1/31/2018 0 Comments an a-chronicity In African Laughter, Doris Lessing recounts her visits to Zimbabwe after independence, and the tours and work she did with friends, family, and strangers to try to get to know the place after the protracted War had ended. She retraces the roads and byways that were familiar from her youth, growing up on a farm outside Mutare. Mutare is really terrifically beautiful; it is nestled just over a pass in a fertile valley slung between green, tree-covered mountains. Smack in the middle of the valley is a rugged iselberg that insouciantly sits there, surrounded. Mutare is the gateway point to the eastern border of Zimbabwe at Mozambique. I learned from pioneer narratives that Mutare and its environs were won in a skirmish with the few Portuguese stationed that far from their trading coast, and then slapped onto the newly-settling Rhodesia. Between Harare and Mutare is a winding highway that cuts through increasingly taller kopjes that become hills that become mountains in a lazy but indiscernible gradient. I visited Harare not long ago to do some work on and in the Doris Lessing Collection at the Harare City Library. (More on that in an upcoming article I’m submitting...) I had the opportunity to meet with Dan Wylie, a Zimbabwean scholar of literature who has been teaching at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, SA for decades. I love his work, which is frank and searching and smart. So I decided to take a couple days after Harare to go up to Mutare and visit the Vumba Mountains. In between Harare and Mutare is a small town called Macheke. Unremarkable, probably, except that Macheke was Lessing’s old stomping grounds. “Macheke is so vivid in my mind because of the War,” she says, and it is Macheke that is the setting for a good deal of The Golden Notebook – her most famous work – where the Mashopi Hotel is the setting of the ‘Rhodesian’ narrative therein. So when I saw the sign for Macheke, I peeled off the highway belatedly, swinging back to the road through a dusty and abandoned gas station. I descended through a charmingly shaded road down to the main thoroughfare of Macheke, sitting on the lip of a valley, a one-road town, with the post office at one end, and garages at the other. “Exhausted with our lives in the big city, Salisbury [Harare], we took ourselves down to Macheke at weekends, not every weekend, but often, whole groups of us, in the cars we owned or borrowed...Mashopi was painted over with glamour, as I complained in The Golden Notebook. When we see remembered scenes from the outside, as an observer, a golden haze seduces us into sentimentality. And what we choose to remember is the external aspects of events: sparks flying up into boughs lit by moonlight or starlight, their undersides ruddy with flame-light; a face leaning forward into firelight, not knowing it is observed and will be remembered. But what was I really feeling then?” (African Laughter 72) When Doris Lessing first revisits Macheke, she calls to mind the Mashopi that seamlessly blended with it and her own memories. “Memories of Macheke came from different layers of the past, and the first was when I was still a young girl. From a car window I saw dusty blue gums by the railway lines, and under them two sad baboons with chains around their waists attached to ropes which were fastened to the tree trunks” (73). When one approaches the place that was mystified in one’s youth, but from the position of the aged, what does one see? Arguably, continuity/discontinuity. We are always ourselves, but each of ourselves is a lost standpoint in the face of what is, now, and what has been, since. “As the sad black youth and I approached Macheke, I said I wanted to stop for a little, because I had been there during the War. But understood even as I spoke that he would think that I meant the Bush War, ‘his’ war.” (Lessing, African Laughter 73) I pulled into the main drag of Macheke and continued off to a dusty shoulder that abutted the railroad tracks. I got out of Sheryl and stretched my legs, arched my back. Three young men walking past me gawked and giggled, so I waved theatrically and bellowed “Howzit!” Behind me there was a colossal granite Celtic cross, its inscriptions utterly scrubbed away, and its body exhibiting cracks. It was surrounded by a small plot of land with planters that only still had flowers by inertia and chance. It definitely seemed likely to be a World War II memorial – there were other such in a good number of places in Zimbabwe. “Later, during the War, it was under these eucalyptus trees that we, the group from Salisbury, sat drinking white wine from Portuguese East Africa, and where ‘we’, the group at Mashopi, drank white wine, with the railway lines a few paces away on one side, and the main road, Salisbury to Umtali [Mutare], on the other.” (73) I can’t remember if they were eucalyptus trees. I’ll be honest that I don’t quite know what an eucalyptus tree looks like; at least not if there isn’t a koala on it. This little square of land, the memorial, was situated where she says she sat, and the characters sat, in life and in fiction. From that side of the road, I could glimpse down the hot, dusty street. My calves ached and lower back twinged and twanged; I’d come out of a paralyzing backache just before departing. I squinted around and across the street lay a low, dark building, with a singular sign on its corner, The Macheke Hotel. “I had hoped to stop here, perhaps for a cup of tea, at the Macheke Hotel, for old times’ sake, but now knew that this must not happen...Now two landscapes were in my mind and I could not make sense of what I saw. The main road was in a different place. Yes, there was the garage, the post office, store, a bar... and a hotel. A hotel in that place? I asked him [her passenger], ‘Do you know if they have changed the route of the main road?’ I didn’t go in. I wasn’t sure what I would find, myself, that wasn’t already described in African Laughter or in The Golden Notebook. I had the same sense of paralysis when I saw Lawrence Durrell’s lemon tree in Northern Cyprus: I’d read about this place, was pretty familiar with it. It appeared more or less as described, but for the knowledge of the passing of time. And here I am, as there he was. I fiddled in my pocket for my cell phone. The three young men had stopped some paces off under the shade and were unabashedly gawking at me, raised eyebrows, talking avidly. I put the hotel in the phone camera’s sights and clicked. A man poked his head out of the swinging doors of the hotel and peered up and down the streets before ducking back inside. I took another photo. I looked at my feet, which turned into stretching my neck, and rolling my back down and letting my arms dangle. I reached up performatively, like a mid-eighties calisthenics tape, and then shook out my hands. I stood, hand over face like a visor, and peered down the street, noticing only that a giant double decker bus was trundling up the wide and disappointing avenue, sending up a giant cloud of dust in its lumbering wake. The three young men were now perched on the granite corners of the memorial, still watching me. “I turned off to the left, where the railway had to be, and there were the dusty, dispirited blue gums and the railway lines beyond. The same. I stopped the car. Where was the hotel? Surely that could not...it was derelict, unused... Yes, I had seen the wonders of the world since I was in Macheke or Mashopi, but surely this could not be the Macheke Hotel were through all those weekends we drank, danced, flirted and played politics?” (74) This past weekend, my trainer and his fiancée invited me down to Ncema Dam. I’ve got a smattering of friends here, as I do in Chattanooga, but I don’t really belong to social circles, because social situations typically stress me out. But it was a small group, and I see them every day at the gym, and they had buddies down at the dam. They went every other weekend or so during the summer. It is The Thing To Do, at least within their circle – on top of braaing at the Dams, or drinking at the Clubhouse on a Friday night. White Zimbabwe! We zipped out of town, taking the hills at the prescribed speed limit, something I normally spare Sheryl on account of her nerves, but she seemed to enjoy it. The dam is not unlike any given State Park in the US South: a lake with a recreational boating ramp; a green lawn section for tents and grills; a smattering of bathing houses and recreational rooms; a bar for “members only.” The club, for what it was worth, appeared to be the Bulawayo Power Boating club, established some time in the 1950s, and peaking, at least according to the plaques and trophies, somewhere in the early 1970s – that is, truly, before many or most of the men who might have powerboated went off to war, and came back scarred, if whole. That is the “Bush War,” or the Second Chimurenga, or the War for Independence. We trekked across this familiar landscape to a houseboat waiting below – a caravan in the middle, flanked by two large asbestos platforms, all balancing on empty drums. A party was already in session, with the crew that had made it out first thing already a little drunk. My trainer and I don’t drink, so we had a few extra packets of cigarettes and dozens of little asides as those around us melted into their “sweaty selves, or worse” (apologies to Hopkins). The day was hot and long, the sun beating down, but towards sundown, we all split into three powerboats and scuttled off to the far end of the lake, linking together and drifting under the shade. The men drank and pushed each other off the boats, losing this (a cap) or that (prescription sunglasses) each time they emerged, sodden. We shouted across the boats and the beats, generating and dropping a dozen conversations, only to subside into whispered barbs and backbiting (“How much you want to bet she’ll sleep with him by sunup?”). I am not a Lake Person. A lot of white people in the United States are Lake People. They aspire to own boats that collect dust in driveways until the season is ripe. They compare notes on the latest Yeti schwag. They also fish and or hunt and or camp and obviously they camp but and or all know each other. They sometimes buy houses on lakes. These houses can serve as second homes. In middlebrow middleclass white American literature, there are stories about lakes and houses and lake houses and house boats. I think it’s A Thing in Canada, too, given all of the Atwood and Munro stories that take place on lakes. It’s a global confraternity of sorts – a confraternity that is tan and louche and rowdy and bored. “No people on earth are more kind, more hospitable, more resourceful than the whites of Southern Africa, when it is a question of one of their own kind. . . and what is the point of saying it again?” (Lessing, African Laughter 123) “It is a fact!” Scott announced, waggling his eyebrows above his very bloodshot eyes. “It is a fact that this is the oldest dam in Zimbabwe!” I looked at him sceptically, cocking my head. The others hadn’t heard, and so the performance was repeated. Scott was sunburned in some places, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as Keith’s sharp red chest. But everywhere around me what was white was pink and tender and shot through with red. “It is a fact that this is the oldest dam in southern Africa!” he valiantly stretched. “It was built before the war,” he stagewhispershouted. “In 1942!” he completed. “That was several years into the War, man. If we take Czechoslovakia or Poland as a starting point. But by all metrics,” I smirked, happy to be a smartarse. “Well, fuck, but it was begun before the War,” Scott eyerolled. “At any rate, gaze upon it, it is right impressive.” And it was: it had the solidity that most dams I knew somehow lacked. And in the dusk, it loomed out of the water and sky like a water’s edge fort from Star Wars. A small cylinder is connected to the dam by a long, thin arm, its glassed top presiding over the surface of the water. Charming aliens could live here, I thought. I got a nudge in the shoulder and was passed a cigarette with a flick of the head to Scott. “Scotty, take this,” I said, passing it over. He popped it into his mouth and took a long drag, spewing smoke as he pulled again before dissolving into a pool of coughing. “Eish,” I said, “be careful, I think it’s all pot, not spliff.” He clutched his pearls. “THIS GUY!” Scott shouted melodramatically. Others craned toward us, bemused. “THIS GUY TRIED TO DRUG ME.” “It’s all pot,” Scott said, needling Keith’s blazing arm, leaving self-vanishing white pressurepoints. “IT’S ALL POT, the Yank says, passing me what looks like a cigarette.” He expertly tossed an empty bottle of Castle Lite into a box below the motor, and gestured wordlessly and impatiently to Keith for another, which smoothly and soundlessly happened, a new beer appearing in his hand within seconds, perfectly timed to his script above. “And NOW I AM GOOFED. I am fully goofed,” Scott pronounced before chugging the whole beer. He set it down and tipped himself backwards out of the pilot’s seat and into the water. A few onlookers smiled and laughed mildly. Doris Lessing muses on the politics of race, and racial politics, when she observes wryly, “White farmers are villains – and that’s the end of it. It is true that some of them are not the most endearing people in the world. But what of the others, who are trying hard? Too bad about them....But I remember arguing with a black friend of mine who wanted to preserve a picture of white farmers as cruel savages: he retreated back and back until he cried out, ‘But they don’t love their homes as we do.’ But if there is one thing that has distinguished the whites, right from the beginning, it is love for the country.” (African Laughter 392) We returned slowly from the far edge of the lake in a powerboat his father had made himself, Scott explained. They made boats, that was their business, at least as long as there was business to be had. He spent many weekends out here, draping himself over one surface or another, fishing, boating. Picking his way among campsites, taking a seat, taking a beer, and another. As we passed each boat on our way back to the houseboat, I was introduced all around – all the white people knew each otherwise, so there was no getting around it, “And who’s this guy?” – so Scott repeated with gusto the dramatic narrative: “THIS YANK DRUGGED ME!” When we docked, the trainer’s fiancée had been busy at work preparing a lavish braai dinner: boerwors (spiced sausage), fillet, pork belly; avo salad; dinner rolls; chips. We ate, and chatted aimlessly; Scott and Keith shoved each other until both had tumbled into the lake and emerged, dripping and faux-mad, and then off--off on a bender. As night fell, we followed them up the hill to the member’s club, already sticky, and already crowded with sunburned white people speaking a little too loudly at each other. One woman, with wild eyes, stood stockstill in the middle of the floor and shouted, “WILL YOU LET ME PLAY, GENTLEMEN? I JUST WANT TO PLAY?” She shout-whined, melting further into a loud pitched, plaintive pronunciation: “I WILL PLAY DARTS, I WILL, GENTLEMEN,” and so on, engaging no one, really, as she opened the darts cupboard. She threw darts at the board fitfully, shouting a number each time that never corresponded with where the dart actually landed. It was as if around this woman was a shimmering sphere of unreality. “WILL YOU AT LEAST WATCH ME?” she pleaded. This was all terribly sad, and I said as much to the trainer, who had been silent and averting his eyes, “Oh it is, isn’t it,” he said with wide eyes. “She’s going through a hard time. Watch out for the laities.” (Pronounced “lie-tees,” meaning--) Children peered around the corner at this, their mother, before whispering conspiratorially and darting back out into the night. The trainer and I hung aloof, he participating in conversations about those passing through, or the unluckily absent, gossiping. I heard no fewer than a half dozen references to family violence. A half dozen or more split their time between Zimbabwe and somewhere where they made money. One, a publican, confessed that she did drink every night, a bottle of wine at least, but that was only because there was a good deal of time to fill, but that also, frankly, she was lonely in the UK. “It’s not like having all you people around, people are too busy there,” she said, screwing up her face. “Here, though, it’s nice,” she trailed off, gesturing toward the starry sky, her arm sweeping past a middle-aged man spitting up at the edge of the lake. Two men came up to me at various points. “I was talking to Scott over there, hey? He said you might have weed? I’m just looking for me and my mate.” “Sorry, mate, but that was a stupid story. I have nothing to do with that,” I said, shrugging and knitting my brows. “Right, then, goodbye,” he said, pivoting drunkly on an ankle. The other one made a go at conversation first. Where are you from? The States. How long are you here? Ten months. What do you do? Professor. Get outta here. You’re no professor. I am, though. A doctor, even. A doctor! And where do you live? Bulawayo, mate. Bulawayo, right, but which suburb. Not a suburb. I live in the city. Stop bullshitting me, bru, which suburb do you stay in? I live in the city, itself, next to the vegetable market. No fucking shit, the vegetable market. My father works down there – he brokers the produce. No shit, man. So my mate Scott was saying you had some giggle-toot? Giggle-toot? Giggle-toot. Giggle-toot?! For fuck’s sake man. Weed? Weed, naw, mate, fucking Scott’s responsible for that stupid story. He is drunk. That he is. But it’s just a story. Just a story. But you do live in the city? I do. Huh. “On the way back from Mutare to Harare,” Doris Lessing reflects in a journey made years after her first return to Macheke, “I stopped...outside the old hotel, which was no longer boarded up and derelict but again recognizable as the hotel of those long-ago weekends. I asked to see the manager, who turned out to be a young black man orchestrating a team of enthusiastic helpers. I told him that in the old days this hotel was popular, always full. But this could only mean popular with whites, and he didn’t care about that. I said that in the War the RAF used to come out from Salisbury for weekends: sometimes there were parties that went on for days. But he thought I was talking about the Bush War, and had never heard of the RAF: the Second World War was over before he was born. I asked if I could look over the place for old times’ sake. He was polite, amused...In the dining-room, exactly as it was, I had lunch, and could have believed the door would swing open and admit ghosts brought back by this resurrection of old haunts. ‘You see?’ I silently addressed them. ‘It has all happened, just as we said it would...well, not just as we said...’” (300) Time out of joint: the dusty plaques on the walls of the Ncema Dam Powerboating Club essentially stopped in the 70s. The bar has taken on the look of a sticky downstairs den in a 1970s suburban tract home. Everything, it feels sometimes, stopped in the 1970s. That there are young people at all can feel like the only proof that we’re not living in some deadened, dead-end end time.
The voices from the bar filter out across the lake, loud and jumbled, individual threads emerging. A few of us lay, stark sober or mad drunk, on the lawn gazing up at the sky. The drunk slur and marvel, giggle and point; we others are quiet, contemplative. The Milky Way here is like a gash through the sky, arising out of the cleft of the dammed valley, splaying out across the sky. Here, you can see that the sky is dimensional: it has depth, feels fractal, four-dimensional. Stars aren’t just slapped against a burnished brown sky, but reveal themselves to be enmeshed in a shimmering fabric of dimensional dark. The heavy drums of the pop music buckled in echoes across the lake and back, and my trainer mused, “Isn’t it cool how the drums carry so far away and come back? People have been using drums around here for centuries to communicate.” “I know, right? Talking drums.” Voices spill out of the clubhouse like tipped-out beer. A man is urinating unsteadily off the back porch. “When this is a colony again,” I hear a woman say with a pregnant pause, “I mean, when more of the white people come back,” she trailed off wistfully. From the tilt of the lawn on which we lay, we can see the far side of the Lake. Sophie piped up, “Oh look, hey? They have a bonfire.” And on the far side of the lake, there were two blazes, sparks trailing up to the sky. All day, the terraced banks of the lake on that side – sheerer – sported distant spots of black boys, sitting patiently in the sun and watching the boats on the lake. The two bonfires blazed like eyes from that opposite bank. The clubhouse’s DJ swerved to Toto’s “Africa,” apparently the agreed-upon ender-of-nights. A chorus of voices warbled along sentimentally, it seemed, although I couldn’t say. Whose “Africa”? Whose Africa? Who’s Africa? The nightbirds croaked. Here, everything is what was and what is at the same time, and that can be disorienting. The stars stay the same.
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AuthorFulbright Core Teaching/Research Fellowship to Zimbabwe, 2017-2018. Will teach at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and conduct research on the city's literary history, its cultural infrastructure, and its outlets for creative writing. Archives
February 2018
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