Writers and their Audience: Memory Chirere

When I teach a fiction-writing course, the class reads samples of works by both students and established writers. This is in addition to the regular business of writing and critiquing each other’s works. The sample readings are an eclectic selection of works by authors from different countries. I usually bring my favorite writers’ works to class: Arundhati Roy, Divakaruni, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gunther Grass, Dambudzo Marechera, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Charles Mungoshi, Chinua Achebe (of course!), Memory Chirere, William Faulkner (any excuse I can get to use his work) and many others.The students read these stories, some of which usually cover unfamiliar terrain, a thing that helps them move out of their comfort zones; then we discuss the works' structural and thematic features.

Last semester we read, among others, the Zimbabwean writers Memory Chirere and Dambudzo Marechera. Marechera’s short-short “Night on My Harmonica” and Chirere’s “A Game” are suitable for a quick reading and discussion session because of their brevity, but in their surface simplicity, they are packed with subtleties that sometimes take the entire class session to unearth. I love that, sitting there smiling as I witness the student-writers entering and getting lost in the unfamiliar terrain of the stories. I see faces light up with smiles when they see something recognizable, that ah-ha moment when they understand the context of a sentence.

But I also enjoy witnessing, and participating in dialogue about the confusing and the indecipherable of these stories. We are in a fiction writing setting, so we are used to creating works that we know some readers may not understand at first, but we thrash on, because we trust in the readers’ ability to apply the experience of the story to their available reality. One day our pieces may undergo the same scrutiny that we subject Marechera or Chirere's works to.

Memory Chirere teaches English at the University of Zimbabwe. He is one of the most influencial contemporary voices in Zimbabwean literature, author of the widely praised Shona short story collection, Tudikidiki, and the English collection Somewhere in this Country, both of which I have in manuscript format.

His short story “A Game” is told from the perspective of a boy who sits by his house sink and observes the actions of the adults around him, particularly a neigboring couple, a woman who always knits outside her house, and the boy’s mother. His curiosity is drawn by Kate’s father and his dubious interaction with Doubt’s mother. The boy notices that the man’s wife is not happy about something (readers start suspecting that the man and the knitting woman have an affair, what with the secretive “hi-good-bye” waves and sharing of pieces of cake); he also notices that his own mother engages in cheerful good-fences-and-neigbors greetings with Farai’s father; then when the story ends the man does not talk to Doubt’s mother anymore, so his wife, on the very first day this happens, is very cheerful to her husband. That’s when the narrator tells us: “no child should ever try to understand grown-ups.” What’s interesting is that we are almost also tempted to not understand this circle of neighbors, not to care even.

“A Game” is one of the stories in Memory Chirere’s Somewhere in this Country, published by UNISA and available for purchase on the publisher’s website. When readers experience “A Game” for the first time, they fall in love with the child narrator, his innocence and insistence--for a boy who should be playing (video games, etc) with others he makes it a point to observe these adults and their strange ways.

There are some aspects of the story that my students may miss on first or second reading, then others they will never understand, and that’s fine because a story should be rich enough for readers to interpret as they wish. Seeing the reactions of the readers is a good lesson for me as a writer. I have noticed that the readers place the age of Doubt’s mother to that of a very old woman, a senior in her sixties or seventies, who has time for nothing else except knitting all day; otherwise, why would she just sit and knit? This is an example of cultural distance between reader and writer; when I read those details I don’t have to think twice about what is the intended message, so I end up explaining the context of this knitting in the Zimbabwean setting.

Then there are the names. I spend up to ten minutes explaining the naming system in Shona culture, the fact that mothers and fathers are called by their children’s names, as in Doubt’s mother, Farai’s father. I explain that even in Chirere’s story, the naming system has already been translated to configure with English diction and syntactic sequence. Alternative naming would be Father-of-Farai, Mother-of-Doubt, or just simply Baba Farai, Mai Doubt; once I mention the latter, a few students nod their heads and explain how Baba is also used in some Indian settings, and so on.

Another feature of the story that the students interpret differently is the fact that the boy is sitting by the sink of his house. In high density surbubs of Zimbabwe, the bathroom is often separate from the main house, and the sink is attached to it. For readers who are used to sinks being located in the kitchen of an apartment (where it may not even be by a window) or a house, the placing of the boy becomes confusing. His vantage point seems inconvenient and not very revealing. “How can he see all these things from the kitchen?” the students ask.

Half the students usually don’t see an affair in the story, but they suspect that Kate’s mother and father might be on the verge of divorce, that things are not well with this family, although we are not given enough information to make a clear judgement. The boy’s mother, with her shouts (cheerful) of greeting to Kate’s father, across the fence, is often passed to be the one who might be having an affair with the man, but readers don’t expect the boy to know this.

Yet, other readers suspect that there is really something going on between the weird (yes, they read her as weird) knitting woman and Kate’s father, and even the boy seems to hint that the man is hiding something from his wife because he makes sure that by the time he enters his house, he has cleaned any trace of the piece of cake that Doubt’s mother gave him. Also his oily mouth is meant to send a message, perhaps to his wife, that he has already eaten somewhere.

The title itself, “A Game”, leads some readers to conclude that the two neibhors–-the boy’s mother and the knitting woman–-are involved in some form of set-up meant to improve the relationship of the troubled couple. Once the man stops paying attention to Doubt’s mother, his wife changes: “Kate’s mother talked excitedly to Kate’s father and they dashed indoors together.” Then reades ask, “Whose game?” Either the boy sees the adult’s actions as a game they are involved in, which makes the idea of the set-up convincing, or that the boy’s game (”Why is he not playing video or computer games, or watching TV like most other [American] kids?”) is that of people-watching.

Of course, I have a few readers who will not get the point of the story at all; they utter a “So?” at the end of the last sentence. And when the boy tells us he and his friend ought to be off to something worthier, “to see a certain girl before dusk,” these readers are apt to say, “That’s what you should be doing anyway, instead of trying to make sense of the actions of the adults around you.” That–-the fact that we have a boy doing this-- makes us realize, as adults, that although children may appear oblivious to our behavior and actions, they actually do, and they often wonder what we are trying to achieve. The fact that we are seeing these adults through the lenses of the child narrator, who does not quite form a judgement, forces us to look underneath the story’s surface simplicity; that’s when real reading begins, and as writer-readers we delve deeper to see how a fellow writer attempts to penetrate life’s subtleties, no matter how far removed they are from our experiences.