Tag: African literature

Africa, Author, Book review, Faber and Faber, Fiction, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Zimbabwe

‘This Mournable Body’ by Tsitsi Dangarembga

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Fiction – paperback; Faber & Faber; 384 pages; 2020.

Shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body is one of the most powerful pieces of fiction I’ve read in a long time.

It’s a challenging read, in all kinds of ways, not least because of the unfamiliar (to me) African setting and cultural references, the second-person point-of-view and the author’s tendency to skip over detail so that I often had to reread passages to interpret what was happening.

But its POWER comes from the way in which it made me see the world from a completely different perspective as I walked in the shoes of the main character, Tambudzai, a woman from Zimbabwe who has fallen on hard times. Tambudzai’s struggle to keep going, to get herself back on track, despite the direst of circumstances, is deeply affecting, so much so that when I finished this book it left me in a deep funk for days afterwards.

Precarious circumstances  

When the book opens Tambudzai is living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare. She’s quit her successful mid-level job in an advertising agency in protest against her white colleagues taking her ideas and presenting them as their own. It’s a decision that shows Tambudzai’s strength of character, but it has terrible repercussions, for now, without a regular income, her living arrangements have become precarious.

The novel traces Tambudzai’s various attempts to improve her situation. When she gets a job as a teacher she takes a room in a widow’s house, but even then the money is tight and she must scrimp and save — and even steal edible plants from the widow’s garden to survive. Later, when she is fired from her job — not unreasonably, it has to be said — Tambudzai must pull herself up again.

A chance encounter with her former boss from the advertising agency she fled leads to a job for a travel start-up company. It’s the perfect opportunity to start afresh, to make a good impression and to advance her career.

In the beginning, she does exactly that, but Tambudzai’s success is limited by her inability to be anything other than herself, for a younger colleague with more get up and go, more energy and more willingness to manipulate things for her own ends, effectively leapfrogs Tambudzai’s standing in the company. It’s heartbreaking to see such a resilient, fiercely independent woman being overshadowed in this way.

Final part of trilogy

This Mournable Body is the final part of a trilogy — following on from Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not — but it works as a standalone. That said, I’m sure Tambudzai’s story might resonate even more if you have read the previous instalments.

Even so, it is clear from this novel alone that Tambudzai is a complicated, complex character, someone whose family expected big things of her. She’s well educated, having fled her small village to become the first in her family to get a degree, but she struggles with her mental health and has no reliable support network — no friends, no family, no colleagues — to help her.

A series of poor decisions and an inability to get herself out of a cycle of “boom” and “bust” means she never achieves the success she feels she deserves. It’s almost as though she can’t quite tap into her full potential and can’t rise above the issues — personal and otherwise — that hold her back.

When she eventually goes back to her home village to run tours for the travel company, it’s not the recipe for success for which she might have dreamed. She’s effectively selling her own people’s poverty as a tourist gimmick and the role she plays in this is just that — a role, one which she finds increasingly more difficult to play.

This novel is a searing indictment of cultural imperialism, structural racism and gender inequality in 1990s Zimbabwe. I’ve not been so incensed by the thwarted potential of a fictional character since I read Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure more than 30 years ago. Expect to see This Mournable Body in my books of the year list come December.

1001 books, Africa, Author, Book review, Books in translation, Fiction, literary fiction, Penguin Modern Classics, Publisher, Setting, Sudan, Tayeb Salih

‘Season of Migration to the North’ by Tayeb Salih (translated by Denys Johnson-Davies)

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Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Modern Classic; 169 pages; 2003. Translated from the Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies.

How people bridge two diverse cultures, the impact of colonisation on Africa by the British, and the ways in which women are treated in both the East and West, are the main subjects of this Arabic language book, which was first published in 1966 as Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal.

Banned in the novelist’s native Sudan for many years, it was translated into English in 1969, named as  “the most important Arabic novel of the 20th century” by the Arab Literary Academy in 2001 and listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

I read it as part of #DiverseDecember and found myself completely drawn into the story of a Sudanese man,  Mustafa Sa’eed, an intellectual prodigy courted by aristocrats and intellectuals alike, who loses all sense of decorum when he moves to London (after being educated in Cairo)  in the 1920s.

After committing a string of appalling crimes and serving a sentence for murder, he returns to the Sudan to lead a quiet, understated life with a wife and two young sons in a remote village by the Nile, in the hope that he can start afresh where no one knows his past history.

But when a young man from the same village returns home after many years living in London and befriends him, Mustafa can’t help but tell him about his exploits in the West. What follows is a no-holds-barred confession about a life of sexual decadence, a tale which is, by turns, compelling, shocking — and powerful.

An arrogant man’s tale

The story is narrated by the young unnamed man who befriends Mustafa, but large chunks of it are told in Mustafa’s arrogant and conceited voice. Occasionally we meet other characters — many of whom are distinctive, if slightly two-dimensional — such as Wad Rayyes, the old man with a huge sexual appetite, and Bint Majzoub, an old uninhibited woman who smokes, drinks and swears “like a man”.

The prose style is crisp, clear, and concise, but there’s a poetic beauty to it, too. The author is particularly good at scene setting, so you feel as if you are there, living in the village on the banks of the Nile:

I wandered off into the narrow winding lanes of the village, my face touched by the cold night breezes that blow in heavy with dew from the north, heavy too with the scent of acacia blossom and animal dung, the scent of earth that has just been irrigated after the thirst of days, and the scent of half-ripe corn cobs and the aroma of lemon trees. The village was as usual silent at that hour of the night except for the puttering of the water pump on the bank, the occasional barking of a dog, and the crowing of a lone cock who presently sensed the arrival of dawn and the answering crow of another.

Compelling read

Season of Migration to the North is one of those rare books that is quick and easy to read but is so ripe with meaning and metaphor that I could never possibly unpick it without reading it several times over. Indeed, I raced through it in a matter of hours, so I am positive much of the subtle nuances about colonisation and the differences between Arab-African and European cultures went over my head.

That said, some elements did feel dated: an Arab man wreaking his vengeance on the West by simply sleeping with promiscuous women, for instance, appears relatively tame by today’s standards.

But what did jump out at me was the sexual violence that characterises women’s lives, whether living in the West in the 1920s, or the East in the 1960s, and which runs like a menacing undercurrent through the entire narrative. (Mind you, the line between sexual violence and eroticism does feel blurred in places, and the book, unsurprisingly, has been condemned in the past for being pornographic.)

In fact, the book has a menacing tone throughout, the kind of tone that gets under the skin and leaves the reader feeling slightly uncomfortable, as though you’ve been given a seat at a dining table with the devil. This all-pervasive feeling comes to a head at the climax of the novel, which is rather gruesome and bloody but entirely memorable. This is not a fun read, but an important and powerful one.

‘Seasons of Migration to the North’, by Tayeb Salih, first published in 1969, is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, where it is described as an “uncompromising read” because of its “presentation of colonial violence through local sexual violence”.

Africa, Author, Book review, Doris Lessing, Fiction, Fourth Estate, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘The Grass is Singing’ by Doris Lessing

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The-grass-is-singing

Fiction – Kindle edition; Fourth Estate; 208 pages; 2013.

The Grass is Singing, originally published in 1950, was Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing‘s debut novel. It brims with tension and shimmers with insight into race relations, colonialism, marriage and rural life in what was then Southern Rhodesia.

Murder mystery

This astonishingly confident book opens in unconventional, some might say brash, style, in the form of a newspaper story by a “special correspondent”:

Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning. The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime. No motive has been discovered. It is thought he was in search of valuables.

The first (shocking) chapter charts what happens immediately following the discovery of the body — a muddled confusion of white colonial types acting as judge, jury and executioner. But then the narrative takes an interesting twist and what starts off as a murder mystery becomes the story of how the woman came to live in the area several decades earlier.

The woman — Mary — was once bright, young and independent, living a relatively carefree life in the city. But then, with the clock ticking, she succumbed to social convention and got married, despite the fact she had never felt the need to have a partner and was frightened of sex (in today’s parlance we would probably describe her as “asexual”). Her husband, Dick Turner, is a struggling farmer, who whisks her away to the bush, where she is expected to live a life of rural isolation in a shabby “shack”, running the household and managing the black servant who cooks and cleans for the couple.

This is a shock to Mary’s system, a town girl used to leading a busy work and social life, who must now spend a lot of time alone, in the bush, where the heat is unbearable and her living conditions impoverished. She only sees her husband at breakfast and supper (he spends the intervening hours out in the field running the farm) and she struggles to cope with managing the houseboy, whom she abuses and treats with disdain:

She had never come into contact with natives before, as an employer on her own account. Her mother’s servants she had been forbidden to talk to; in the club she had been kind to the waiters; but the ‘native problem’ meant for her other women’s complaints of their servants at tea parties. She was afraid of them, of course. Every woman in South Africa is brought up to be. In her childhood she had been forbidden to walk out alone and when she had asked why, she had been told in the furtive, lowered, but matter-of-fact voice she associated with her mother, that they were nasty and might do horrible things to her.

Unfortunately, she can’t seem to control her temper and fires a succession of houseboys, one after the other. This frustrates Dick, who bemoans her lack of consideration and tact, and wonders if something is wrong:

What was the matter with her? With him she seemed at ease, quiet, almost maternal. With the natives she was a virago.

But this works both ways, for Mary wonders what is wrong with Dick, whom she soon realises is hopeless with money and hopeless at farming. When she sticks her nose in to help him at one stage, she reaps success, but later, for some inexplicable reason, she gives up and a deep-seated ennui sets in. This later turns into something akin to a kind of madness, which is heartbreaking — and frightening — to follow in the pages of this short novel.

Race relations

As you can probably tell, there’s a lot going on in this book (which is listed in Peter Boxall’s 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die — you can see reviews of all the other books I’ve read and reviewed from his helpful guide here). The relationship between Mary and Dick, especially as it begins to unravel over time, is intriguing and sharply observed, but it is the relationship they each have with the natives — Dick considerate, if exploitative; Mary, harsh and belittling — that makes the book such a thought-provoking read about relations between black and white.

And the mystery element of the story makes it a compelling read. Because you know from the outset that Mary meets a violent end, you’re waiting for the moment that might indicate a motivation for her murder: is it something she does or says to the houseboy? Or is it something else entirely? (I chose this book for our book group and we all had different theories — it is certainly not cut and dried.)

Finally, I can’t finish this review without mentioning Lessing’s prose style, which is simple and clean, but often dressed with quietly beautiful phrases. Indeed, I underlined so many passages in my copy, I’m only grateful it was an ebook; a paper edition might not have survived all the pen marks! This is a good example:

It was a wet, sultry morning. The sky was a tumult of discoloured clouds: it looked full of billowing dirty washing. Puddles on the pale soil held a sheen of sky.

 

Africa, Andrea Eames, Author, Book review, Fiction, Harvill Secker, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘The White Shadow’ by Andrea Eames

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White-Shadow

Fiction – paperback; Harvill Secker; 336 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Andrea Eames is a young writer, who grew up in Africa, moved to New Zealand and now lives in the USA. The White Shadow is her second novel.

An African coming-of-age tale

The story is set in Rhodesia during the guerrilla war of the late 1960s. But this is not a book about the war, although the political situation is ever present and the soldiers — “white people who passed through our town, thin and bitter as woodsmoke” — are often mentioned in passing.

Instead, this is essentially a coming-of-age tale about a young boy growing up in a rural village, who wants to better himself by getting an education and going to university. Tanishe is partly inspired by his rich uncle, who drives a big silver car and lives in the city, and his cousin, Abel, who visits the village during school holidays and has everything a young boy could wish for.

But events and circumstances conspire against Tinashe, not least his troublesome younger sister, Hazvinei, whom he must protect from the forces of the Shona spirit world and the unwanted attention of men, and the sudden arrival of cholera in the village.

A tragic story

This is not a happy story, although the descriptions of Tinashe’s simple childhood pleasures — swimming in the river, walking to the bottle shop for a coke and exploring the kopje on foot — are delightful. It is the ever-present threat of danger — whether it be from the war, the witch doctors, domestic violence or disease outbreaks — that gives the narrative a bit of bite and makes it a page turner.

Eames paints a fascinating portrait of an African childhood and of the friendship between the three main characters — Tinashe, Hazvinei and Abel — and how this changes and is tested over time.

And her prose, which is simple and fable-like, is hugely evocative of Africa, of the heat, the dust and a way of life in which Catholicism often takes a back seat to voodoo and witch doctors. She also does a wonderful job of contrasting city life with rural life and of showing the difference in attitude between blacks and whites, men and women, the educated and the non-educated. Less impressive is her slight obsession with bodily functions — there’s a lot of menstruation and going to the toilet — and male genitalia in this novel.

Some inconsistencies

I also thought there were some inconsistencies in characterisation and voice — for instance, I didn’t find the male voice convincing and thought Tinashe, as a toddler, was far too wise and knowing for his years  — but I quite liked the way the story shows how people’s life paths are often determined by their family background, the order of their birth and their gender.

The White Shadow is far from sappy and sentimental, but there’s a genuinely heart-rending aspect to the tale. For instance, when Tinashe throws away a golden opportunity to secure his future in order to do the right thing by his selfish, bratty sister I felt distressed — and annoyed — by his misplaced loyalty.

All in all, this is an effortless read that combines shocking true-to-life events with folklore and great sensitivity.