11/28/2017 0 Comments Mirror Tricks & The Rumours of the Resignation of the President Have Been Greatly ExaggeratedPart One:Over the past few days, I have been reading Ngugi’s The Wizard of the Crow. A work of subtle speculative fiction, dense allegory, sharp satire, and socioeconomic observation, this novel follows a long-lived and long-ruling African dictator simply named “Ruler.” Ruler’s characteristics firmly overlap those of Mugabe – pervasive paranoia, a culture of unwavering sycophancy, consolidated one-party rule, control of all media, kleptocratic politicians, indignant anti-neocolonialism... the parallels continue. Even similar is the narrative that the Western media has been happily trumpeting for the past several weeks: “Once the world’s (or Left’s, or Africa’s, or pan-African politics’) darling, his reputation waned as he became ever more tyrannical...” Around the Ruler are a swirling cast of a dozen continuously interlocking and overlapping characters – ambitious dolts, fawning sycophants, manipulative masterminds, suffering wives, Lady Macbeths. The contiguities and juxtapositions, the endless recombinations, make the novel feel like an endless unfolding of a interminable drama. This isn’t a criticism – indeed, perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments of the novel is its theatricality. The novel could be staged—granted, over many consecutive nights of unfolding permutations – and this shades the allegory of the novel, about ambition and corruption. In the novel, the eponymous Wizard conducts his sorcery with no items other than a mirror. And the mirror is an acute figure for what mirrors do for us, psychologically (think here of Lacan’s mirror stage in particular). Using the mirror as a prop, the Wizard punctures the fictions maintained by those seeking his guidance, using psychological and social insights in their body language, their confessional language, their narrativizations. It is incredibly wise that, in a work of mild fantasy, the sorcery isn’t magical at all, but pragmatic and materialist – where material bodies, on the other hand, are manipulated and act and behave in some fantastic ways. The conceit of the mirror allows the afflicted to realize their own cure through the psychoanalytical back-and-forth with the Wizard – and that is true power grounded in its fake magic. Even though the Ruler is ultimately irredeemable, even he (or He, in the novel) is promised some measure of salvation through self-awareness and self-realization. That is, if he could set aside his narcissism long enough to reflect self-critically. In one of the weirdest turning points of the UnCoup drama was when Bob took to live television to make a solemn announcement. Flanked by a dozen military men, he took the microphone and... talked for about a half hour. There was no indication throughout the speech what the thrust or import was, other than that everyone knew he was going to resign. “Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy. Some did not realize that they themselves had become hoarse and were now producing barely audible whispers of more, give us more, couldn’t agree with the Mighty One more. Some could barely complete a sentence, then a word, then a syllable. But he got to the end of the speech, it seems – he flipped past a page, shuffled notes, muttered, ... and then concluded without resigning. Whatsapp was aflame with what the mic caught him saying after he finished the speech (“Asante sana,” for one). Whatsapp was also aflame with the rumor that he had foiled the generals by skipping over the paragraph or page wherein he was meant to announce his retirement. For thirty-seven years, Zimbabwe has been ruled by one party, one leader. All of that changed quite suddenly, but to shouts of great joy and pleasure. An era was over! A new one...begun? The coup that wasn’t was ultimately an in-party impasse: warring cliques of politicians escalated a succession crisis exacerbated and accelerating daily with rumors of the untenable and universally unstomachable ascension of the former first lady to the Presidency. But no one who has survived the Purge hasn’t also been there all along – and so the joy of the downfall of the president has quickly given way to misgivings about the perpetuation of the Old Guard. Today a new cabinet is announced – a fact hashed out on ZBC (zed-bee-cee) Radio this morning on a call-in forum. Several callers in a row were anxious to stress that the horizon of the New President’s current tenure – he has promised elections as planned next year – the “at most eight months” – were more than enough for him to accomplish what he wants to accomplish and then step out of the way for a new establishment altogether. Three callers in a row stressed that he should not get more than those eight months – a stark contrast to the thirty-seven years of rule for the Last Guy. Given an inch, I’m pleased to report, Zimbabweans are increasingly demanding a mile – no less than their due for their patience. This November, we Americans completed our first year’s lap with 45. It has been surreal to be living in a country with an all-consuming political spectacle (even well before the UnCoup un-unfolded) away from the political spectacle in which I feel daily more implicated and also distant from, at the moment. Diasporic Zimbabweans felt the same about the UnCoup. Rebecca Solnit, a lovely writer and thinker, has a piece out on LitHub right now that suggests her own kind of “mirror trick” for 45. She describes, as if allegorically, the circumstances poisoning 45’s sense of self/righteousness. She cites a Pushkin fable wherein the insatiably greedy and self-serving are ultimately rewarded with their downfall and comeuppance – a familiar theme in literature, hey? But Solnit’s reiteration of the fable is meant to instill hope – even the darkest possible hope, as the thudding end of her essay: “The man in the white house sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding, because his understanding was dulled by indulgence. He must know somewhere below the surface he skates on that he has destroyed his image, and like Dorian Gray before him, will be devoured by his own corrosion in due time too. One way or another this will kill him, though he may drag down millions with him. One way or another, he knows he has stepped off a cliff, pronounced himself king of the air, and is in freefall. Another dungheap awaits his landing; the dung is all his; when he plunges into it he will be, at last, a self-made man.” Part TwoThere’s a great Petina Gappah short story that seems prophetic in her 2016 collection Rotten Row. The book is an interlinked fugue of stories about crime and punishment in Harare; it is sometimes sensational, sometimes banal, often transcendent, but it’s her best work. In this acute short story – which was invoked for and by her in her newsshow punditing in the Wake of Bob – rumors of the death of a Mugabelike President begin in a diasporic internet forum by an exiled Zimbabwean man who angrily trolls any and all related to Zimbabwe. One of his online avatars dumps a rumor into the ether - and “the story is now feeding on itself, growing as it feeds...By the time Amai Bhoyi has her electricity reconnected, the news is now the top thread on the column: LATEST FROM ZIM, PRESIDENT COLLAPSES!!...As Fortune puts in his hours, all around the world, in every city where Zimbos have taken refuge, in every city on every continent, there is an ecstasy of typing on Twitter and Facebook and WhatsApp, in Washington and London, in Helsinki and Geneva, in Johannesburg and Gaborone, in Dallas and back in Luton, as his countrymen and women across the world join to discuss the horizons that are revealed by this news. Text message flash from Johannesburg and Leicester, Slough and Scotland.” (172) While the UnCoup was happening, the two WhatsApp groups I belong to – and most here will belong to dozens covering a range of concerns or professional or social groups – were a permanent, ongoing discussion forum. It was a model of civil dialogue, even when it got heated. It is where, as we are slowly adjusting to dawning potential freedom for political speech (it’s so hard to tell), real live political talk happens all the time. In Gappah’s story, the rumor builds over its circulation, gaining flesh and momentum until the Western press catches the story as the Death of the President. “the words ‘BBC Reports President’s Death’ flash on Gift Chauke’s mobile telephone at eight in the morning. Gift Chauke is selling newspapers and airtime at Newlands shops, a few steps from Barclays Bank. He shows the message to his friends Biggie and Nicholas, whose business models see them as vendors and walking purveyors of everything possible. ‘This cannot be true,’ Gift Chauke says. ‘Otherwise it would be in the newspapers.’ The first news of the coup-that-wasn’t came to me, at least, in the form of a dozen or more Facebook messages or posts expressing vague concern over “what was happening,” and it took about a half hour of coffee, wiping the sleep nuggets out of my eyes, and squinting at the New York Times to suss out that we had had a coup. But for the first two days, the headlines of the newspapers plastered on the street corners (public libraries of a sort: everyone, literally everyone, reads the headlines habitually) reflected none of the ongoing “drama,” such as it was – the Western press, however, were coming through with photos of tanks and soldiers, and commandeered the narrative of the UnCoup.
One of the strange things about the newspaper headlines displayed on the corner is that they are never united – as if no two newspapers can compete with the same news (very different from the American context) – and instead, there will be five or six different headline-worthy stories. But if you squint and braid these headlines together over time, they represent a kind of plot arc and narrative periodicity – rises and falls, reversals. It is a complexly woven and highly responsive narrative structure, because as rumors circulate on social media and stories are debated and augmented, the news, too, morphs to accommodate these new realities. One of the major effects of all of this is that everyone here – with very few exceptions – has a deeply complicated narrative of Zimbabwe. In these narratives, personal advantage, family ties, decades of history and histories of conflict, as well as up-to-the-second developments and late-breaking scandals, all collate to form a unified narrative. Interacting with any three Zimbabweans elucidates the subtle differences in the wefts of their narratives, but it is fascinatingly near-universal. And perhaps more impressive is the fact that these narratives are less concretized than one thinks. Indeed, the real coup was in the surprising plasticity of these narratives that themselves drove the UnCoup – in other words, that a ripple of unrest and suspicion could crest in a Greek drama that signalled the sudden reversal of fortune for a Patriarch that had been in place for thirty-seven years. One day, the narrative shifted for enough people to effect a sudden (even if elongated over a week) change in politics. It’s not a fundamental change – the New One is cut from the same cloth as the Dearly Departed – but it is an entire change of frame. It’s like a mirror trick. Asante sana.
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11/21/2017 0 Comments He Who Can Be NamedWednesday, November 21, 2017
A week ago, a coup that was not be called a "coup" began. It began with hysterical foreign reports of tanks and armored personnel carriers in the streets of Harare. There were those, but they never fired their weapons. Soldiers replaced police officers at roadblocks, and a change of guard happened over night. For a week, we all watched the news fervently. We shot each other messages on Whatsapp, the 100% pervasive social messaging app. Every vicissitude captured, every rumor circulated. We knew He was going to resign, had resigned. And then came the resignation speech that wasn't a resignation speech, and our spirits dipped lower. Was the Man so stubborn he skipped the paragraph that said he'd resigned? So we resigned ourselves to the possibility of impeachment, carrying two irreconcilables in our heads: rule of law and expediency. Rule of law lost, but so did He. At 5:15pm on November 21st, I drove home from the gym and took an extra spin around the block, listening to Jacob Mudenda read out the Constitution, its section on impeachment, the charges against Him. I showered, braced by the cold water, and heard a mighty honk. A mighty honk followed by another mighty honk. A car accident? Traffic? It was "rush hour," such as it is in Bulawayo. And shouting. I hear shouting a lot: the men offloading crates of bulk groceries in the alley behind my apartment often shout. So, too, do earnest Pentecostals in a church two blocks away every morning, or the touts recruiting passengers at the kombi stand across from my apartment. Honking, and shouting. Unbroken. I turned off the water, frisked the towel over my body and threw on clothes. The honking crescendo'd. I threw on slops and dashed down the stairs. Outside, there were whistles, shouts, beeps, honks, a chorus. 6pm. The news had broken, finally, that He had stepped. He who made political speech a near-impossibility, who had ordered the death of His rival but killed only His rival's wife, who had led the purge of the Ndebele after independence, who had ordered farms be given over to His party not His people, who had driven the economy into, through, and dragged along the bottom of a hyperinflationary crisis that cost Him the most successful of His citizens. He had married an unstable woman with an obsession with luxury. He had commandeered more than $1billion of His people's money in properties mostly abroad. He had fired successive VPs when it emerged that they might be more popular or capable than Him, the last of which outdid Him. While He was in charge, we could not really mention His name; we feared being taken for critics, and critics were dispatched with harshly. Just recently, He had an American woman arrested, charged with attempting to overthrow the government because she posted a picture of Him with a catheter. He had been going to Singaporean doctors for years, seeking treatment for His ailments, which increasingly beset Him as he moved into his nineties. When He was president, all speech critical of Him and His policies earned surveillance and attention at least, gruesome torture and death at the worst. While He was president, all the news channels will tell you wistfully, the "Bread Basket" of Africa became a debtor nation, then a nation in shambles. He was Robert Mugabe. (He still is, for however much longer his nonagenarian body can hold up to the demands of his erratic wife.) He was a complicated man. He was not always Bad with a capital 'B,' but just bad-with-a-lower-case 'b', like any complicated man. But there's no doubt that by the end, he was Bad; rotten; had overstayed his welcome. We will never have to speak of him with a capital 'H' anymore - at least we hope not. But the road ahead is winding, and the champion uncritically welcomed home has a lot to prove. The Zimbabwean people got their first taste of political freedoms last week. And last night's celebrations - the toyi-toying in the streets, the flapping flags, the whistles and horns, the joyrides around the city and the suburbs just honking honking honking -- will burn off. It is my hope that enough hope has been ignited to keep this revolt in motion; it is my hope that not only will the Zimbabwean people hold their leader to higher standards, but that they will be allowed to. It is my hope that this isn't another iteration of the same, bad-old patterns that ruled for thirty-seven years. This isn't the most eloquent reflection on the world-historical events, but it's a start, and I knew I'd be remiss if I didn't record some of my thoughts in the moment. I came here, after all, precisely because this could have happened. Not what actually happened - no one predicted that, or even really understood it while it was happening. But I was hopeful that I might witness a change for the Zimbabwean people that might allow them to breathe better, think better, be better. And so it came to pass. In the latest instalment of “Six Awkward Questions,” Bulawayo author Bryony Rheam offers thoughtful responses to the admittedly awkward questions. Rheam is the author of the elegant and acclaimed This September Sun, published by ‘Amabooks; a number of her short stories have appeared in anthologies, including ‘Amabooks’ latest, Moving On; her story of the strain of exile and the tensions it inscribes in families gives us the anthology its title. She describes herself below as the “number one fan” of Agatha Christie, and she is appropriately at work on a crime thriller, which is in the editing process and edging towards print – keep your eyes open! describe your favorite novel or writer using synaesthetic terms It has to be Virginia Woolf. I love her because I relate to her so well. She was deeply unhappy and, of course, famously committed suicide. Yet she has this amazing ability to see the beauty of the world and capture it so well. This trembling, transient beauty comes with the knowledge that nothing lasts; everything dies - but that is part of the beauty as well. The strength of her writing is that she illuminates those tiny, fleeting moments that most of us take for granted, but which make up daily life. what are some metaphors for your relationship to African writing?The first would be roadworks with lots of 'detour' signs. Another would be looking for the seventh floor only to be told that the lift only goes to the sixth and I'm not allowed to take the stairs. I don't really know where I am as an African writer. I was born in Zimbabwe and have lived most of my life here, but I am white so I don't fit in with the majority and people are also a bit suspicious of white writers. I feel sometimes as though I am muscling in on a space which is not mine. One of the criticisms of This September Sun was that weren't enough black characters, even though it was essentially a story about a family. Now if I was to write a book with mainly black characters, I would be accused of appropriation. Either way, I don't win. But, on a more positive note, another metaphor would be a wide open space because I think there is a lot of opportunity, a chance to do something different because African literature is coming to a stage of opening up. assuming a utopian arc, what is the best thing about Africa in the future? I think it's expanding, developing and going forward in a way in which literature from the West is not. As long as African writers push ahead and challenge Western ideas of Africa - poverty, famine, disease - by writing what they want, then I think we will see great things. Many British and American writers have become very cynical about the world and this is reflected in the type of books coming out. I think, to paraphrase Scott Fitzgerald, we have a great capacity for optimism, for seeing a brighter future and not getting stuck in all this angst that the others are. what habits aid writing most and least?I love getting up early in the morning and just enjoying the silence if nothing else. Walking is great for getting ideas and sorting out problems! I think the staff at Hillside Dams might think I am slightly unbalanced as I walk round talking to myself. Taking the dogs with me helps me look a little more sane. I also enjoy meditation, both for the discipline and the peace of mind it lends me. The worst thing to do is to get onto Facebook. It's best left alone if you want to get anything done. You think you'll just have a peek, but suddenly a whole hour has gone by and really it's rarely very interesting. how do you do it?I start off with my trusty notepad and pen and just sit and write. I have another notebook for good lines that come to me, but I have no idea where they are going or what they are about. I can't say I have a set routine as some days I go and teach and some days I have something I have to do in town. I do have to write in the mornings though; I just can't think in the afternoon, especially if it is very hot. Also, the afternoons see me running around after my children and making supper. what is the most exciting book you've read in the past six months? Unfortunately, I don't read as much as I want to. At the moment I am reading an Agatha Christie - you know I'm her number one fan, don't you? - called The Secret of Chimneys. It actually begins in Bulawayo with two friends meeting after a while apart. One of them is running desultory tours to Matopos and is bored out of his mind and the other is a hunter/prospector of the Indian Jones ilk. The latter pays the former to take some documents to England for him and pretend he is him (hope that makes sense!). It turns out the documents are diaries of a Count from some weird Eastern European country with a fictional name. I am enjoying it because it is an early spy thriller, a bit like The Thirty Nine Steps.
I will be posting occasional interviews with Zimbabwean writers, all with the same six-question format.Tariro Ndoro is an emerging Zimbabwean short story writer and poet, whose story “The Travellers” in ‘Amabooks’s most recent collection of Zimbabwean literature caught my eye. I had the pleasure of interviewing her as part of a panel on the collection at Intwasa Arts Festival in Bulawayo in October 2017. Her depiction of the economic and social end-of-the-road in the person of a bored Chicken Inn employee in “The Travellers” really humanizes the social and economic difficulties that Zimbabweans – and Southern Africans, generally - are currently facing. Her poetry and her prose alike explore scenes like this one from Cape Town in her poem “Transport”: “across from me, sleeping on the bubbling yellow foam / of the tattered prison grey seat, a tattered young man / and his tired sister both travel to their dead end jobs.” For every protestation that 2017 is not the new 2008 in Zimbabwe, Ndoro answers with another searching portrait of those whose minor suffering belies ongoing, everyday realities. Do I stay or do I go now? describe your favorite novel or writer using synaesthetic termsThe God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Definitely. This work was pretty revelatory for me. A warm, relatable book, and at the same time creepy and claustrophobic and painful. I love the different motifs Roy sets up and how they all tie up in the end as well as her several streams of consciousness. what are some metaphors for your relationship to African writing?A stuffy room, mainly because there seems to be this culture of having an elite few African writers that are the flagships for African literature, which means a lot of emerging writers feel like they have no voice at all or no story to add to the ongoing narrative. A good meal that ended before I was done eating, when I find a story that's particularly fresh and good -- for instance, a lot of Lesley Nneka Arimah's work. assuming a utopian arc, what is the best thing about Africa in the future?Self actualisation. It seems we're going through an African Renaissance. The natural hair revolution, African literary ezines giving the ordinary African more access to African lit... If all goes well, ten years from now, we'll be an actualised continent and the stereotypes that hold my generation of POCs back won’t hinder my children (I hope). what habits aid writing most and least?Reading. Reading the classics for structure, reading the contemporaries for inspiration and reading outside of my forte to prevent stagnation. Daydreaming also helps and giving myself writing targets (eg 1000 words a day). how do you do it?I love it. I know this isn't really an answer -- but it is the love I have for stories and story-telling that drives my search for the greatest short story, my love for the word that makes me struggle with my own fear of the blank page and the discouragement brought on by rejection slips. On a practical note, though, I probably spend about one or two hours [a day] writing until I run out of steam, then I go back to reading and editing until I find some form of inspiration to write a new work. what is the most exciting book you've read in the past six months?This is a hard question. I haven't read a whole lot of books in a while. I feel like I've been reading short stories. The God of Small Things was pretty exciting. I read it this year but I'm not sure when. I've also started reading Kate Zambreno's Green Girl and that's pretty exciting as well; I love the pace of the book and also the streams of consciousness Zambreno constructs.
11/6/2017 0 Comments Three Short Essays1. What the cleaners wanted
* time to talk to me * tokens of appreciation * to treat me like a hapless eldest son * never to be spoken to like that again * to tell me she used to be a teacher * to tell me that all of her siblings moved abroad * to remind me of the state of the economy, since I seem so aloof from it * to get me to take better care of myself 2. Five paraphrases from a letter the hotel sent me * Unfortunately, with the economic climate worsening, we fear more and more brazen thefts from our hotel rooms * Regrettably, as the economy tanks, more of Us will steal from You * We will do the best we can, but we hope you understand that with the economy like this, we shall have to steal from you more often * Maybe because you're American and rich you don't understand this, but the economic situation here is frightening, and we are doing the best we can, which may or may not involve taking additional monies from our guests * You couldn't possibly understand that 2017 feels like 2008 and that feels like death, because our families left, our money dried up, our industries died, as did our hope; and there's but scant hope left even now; and when you, and others like you, travel here, you come with reserves of hope, and bundles of US Dollars that you don't even bother to lock away, so rich are you, so carefree, when we, those who serve you, are suffering 3. Things they keep behind the counter at Choppies * cigarettes * deodorant * liquor * condoms * tampons * sweetened condensed milk |
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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