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The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe , by Ranka Primorac

2008; Indiana University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/ral.2008.39.2.143

1527-2044

Terence Ranger,

African history and culture studies

Reviewed by: The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe Terence Ranger The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe By Ranka Primorac. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006, vii + 241 pp. ISBN 978-1-84511-120-5 cloth. When Zimbabwe became independent in 1980 it had no internationally renowned novelists. Men deeply involved in black nationalist politics—Herbert Chitepo, Stanlake Samkange, Ndabaningi Sithole—had published poetic epics and novels, but they had done so as part of the sense of obligation felt by the first universityeducated generation. They were novelists but also historians, lawyers, theologians, orators, party chairmen, theoreticians of guerrilla war. They had to turn their hands and minds to everything and were better at some things than others. Twenty years later the situation was very different. When an international jury chose the 100 best African books of the twentieth century, six of them were by Zimbabweans. One of these—Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions—was chosen among the twelve best books of the twentieth century. Zimbabwean literature had come from nowhere to assume a status surpassed only by the two giants, Nigeria and South Africa. The new Zimbabwean novelists—Chenjerai Hove, Dambudzo Marechera, Shimmer Chinodya, Charles Mungoshi, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Yvonne Vera—were very different from the earlier generation. They could not sustain themselves solely through writing, although they won many major prizes. They had to work as writers in residence, or publishers’ readers, or filmmakers, or directors of galleries. But they did not have to be barristers or political leaders or guerrilla theoreticians. They were able to define themselves essentially as writers. If they felt an obligation to the new Zimbabwe it was amply met by the international honors they attained. They formed a brotherhood (and sisterhood) of writers, supported by enlightened publishers like Baobab and Weaver, and with an annual showcase at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. These writers constitute the topic of Ranka Primorac’s book. As she points out, there was a paradox. In the 1980s and 1990s, Zimbabwean novelists were being honored internationally. None of them, though, was admired by Zimbabwean literary critics. Primorac described the atmosphere at the University of Zimbabwe when she took an MA course there on “African Literature and Ideological Thought” in the late 1980s and early 1990s: [End Page 143] I was a recipient of a strangely male-centred, streamline and polarized version of Africa’s literary history [. . .] informed by a combination of Afrocentric and Marxist ideas [. . .]. Writers’ achievement was measured in terms of their texts’ perceived proximity to [. . .] a ‘correct’ representation of ‘African reality’. (7) Most of the new Zimbabwean authors failed this test. Marachera was written off for representing European angst, Yvonne Vera for turning the personal into the political. Primorac quotes one of these academic critics, V. G. Chivaura, dismissing “some of the best known novelists in English as un-African, and therefore as non-Zimbabwean”: Heroes from Africa history and culture [wrote Chivaura in 1998] contrast sharply with the dwarfish, confused, morally sapped fictional absurdities like Lucipher [sic] in [Charles Mungoshi’s] Waiting for the Rain, Tambudzai in (Tstitsi Dangrembga’s) Nervous Conditions, Marita in [Chenjerai Hove’s] Bones, Mazvita in [Yvonne Vera’s] Without a Name and the Narrator in [Dambudzo Marechera’s] The Black Insider. These are forged from the creative imaginations of European novels, depicting lives spiritually exhausted by their insatiable, morally barren cultures. (41) Primorac sets out to engage much more creatively with recent Zimbabwean fiction. She is very well qualified to do so. She draws on an Eastern European tradition of Marxist criticism—the work of the Croatian, Aleksandar Flaker, for example—which is very much more nuanced than the Leninism of the University of Zimbabwe literature department. She knows the Zimbabwean novels thoroughly and has talked with many of their authors. She understands that they are not taking refuge in irrelevant European literary models, but are interpreting contemporary Zimbabwean politics and literature with the qualified autonomy of the creative artist. Her book is by far the best account of Zimbabwean literature in English. One hopes it will be read by every literature student at the University of Zimbabwe. Terence Ranger Oxford Copyright © 2008...