Cassava Republic
Avenues by train
Farai Mudzingwa
Cassava Republic
It is such a pleasant thing to come across a new literary voice with acute observation and compelling characterisation powers – the basic requirements for good literary fiction. I recently encountered this in Farai Mudzingwa’s Avenues by train.
This is a story of Jedza, aka Gerry, a seven-year-old boy we first meet living in an imagined small town somewhere in Zimbabwe. Reading the early sections of the book somehow invoked in me – because he has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I guess – something of Jon Fosse’s Scenes from a childhood. Mudzingwa cited John van de Ruit’s Spud as the writing influence for those parts, when I asked him whether James Joyce’s A portrait of the artist as a young man had also been an influence.
Jedza is a dreamy young boy who is haunted by the story of his older sister’s near death when she was touched by the Njuzu, a water spirit, when they had crossed a notorious water swamp in their township. During this incident, another girl, Theresa, disappeared underwater for days, until the community appeased the Njuzu by offering it a black goat sacrifice. To me, this resonated of Xhosa traditional beliefs about river mouths being sacred spaces where the living and the dead meet, especially during the process of ukuthwasa. The disappearance underwater is part of the ubugqirha process, when one comes across the iminyanya, the ancestral river spirits that mediate between the living and the dead. These are what Nongqawuse is supposed to have seen that gave her a message for the great Xhosa cattle killings. I reckon almost all African cultures have a story about the water spirits, one way or another.
Jedza’s sister grew up with the markings of the Njuzu on her legs, something that made others, including Jedza, think she was marked. Jedza implicates himself with regard to this marking after a train accident involving his friend, largely because he was accidentally involved in it. During his mid-20s, still haunted by the incident, he decides to move to Harare in the hope that he will escape the darkness of his past while pursuing his electrician hustle. He also wishes to look for his sister, who was swallowed by the streets of Harare while doing a journalism internship there. The disappearance of his sister is, to Jedza, the fulfilment of the markings by the Njuzu. The story is largely weaved from that, touching on themes of his mother’s strict disciplinarian cruelty and religious fanaticism.
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The book often reads like a creative, nonfiction narrative of connected essays and footnotes. This is not a criticism per se, since the novel genre is flexible enough to accommodate these things in its task of meditating on life. As such, the book is a piece of life carved from the contemporary Zim life of internal exile and migrant literature. Mudzingwa says he added the footnotes as a means of gently nudging the reader. He didn’t want to factor its information into the body narrative structure, because it would have felt like information overload.
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The book often reads like a creative, nonfiction narrative of connected essays and footnotes. This is not a criticism per se, since the novel genre is flexible enough to accommodate these things in its task of meditating on life. As such, the book is a piece of life carved from the contemporary Zim life of internal exile and migrant literature. Mudzingwa says he added the footnotes as a means of gently nudging the reader. He didn’t want to factor its information into the body narrative structure, because it would have felt like information overload. The trick also has a stylistic purpose in making the book read more like a memoir than fiction, even if it must be admitted that it does sometimes distract the narrative flow for the reader.
Mudzingwa says the book is an exploration of Shona spirituality and a reconciliation of this with anthropological studies. We all know that anthropological studies have in the past been problematic in Africa and still have a lot to answer for. Hence I was surprised by this assertion, because I thought Mudzingwa exposed well where the Shona spiritual outlook clashes with Western anthropological assumptions, like Chinua Achebe in Things fall apart.
There is currently a lot of talk about African spirituality and mythology in contemporary African literature, and rightly so, because this is an area that has been much maligned at the hands of colonial missionaries in order to undermine the African worldview. I get that, based on our colonial experiences. I also think we whitewash the underbelly of our own African superstition, which is equally problematic regarding the damage it has caused and still causes in our communities. I define superstition as an irrational belief in supernatural power, and an inability to decipher and digest a religious belief properly. Again, what comes to mind is my Xhosa heritage, what I term Nongqawuse Syndrome and which goes back to Nxele, aka Makhanda. Even the religious fundamentalism and fanaticism errors of the born-again Christians, of whom Jedza’s mother is a typical example, are the results of superstition, albeit religion-based (Christianity-based) superstition.
When I travelled to India with my British friends, I was quite shocked at how white people, British in particular, are viewed there. They’re revered almost as gods, whereas as an African I was mostly ignored at best, and treated with prejudice accorded to the lower-caste-born, at worst. I kept thinking to myself, were these not the people who were colonised and oppressed by the British a few centuries ago? When I asked why to my Indian friends, they told me that Indians have a strange nostalgia for the British era, because it brought order to the country. I kind of felt a similar sentiment, sometimes, when reading Mudzingwa’s book – as if the elders, in particular, were hankering in nostalgia for the past, missing the order of bygone days when things worked in Zimbabwe. To be fair, I noticed the same attitude from my parents also. They felt that there was certain order to cling to in the past, even at the price of oppression for the majority and privilege for white people. You get the same attitude from black conservative people who are scared of the creative chaos of democracy and freedom. This might be at the height of the critique against the majority of Zimbabweans, Russians or any other people living under oppressive authoritarian regimes. They would rather endure that, so long as the lights are on, clean water flows from the taps, gas heats their houses in winter, roads are paved and the supermarkets have groceries to buy with their meagre government pension monies. The irony, as in Zimbabwe, is that even those public services disappear under the authoritarian governments in the end. And all you are left with is dust under your fingernails, counting the last chickens to slaughter for a welcome dinner for your long-lost son when he visits from the city, as Jedza does in the last parts of the book. The older generation seem to be more forgetful, even forgiving, of the colonial mischief they grew up under, regardless of the atrocities of the so-called liberators, whose atrocious behaviour might still be so fresh and current in their minds.
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There’s an inherent risk of disharmony in this, but most amazingly the symphony of the book is melodious, and it fluently overlaps in a pleasing manner that doesn’t tax the reader’s concentration powers. I am sure it owes that not only to the writer’s skills, but also to those of the book editor. It is superbly achieved.
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The other enjoyable part of Avenues by train is the use of music, Mbira in particular, as a metaphor of what goes on, and as a soothing refuge against the harsh realities and conditions of life. The book is written like a Mbira music concert, where all voices (1st, 2nd, 3rd and in between) are allowed to merge into each other, jazz-like. There’s an inherent risk of disharmony in this, but most amazingly the symphony of the book is melodious, and it fluently overlaps in a pleasing manner that doesn’t tax the reader’s concentration powers. I am sure it owes that not only to the writer’s skills, but also to those of the book editor. It is superbly achieved.