When Petina Gappah won the Guardian first book award with her short story collection “An Elegy for Easterly” in 2009, she cheerfully told an interviewer that her first novel was due out in two years’ time. Last month she was back in London to launch that novel, “The Book of Memory”.
Why did it take her so long? “It’s been six incredibly long years,” she agrees. “Part of the problem I had is that the first book was so much more successful than I could have anticipated, which created expectations in my own mind. I was terrified that I was going to be found out: that I was this impostor. I had so much self-doubt. It was the same doubt that stopped me being published at all till I was 37.”
As she chatters on her way to the photo shoot, blithely halting the traffic as she crosses a busy London road, it’s hard to imagine this effervescent woman in the grip of a confidence crisis. But she wasn’t suffering from a simple case of second book syndrome. The journey from “Elegy” to “The Book of Memory” involved a three-year career break. It carried her back from Geneva, where she had been working as a lawyer while raising her son by herself, to the midst of a Zimbabwean family that boasts 200 direct descendants of her grandparents.
The 13 stories of “An Elegy for Easterly” depicted a new nation hyperventilating with inflation and driving itself crazy with corruption and hypocrisy. “There are almost no whites in the country now. Everything is black and green and brown,” reflects a widow, as she stands by the side of the president, watching her husband’s coffin being buried with full military honours, in the knowledge that he isn’t actually in it.
Like many men in these stories, he was a lapsed idealist, who has died an unheroic Aids-related death, his body buried secretly in his home village as his public face is saved for the nation. “These are the ceremonies that give life to the ruling party’s dream of perpetual rule,” muses the widow.
Gappah says she “wrote the stories of ‘Elegy’ out of the rage and hopelessness that come when you’re watching a country collapsing from the outside, and there’s nothing you can do about it. When I look at them now, I kind of wince because I wasn’t as nuanced as I could have been.”
After selling the follow-up novel on the strength of a few sample chapters, she found herself stuck. It was only when she moved back to Zimbabwe that “something just shifted”.
Part of the shift involved a change in her own political perspective. “I used to be a huge supporter of the [opposition party] MDC , but I’ve got to know some good Zanu-PF people and some corrupt ones from the MDC. I also have a fascination with the social history of Zimbabwe, and with a category of white people who have been very important to the culture of the country: they translated the Bible into Shona and wrote the first dictionaries.”
Where “Elegy” is full of powerful men exploiting young girls, “The Book of Memory” centres on an interracial relationship that challenges preconceptions about abuse of power, whether involving differences of race, sex or age. Writing from prison, where she awaits execution for murdering her white protector, Memory is a gloriously unreliable narrator who blames her predicament on the misfortune of having been sold off as a small child by her parents.
She carries a secret, however.
“It’s a very Zimbabwean story in that we keep a lot of family secrets,” says Gappah. “There’s a Shona saying: ‘chakafukidza dzimba matenga’ — what covers the home is the roof, or every home has its secrets.” Family loyalty is as important to the novel as it is to the writer’s own life, but it takes unexpected forms, one of which is concealed until the very end.
It involves shame and remorse, and a fear of deeply ingrained societal prejudices.
Gappah is wary of being regarded as an “authentic” Zimbabwean writer — “authentic is one of my least favourite words because in such a diverse country, whose authenticity are you talking about?” — but her novel is proudly Zimbabwean, and is full of references to Shona superstitions, some of which, she explains, were developed as a way of keeping law and order in an era before there was a formal legal system.
In prison, Memory is surrounded by women who cheek each other, and their guards, in a vibrant polyglot language. There is a sense that Gappah is reclaiming for the speech and culture of her birthplace the right to be at the heart of its own story, even if that story is largely written in English.
“When I went back to Zim I became really attuned to the way people talk, in a mixture of languages and slang,” she said in a recent session at the Edinburgh international book festival, quoting Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe: “Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard-of things with it.”
In its portrayal of a postcolonial, multi-ethnic country, “The Book of Memory” reflects the complexities of Gappah’s own background. She was born in 1971, when it was still white-ruled Rhodesia, to an autodidact father who worked for a bank and was determined that his five children should get the education he had been denied.
She spent the first two years of her education in a segregated school, but after independence in 1980, the family moved to “a nicer area” and she became one of the first six black children to be accepted into a formerly all-white school. For five years she was taught only in English, and by the time she was allowed to return to Shona at secondary school, “everyone was laughing at my Rhody accent”.
One result, she says, is that “while my Shona is good enough for dialogue, I could write a play but not a novel in it. It’s not the language in which I think or am angry or in which I lecture my son.”
She went from a Dominican convent where she was set on becoming a Catholic nun — “They had all the good food at the convent and I wanted to taste the wafer” — to a Jesuit sixth form where she briefly converted to Buddhism. It proved a lonely experience: “You realise you’re probably the only Buddhist in Zim.”
By the time she was 18, she had enrolled at the University of Zimbabwe and become a Trotskyite, joining a cell of five headed by Tendai Biti, who would go on to become the country’s finance minister. But a proselytising trip to a township proved that, too, to be a lonely calling when hardly anyone turned out to support them.
Though she had wanted to be a journalist and a writer, she bowed to her father’s wish that she should study law. She went on to do a doctorate at the University of Graz in Austria and a master’s in law at Cambridge before settling down to a job in international trade law in Geneva, scribbling away in whatever spare time was left after looking after her son.
Then came her sudden success and creative crisis. Her father was getting frailer, and she wanted her son to have a chance to know his family, so she decided to return home. During her time in Zimbabwe she developed a voice as an international newspaper columnist, led a project to refurbish Harare city library, backed by $1 million from the Swedish government, and made a tour of her old schools, observing the collapse of the education system in a poignant essay for the arts and politics magazine “Guernica”.
“What Zimbabwe did particularly well in the first 20 years of its life was to correct the racial injustice that had denied quality universal education to the majority of the country’s black children,” she wrote.
But in the last 10 short years of Zimbabwe’s political and economic crisis, these hard won gains have been all but lost ... It is hard to shake the sense that money has replaced race ... In Rhodesia, race determined whether a child was guaranteed a good education. In post-crisis Zimbabwe, it is now class that is the determinant. It is the ability of the parents to pay that determines whether their children get a good education.
A Zimbabwean PhD student has written a thesis that argues that this generation of children will be less literate then their parents, a terrifying possibility that brings with it the spectre of social upheavals to come.
Gappah was sufficiently unnerved, after the re-election of Robert Mugabe in 2013, to head back to Geneva. The hyperinflation of the nineties and noughties might be over, but the tethering of Zimbabwe’s currency to the US dollar brought its own problems.
Her father still collected his bank pension of $12 a month, but she became fearful for her own financial security, and wanted a European education for her son. “Thankfully, I have one of those civil service-type jobs where you can take a career break and still have a job for life.”
Her son, Kush, is now a trilingual citizen of the world who shuttles between boarding school in Scotland and home in Geneva; he wants to play cricket for Zimbabwe. “I really envy him,” she says, “because he has no hang-ups about being a black kid in Geneva or a Zimbabwean who doesn’t speak Shona very well.”
She keeps her relationship with the country alive by translating poetry, and particularly through her passionate involvement in a multi-author project to translate George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. She chose the novel because it had been a fixture on the school syllabus for so long that generations of Zimbabweans were familiar with it, yet this will be the first time Orwell has ever been published in an African indigenous language.
Shona, she says, is very flexible and can easily absorb new ideas. “How do you say windmill in Shona? We have mills, so we translated it as ‘a mill of the wind’. We’ve added a new concept to the language.”
She has friends in Kenya and Nigeria who hope to extend the project into Swahili and Yoruba.
As to her own work, though her stories have been quoted in public by her old friend Tendai Biti among others, she is resigned to being better known in Zimbabwe for her Facebook presence than for her fiction — at $20 apiece, books are beyond the reach of most people. But on the bright side, she says, the last time she had a book launch there, she must have sold 250 copies to the members of her own family who turned up for it.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
