Ancestors.
Gibbs, James
In addition to writing "Messages from Harare" and the Noma
Award-winning novel Bones (1988; see WLT 65:3, p. 538), Chenjerai Hove
is a close and critical observer of the Zimbabwean literary scene. He
has interviewed his fellow writers, including Charles Mungoshi and
Tsitsi Dangarembga, and has emphasized the responsibilities and duties
of authors. Extracts from the titles of a series of articles on
Zimbabwean literature suggest directions that he feels must be explored:
"Children of Memory," "Shaking Off Drought and
Hunger," and "New Ways of Portraying Half-Won Wars."
Ancestors is an attempt to understand memories, to come to terms with
spiritual drought and cultural hunger, and to find new ways of
representing the Zimbabwean situation while incorporating Shona
traditions and giving voice to women. The ambitious novel is pervaded by
a sense of loss, disruption, migration, and bereavement; it illustrates
the problems encountered in attempting to establish links with new
circumstances and environments. In one scene a young man seeks his
grandfather's grave and finds that not only has a road been
constructed through the burial ground but the excavated bones have been
dispersed. He is only able to establish tenuous links with a creative
forebear through a carved drum that, significantly, the owner can no
longer play. The episode is central to the vision of the fractured
community presented in the novel.
Hove set himself huge challenges by establishing the deaf and dumb Miriro as an influential ancestor. He presents part of her life in the
1860s and indicates that she was eventually given in marriage to a
drunkard. Miriro subsequently appears in the dreams of a schoolboy, but,
as one of the narrative voices acknowledges, "It is not easy to
tell this story of a deaf-and-dumb woman married in her deafness, her
inner silences eternal." This is very true, and it is a problem
Hove never overcomes; indeed it is as a storyteller that he fails. His
use of numerous voices, his movement backward and forward through time,
his wrestling with major themes, and his use of a significant figure who
is deaf and dumb all serve to alienate.
The writing is controlled, but rarely grabs or holds the attention.
In due course, academics will write profoundly of the novel's links
with inherited forms, of its concern with women finding voices, and of
its manipulation of several narratives; but I tired of the shifts,
wearied of the elegiac and apocalyptic. Even the episode about the
grandfather's grave is allowed to become maudlin!
The Zimbabwean social reality out of which the novel emerges and
against which the lives of, for example, Miriro, Tariro, Mucha, and
Tsapi are lived is swiftly etched. There are references to missionaries,
schools, taxation, loss of land, migration to the city, workers in the
mines, District Commissioners, and Land Development Officers. There is a
stronger presentation of local life, of traditions of music and carving,
of folk narrative, of restrictions affecting women. But the fragmented
presentation, presumably reflecting the apprehension of the
dispossessed, verges on the self-indulgent. One whole chapter is given
over to "Potions for a New Home" and is just that: recipes for
potions.
The theme of severance nevertheless comes through strongly, thanks to
the interwoven narratives that repeatedly feature those who have been
set down in strange lands. At one point, in a passage in which the
narrator disconcertingly insists the reader is "you," we read:
"With your breath fading, you recite the names of all the children,
then play the games of naming the trees, the rivers, the hills and
mountains. You can only name the rivers and hills of the place where you
were born." Hove addresses this problem of namelessness using
deeply felt ideas about ancestral influence and literature, but the
result is ambitious rather than accomplished. The text blurs as one
waits for the ancestors to turn the pages.
James Gibbs University of the West of England, Bristol
