentally, laughing at myself for having been led down the garden path. Alfonso is not exactly that drunken fool who enters the novel through the Magistrate’s door one morning. Through him, you learn that this novel does not underestimate what the establishment in Zimbabwe can achieve, miles and miles away. That is why I am still laughing every time that I read the very last page of the novel. Alfonso! O, Alfonso!

At the heart of this story are three Zimbabwean men, residing in Edinburgh, Scotland, far away from Harare and Bindura. They are named The Maestro, The Magistrate and The Mathematician. The way these men think and go is typically Zimbabwean. Although they are far away from it, turbulent Zimbabwe of the around the year 2000 is their recognizable fulcrum.

The Maestro is my man. Through him, Tendai Huchu makes the most poignant contribution to Literature and Philosophy: “I went on a journey of discovery, trying to find the meaning of life, he said. I discovered that it is many things to many people at many times, and that , for me, and for me only, because you can only discover the meaning of your own life and no one else’s, that the meaning of life lies in giving a bit of yourself to someone else…. And he lay there and told her everything: wide open spaces, blue skies, laughter and the sound of sweet rain falling on zinc metal sheets, the brown puddles the rain makes, splashing in the puddles under the moonlight, cups of tea in the sunshine, cricket pavilions, of time that is measured not by the tick-tock of a clock but by its nearness to eternity, how the crickets sing their song in the night and birdsong picks up the refrain at dawn, all these things and more…”

Here is a man who goes far away from home in order to be himself and to read book after book after book, until he discovers that if a book contains an idea, then it contains something of the writer’s soul… 

I enjoy disliking the Magistrate. It is because despite his huge social loss that comes through leaving Zimbabwe and the pri
vileges he used to enjoy, he still has the holier than thou air around him, like most government officers everywhere whom I have learnt to loathe. His wandering around Edinburgh, taking in the environment and dreaming of little and far away Bindura, tells you that here is a bully looking for a new pedestal to sit on in order to start to bully the rest. No wonder I like it when that fatherly pride of him is constantly punctured for him by his no longer submissive wife and unsympathetic daughter. But I catch myself wallowing in and enjoying his deep appreciation of Zimbabwean music. He turns all the remembered songs into a map of his good and bad memories of Zimbabwe.

I don’t know what to do with the Mathematician and what finally happens to him. I honestly think that he wanted opportunity to find meaning out of life, love, sex and friendship.

Tendai Huchu’s second novel is a serious work of art, meant to accompany you through three different mental journeys of travelers from one country to one city that adopts them and has various levels of allure for each of the travelers.
-Memory Chirere, January 2016, Harare.

Memory Chirere reviews Textures

Reviewing ‘TEXTURES’, a collection of poems by John Eppel and Togara Muzanenhamo, published in 2014 by ‘amaBooks. ISBN 978-0-7974-9498-5

Today, Thursday, 21 May 2015, we attend the Harare launch of Textures, a collection of poems by John Eppel and Togara Muzanenhamo. This will happen at the Book Café. The Bulawayo launch was sometime in March and I understand that the book was well received. In one online picture, the two poets are standing very close together. Togara’s face has a satisfied smile as he looks straight into the camera. Eppel appears to be contemplating, almost saying under his breath, “We are finally there, young Togara. I told you.” That grey beard and specks give Eppel a grandfatherly look.

John Eppel is a big name in Zimbabwean writing. He is a serious satirist most of the times and you need to climb up to his high sense of humour to fully appreciate him. You cannot go through Eppel without a re-read. He is master of irony. I tend to pick him in the second or third reading and at every step,  I pick out something new. I do not allow him to frustrate me. There is always more onion under the onion. We haven’t met (having only read his works that are everywhere in Zimbabwe) and I do not yet know the texture of his voice or the feel of his hand.

If we meet today I want to ask him, “What are all those birds doing in your latest poems?”  In our country there are many birds that sing, good and bad. Some stand for death and some- good fortune. That brings me to Eppel’s poem, ‘Cape Turtle Dove’ which I enjoy immensely because I have also been very close to doves all my life. Of all the habits of the dove, the persona here is most touched by dove song which is haunting ‘like well-loved landscapes lately lit’. And the poem ends. The poem brings me back to the veldt with a deep sense of nostalgia. I am lost in my childhood when a dove was as commonplace as maize seed and the bushes themselves. The dove is the typical character in typical circumstances.

There is also ‘Grey Heron’ in which the bird is first described elaborately like you find characters being described at the point of entry in a detective novel. This particular heron is like ‘some poets’, lonely, calm but sometimes- suddenly swift and aggressive. Are these birds not like the people that we know? This time Eppel puts aside the political subject and goes bird watching! In order to come back rejuvenated? But are these birds not Eppel’s usual political animals now resurrected as birds? But Eppel is not aggressive now when working with birds. He is at his most soulful pitch. He is awestruck by the presence of various birds. He wishes he were a bird, too, far away from the madding crowd. Is age catching up with Eppel? Will I get used to the new Eppel? He is uncharacteristically calm and even prayerful… I am thinking.

Then I come to ‘Golden Orb Spider.’ This is my favourite poem in this whole book because we start with the spider and end up elsewhere! The spider at work becomes the genius; a Mozart, a Marechera, a Thomas Hardy etc. But the spider traps, mangles and kills its victims too, with the help of its web!

Today, if I have the chance, I will ask Eppel, “Sir, I think you come across as lonely!”  In ‘A Surburban Night in August’  there is something of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock! I mean, the image of the wandering and sleep walking male loner, soaking it all in. Walking slowly in the dark, concerned with the losses of a distant past. I think ‘Looking for You’ is a quest for love lost. I also think the same about ‘Solvitur Ambulando’ where the loner is walking in the moonlight, choosing to solve the problem not by talking but by walking. Being a habitual walker myself, I know how walking heals a troubled mind and how one feels like forgiving the whole world after a long walk.

The sonnet sequence based on the area around the Bulawayo Dams is a must read. But once more, there are no people here, except for the aloes, the rocks and the insects. The persona takes in the world all by himself like John the Baptist- the hermit. It is when you are alone that you are able to place yourself within time. Here is John Eppel’s questing spirit.

I must also confess that I like some of Eppel's word combinations in Textures. Here are some: ‘The world is waiting, trembling like a mouse.’ Then there is: ‘There is something human about aloes.’ I also like: ‘Last night the blue moon brought you back to me.’ Sad. John Eppel is sad. But under that sadness there is the satisfaction that always come out of pining and suffering. Flogging the self in order to arrive at a certain purity and release.

Togara Muzanenhamo’s poems are dense. That is an honest warning! The constant allusions to characters in far away lands and in broad human history, is bound to challenge the uninitiated. He comes across as a very well read and travelled poet. He is always in control.

This poet is serious and unrelenting. And you feel that these poems were written and rewritten because they have deep links with humanity in various climes. You search for your own spot until you find it in his universe of feelings and thoughts. The other fortunate part is that  Muzanenhamo’s style is like the slow bold stroke of a brush. He cascades. He is long drawn. He goes for sounds that words make. He goes for the colour that certain word combinations make. Reading Muzanenhamo is like listening to a cat purring! Or, listening to a distant bulldozer ‘eating’ the terrain, constructing a dam or a leveling an ant heap.

In ‘Gondershe’ the story of the boy with a gun by the sea comes to one very gradually. The boy by the sea has to be seen and felt and he is here to feel and see the sea one last time. Will he shoot himself, you keep wondering. Will he go back home? Or, is the boy not your shadow? The sea is a powerful force in Muzanenhamo’s poems. The sea has a calming effect. The sea makes a useful backdrop to the poem ‘Desire’ where the persona ‘felt good being back on the water.’ It takes the sea for the man to see his woman for what she really is- an invitation to carnal and spiritual satiety. The turmoil is hidden underneath the style.

This takes me to the prose poem ‘Peruvian Sunsets’ where a woman is at one special moment of making love to both a shell shocked man and the old city, right there in a public park at sunset. We glimpse them just a few moments before they are consumed in their gradual but hungry passions. The power of flesh is deeply felt here.

I also enjoyed (but was also dazzled) by what happens to one Uzziah Chikambi in the other prose poem. A man with a ready gun walks towards both a ghost and his very own past. The edges of reality are so blunt that you realize that we often dream regardless of our wakefulness. I also felt the same with ‘Engine Philosophers’ because sometimes we are consumed in work and think about work and its history and the endless yet to be touched futures of those who work tools and engines with their hands and souls.

My favourite poem by Muzanenhamo is ‘Zvita’ because it terrifies me beyond explanation. I also am in the habit of constantly thinking about what happens to the body when it dies or after it is buried or when it is abandoned out there, unburied. Forbidden territory! How does it help you to think about a body’s condition after burial? That is why human bodies have to be buried...But you find yourself going in that direction. Maybe because the body is the only real terrain we have between ourselves and the world itself. ‘Zvita’is not a poem for the faint hearted. The body is a very fragile and temporary thing.

Textures is a collection with poems that speak about what we see and feel as we glimpse a world that is passing by. You come away with the feeling that the experience of the senses cannot be substituted with any other thing. This is a book about precious feelings.

++Memory Chirere, Harare
http://memorychirere.blogspot.com/2015/05/kwachirere-reads-textures-from-amabooks.html

Memory Chirere reviews The Gonjon Pin

Published by amaBooks of Zimbabwe and several other publishers, The Gonjon Pin and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by African writers shortlisted for the Caine Prize 2014 and from the Caine Prize annual writing workshop held in Zimbabwe during the same year.

On receiving this anthology just before the Harare launch, I quickly notice that it is a massively solid book. I am intimidated. I am used to reading the usually thin volumes normally associated with short books in Africa. But since these are stories from one of the most prestigious awards in African literature today, I hope that quality will pay for the volume. I do not remember the last time I felt like this about a book.

I do not want to start with the shortlisted stories. I want to make my priorities right. I have been invited to anchor the discussion at the Harare launch. Some of the writers based in Zimbabwe will even give a reading.  I quickly go for the Zimbabwean stories.

Having been raised on the short stories of Luis Honwana, Charles Mungoshi and other writers from the Southern African sub region, I find Lawrence Hoba’s ‘Pam Pam’ a very comfortable landing pad. Due to my background, this is the story that speaks most directly to me. The sensitive child is snooping into the seemingly unusual world of the grownups who are also trying to come to terms with the most ‘weird’ in their midst. Muffled voice. Understatement. Power play. A surprise ending. Hoba’s deft engineering of placing one soft word on top of the other… and the other, almost like bricks, tells me that this was not easy to write.

‘The Sonneteer’ must be the ‘craziest’ story in this book! I am hoping that somebody will agree with me. I love the deluge of sonnets towards the end because it is a clever way of flourishing out after such a deep rendition on the tumultuous Zimbabwean condition. The story ends in successive loud spurts like a gas canister unleashed onto a hapless crowd. I like stories like this one, driven by silences – especially by what characters do not say to one another. We are no longer reading but are also writing the story alongside Philani Nyoni. The language is vigorously god forsaken and its rigors remind me of the late Marechera.

Later, at the launch itself, I was impressed by Isabella Matambanadzo’s views. Her ‘All The Parts of Mi’, just like Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s and Chinelo Okparanta’s are stories about betrayal, intimacy and courage.  During the discussion, I asked Matambanadzo about what she thinks about the use of the erotica in stories. Her candid answer sent the audience roaring in approval. It took us a while to return to silence.

‘The Intervention’ by Tendai Huchu is part of the short list. It confirms my thoughts about his previous stories, especially the one which I have been struggling to translate from one language to the other. Here is a writer who has an eye for dramatic irony and the incongruence of human character. His stories challenge the reader to work from many points of view.

In ‘The Murder of Ernestine Masilo’ by Violet Masilo, the protagonist dies slowly from the first time you meet her. Her death is not shocking but why she dies is riveting. You are left with a feeling that a flower has withered before anyone could pluck it and place it in a vase. If only there was enough love…Typical character in typical circumstances.

‘Music From A Farther Room’ by novelist Bryony Rheam is a story filled with utmost colours and sounds  and wide spaces. It is a piece of painting or tapestry. If it were a piece of cloth, this story would flutter in the wind like a kite, landing on its nose until somebody picks it and throws it back into the sky just in order to see it and shout like a toddler! I read it over and over for the sheer serenity that it gave me.

Had it come in good time, Barbara Mhangami-Ruwende’s ‘Blood Work’ could have been shortlisted! It is filled with a delicate tension right from the statement ‘I don’t like black people’ up to the end and you are always on the edge.  I hope I am not being prescriptive but this looks like my favourite story in this book. At least for now.

I then hurry to the winning story itself, ‘My Father’s Head’. I had read elsewhere that it is story filled with sad memories. I do not disagree but I discover that it is full of sweet sadness with more of sweet. Sad but not depressing.  The kind of balance associated with kopjes. On the second and even third reading, I begin to feel that this is about a daughter’s celebration of a father’s not so happy life. The language is syrupy, describing expanses of time and dwelling on tiny-tiny details of life like the paw of a dog and the flutter of a butterfly. I agree with the judges. It was right that this story won. Maybe it is not a story after all. It is life.

Among the short listed stories, I also have lots of respect for Billy Kahora’s ‘The Gorilla’s Apprentice’. Loneliness of people, and of animals too? A unique and unfulfilled camaraderie between victims from different communities? This story could just have won.

However, in just a few of these stories here, adjectives tend to pile on top of one another; adverbs trip over each other. Colons clog the flow of even short paragraphs, and the plethora of semicolons often cause the reader to throw up his hands in exasperation. If you are able to forgive the very few overwritten pieces, the Gonjon Book is something to take with you on a journey.

from: http://memorychirere.blogspot.com/2014/09/kwachirere-reads-gonjon-pin-and-other.html

"Giant Leap for Zimbabwean Literature in Ndebele" - KwaChirere

Thabisani Ndlovu of Witwatersrand University has translated 'Where to Now? Short Stories from Zimbabwe,' from English to Ndebele. It becomes: 'Siqondephi Manje? Indatshana zaseZimbabwe.' 

The translation, like the original collection of 2011 by ’amaBooks of Bulawayo, features stories by sixteen writers: Raisedon Baya, NoViolet Bulawayo, Diana Charsley, Mapfumo Clement Chihota, Murenga Joseph Chikowero, John Eppel, Fungai Rufaro Machirori, Barbara Mhangami-Ruwende, Christopher Mlalazi, Mzana Mthimkhulu, Blessing Musariri, Nyevero Muza, Thabisani Ndlovu, Bryony Rheam, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, Sandisile Tshuma. The original was compiled and edited by Jane Morris.

 

Preface to Siqondephi Manje?

One of the key aims in undertaking this translation is to contribute towards the development of the isiNdebele language by encouraging writers to write in this language. As such, it was a most opportune moment to translate some of the most well-written Zimbabwean stories in English to isiNdebele.  In English, the stories are riveting.  They take one through a journey of mixed emotions – laughter, sadness and concern.  They all demonstrate immense creativity.  Some flout rules of punctuation whereas others use various forms of narration except the linear. I tried to capture all this creativity in the isiNdebele translation. Those who read the translation will be happy to know that not much was lost.  That is because, like a doctor with a stethoscope, I took a long time listening to the heartbeat of each story. As such, you will find that the language used for each story is appropriate for the setting, content and style. It is also current language. 

Of course, some will criticise this translation, as inevitably happens with a project like this. I can almost hear some saying, “That is an English word and not an isiNdebele one,” or, “In isiNdebele, that order of letters is impermissible.”  Some are likely to say, “There are some impolite words where euphemisms should have been used.”  Here are a few examples.   All speakers of isiNdebele know ‘ifriji’ (fridge).  No one refers to it as ‘ikhabothi yomqando’ (cold cupboard) or any such ridiculous term.  Is there anyone who calls it ‘ifiriji’?  That becomes a Shona pronunciation once we insert an ‘i’ after the ‘f’.  Similarly, we say ‘iphaspoti’ and  ‘iplastiki’.  You will also find words such as   ‘hlanza’ (vomit), ‘izibunu’ (buttocks) and others like them. These words are not used gratuitously.  Using euphemisms in their place would have distorted the tone and meaning of some stories resulting in a stilted and terrible translation. That would have resulted in substandard work, ruining the beautiful stories. Then what would I claim to be the value of the work I would have done?  In any case, words that some of us say should not be part of written isiNdebele, are words we use every day, irrespective of audience.  Let us take ‘izibunu’ (buttocks). It is common to hear people say of children with inadequate clothing, “abantwana bahamba ngezibunu egcekeni” (children wear worn-out clothes that show their buttocks). Likewise, “olezibunu ezinkulu ngolezibunu ezinkulu; ongalazo kalazo” (whoever has big buttocks is said to have such and the same for small or smaller buttocks) – that is how Ndebele people speak without any profanity implied in most contexts.  Why then should we change this when we write? I am thinking specifically about events and contexts in the stories contained here.  For example, an angry character should appear as such through the language he or she uses.  Needless to say the language should suit that character.  As a translator, one of my key duties is to make sure that the translation is as close to the original text as possible, having of course, taken into account the cultural context of the Ndebele people

Times change and so do people and their languages. That is how English grew – borrowing words and quickly incorporating them into the English lexicon. Some people say isiNdebele is dying.  What I agree with them is that we have a dearth of books in the language, publications of such being too few and far between. But the language itself is very much alive and vibrant.  Current isiNdebele is not the same as isiNdebele of twenty years ago.   There are words we should accept as isiNdebele words. Examples include ‘skulufizi’ (school fees), ‘eralini’  (at a rally), ‘iklasi’ (class/ classroom), ‘ukudiza’ (to pay a bribe),  ‘drayiva’ (driver/to drive), and  ‘khastoma’ (customer).  It is a good thing to want ‘proper’ isiNdebele words such as ‘umtshayeli’ (driver) or ‘tshayela’ (drive).  But how many people use these words in everyday speech? Thus, we can enter ‘umtshayeli’ in the context of driving a vehicle as old use or an archaic word, and next to it, indicate the recent and most widely used form, ‘drayiva’.  For a language not to die and for it to be appealing even in its written form, it has to be a language that people are familiar with, not stilted and archaic. I am not implying in any way that all old words should be thrown away.  All I am saying is that words must suit the specific contexts in which they are used. We should, by the same token, be aware of new unavoidable vocabularies. People speak of ‘istayila’ (style), ‘ukungena  ku-intanethi’ (surfing the net), ‘ukuhlaba ijini’ (wearing jeans). All of this is isiNdebele proper.

People of the Mthwakazi nation, I think I have said enough.  A language that grows is one that is in constant and creative use, whose lexicon evolves with time. In its written form, such a language should reveal the creativity of the people who speak it and in particular, the novel ways in which those people capture experiences.  Once this is achieved, it will inspire other writers to be even more creative. I hope this translation will not only inspire writing in and reading of isiNdebele, but also pride in speaking this colourful language with a rich heritage.

Thabisani Ndlovu

Johannesburg 2014