ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT BOOKS-ZIMBABWE: Tell It As It Is

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

HARARE, Feb 2 1999 (IPS) - Zimbabwean Shimmer Chinodya’s new book ‘Can We Talk and Other Sories’ takes the reader through a soul- searching and sometimes bumpy road, presenting the reader with an assortment of swearings, hot gossip, rumours, cursing and foul language.

The 115-page book (Baobab Books Limited of Zimbabwe), launched in Harare on Jan 21, also rumbles through the jungle of children’s world, where in the ‘Hoffman Street’ Chinodya lucidily tells the story of a group of children trying to understand adults.

Like in the other stories in the book, the reader is quite familiar with the content but often too embarrassed or shy to talk about.

“It is the sort of a book that everyone should keep in his or her book shelf,” says Trice Mbanje of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. “It is beautifully written” and spiced in “beautiful language.”

Chinodya, one of Zimbabwe’s foremost fiction writers, appears at home with the book’s main story ‘Can We Talk’ where he passionately displays the boldness of a sarcastic man fed up of his wife’s habits and attitude.

The man hates the way his wife loves medicine. The way she’ll stuff herself with painkillers, lozenges, cough syrup, antibiotics, lemon, sodium bicarbonate, mouthwash and honey just for a common cold.

The way she’ll regard every sneeze an allergy, every itch an infection, every pimple a cancer and every twitch a stroke.

He hates the way she loves funerals, the way she’s always going off to bury people he’d never met and who never came to visit his family and had no idea what they were going through.

He hates the way she’d put on her cloth and wraps herself up in her Zambia print cloth (the bright, colourful African dress) and be off on her mission of solidarity on just a chance phone call — as if to enlist attendance at her own affair.

He dislikes the way she first looks at the obituary and memorial column of the newspaper before reading the news and she’s always the one to say who died when, where and of what, and whose death anniversary it is.

He also hates the way she hates his relatives. The way she says she doesn’t want them in her life and she doesn’t want them to understand her, and she confuses them with her unpredictability.

The way she’ll do something nice and then when they warm to her, suddenly backs off. He hates the way she conveniently choose to forget some of their names, the way she chooses to hear what she wants to hear when he talks about them, and when he reminds her of something she looks up with a feigned surprise.

Chinodza was born in the central Zimbabwean town of Gweru in 1957 and educated at the University of Zimbabwe, where he studied literature and education. He later attended the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the United States where he gained an MA in Creative Writing.

His published works include ‘Dew In The Morning’, ‘Child Of Wars’ and ‘Harvest Of Thorns’ which earned him the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the African Region in 1990.

Chinodya has also published several children’s books in drama, folklore and poetry under the name B. Chirasha. ‘Dew In The Morning’ and ‘Harvest Of Thorns’ have been serialised on radio in Zimbabwe.

He has worked extensively as a curriculum developer, materials designer, editor and screen writer. He has been awarded various fellowships abroad and from 1995 and 1997 as a distinguished visiting professor in Creative Writing at St Lawrence University, New York.