Book Review: Tales of a nation in darkness

Book Review: Tales of a nation in darkness

STORIES OF HOPELESSNESS: Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah

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By Tina Jackson
Posted to the web: 16/04/2009 12:20:11
PETINA Gappah laughs heartily at the idea of being an over-achiever. "I have a very stern father," giggles the Swiss-based Zimbabwean lawyer, whose debut short story collection, An Elegy For Easterly, has already prompted praise from South African literary luminary JM Coetzee.

Behind the warmth of her conversation, though, Gappah has a strong sense of anger and that's where these stories came from, in reaction to the terrible events taking place in Zimbabwe.

She is very specific about when she started writing: May 2006. "It was like a stream, all these stories coming," she says. "There was so much going on in Zimbabwe and I channelled all my anger and frustration into these stories. I wrote 22 stories in a year."

An Elegy For Easterly is a quiet storm of a collection, conjuring up the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans struggling to live under the horror of Robert Mugabe's regime.

In January this year, Physicians For Human Rights published a report that argued the basic provision of clean water and healthcare in Zimbabwe had collapsed as a result of government policies.

'This is why we had the cholera epidemic last year,' agrees Gappah, vehemently. 'If you have a total breakdown of your sanitation system, that's how it spreads.'

In one month alone, Médecins Sans Frontières treated 4,000 cholera cases in Zimbabwe.

When Gappah took her five- year-old son with her to Zimbabwe over Christmas, friends were horrified. 'But like anywhere else, even Somalia, you can have a perfectly good life if you have money,' she says. 'If you have dollars, rands – anything apart from Zimbabwean dollars – you can have security.'

Yet Gappah, who was born in 1971, recalls a very different Zimbabwe: when the newly independent former Rhodesia was a symbol of hope and liberation.

Her stories evoke the time in 1980 when Bob Marley's song Zimbabwe celebrated African self-determination after Ian Smith's white minority rule and the reggae superstar performed it in front of tens of thousands at Harare's Rufaro Stadium.

'I wanted to show that Zimbabwe wasn't always this collapsed economy: we had a dream of a nation we wanted to be and we could have been anything,' she says.

Gappah's life was shaped by independence. 'We lived in the township and after independence we moved to a nice house in the suburbs.'

Her father was determined his children would have the university education he hadn't had: Gappah got her first law degree from the University of Zimbabwe, where she was a radical Marxist notorious for organising a miniskirt protest after male students ripped off the short skirt of a visiting German student.

She moved to study postgraduate law in Austria in 1995 (during which time she also took a further law degree at Cambridge) but her decision to leave Zimbabwe wasn't about escape. 'At that time, Zimbabwe was a great country and life was really easy. Then things flipped around.'

Gappah is matter-of-fact about the financial support her salary provides to family members still in Harare; after all, she notes, she's not the only one. 'At least one person from each family in my old street is living outside the country. It's an astonishing brain drain.'

Gappah's day job providing legal aid on international trade law to developing countries, though, was not her first choice of career. She wanted to be a writer from the age of ten. In 2006, she had 'a mini life crisis where I woke up and thought I might die as this lawyer who always wanted to write and never did anything.'

The stories in An Elegy convey horror with a feather-light touch. 'It's essential if you're dealing with a heavy subject,' she insists.

'I'm writing about ordinary people living in a situation rendered extraordinary because of politics. I hope the stories tell you something about the Zimbabwean character: the resilience, the tenacity, the humour. The desire to survive.' - Metro.co.uk

An Elegy For Easterly was published on Thursday by Faber and is available at most reputable bookshops, £12.99. You can also get it on Amazon, CLICK HERE
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