Weekend Reading: Mungoshi, Aidoo, Head, Achebe, et al

What I like about writing in a specific genre is that I get to read a lot. Perhaps I write in order to read. It is like I reward myself, for finishing a short story draft, by reading someone's short story. Since I am putting together a collection set in rural and urban Zimbabwe, I have been drawn to authors who have dealt with the same issues, dichotomies, etc. So for this weekend, these are the books I have lined up:

The Collector of Other Treasures & Other Botswana Village Stories by Bessie Head
The Setting Sun & the Rolling World by Charles Mungoshi
No Sweetness Here and Other Stories by Ama Ata Aidoo
African Short Stories, edited by Chinua Achebe and CL Innes
The Unwinding Threads: Writing by Women in Africa, edited by Charlotte Bruner
The Henemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories edited by Chinua Achebe and C.L. Innes

Since these are collections of short stories, they are easy to read at the same time, one story from this book, another from that one, and so on....
Of course, I have already read Mungoshi, who almost pre-empts the concerns of some of my Mukoma stories, but in reading him carefully, I am noticing that his stories are told from his distinct vantage point. He certainly hasn't told "my" Mukoma stories. But each time I read Mungoshi, I am left with the feeling that writing is doable. I am sure that's what they call inspiration. Everyone should read a Mungoshi work at least once a year.

Set in the 70s, like Mungoshi's, Ama Ata Aidoo's stories cover a different stage in African history. While Mungoshi's stories deal with family issues in colonial Rhodesia, Aidoo, writing at the same time, is already dealing with post-colonial issues of Ghana; but her stories are also steeped in family politics, which, of course, mirror national ones. That's the thing: if you look carefully at some of the politics played out at the national level in many countries, you will notice that they are already mirrored at the family (hence social) level. As some stories show, there were family dictators in Africa before we even knew about the Mugabes and the Amins. As some of the contemporary Zimbabwean writers seem to be cautioning, the mess in government, can be examined through the mess in the little villages (There are no angels on this earth, just little wicked beings...., the literature seems to be saying). Such concerns are equally revealed in Mungoshi and Aidoo.

I met Ama Ata Aidoo some time in the 90s in Harare. What a down-to-earth woman. By the time I met her she had already been many things: highly educated, internationally published, had served as the minister of education in Ghana, the director of the Ghana Broadcasting corporation, was a mother, etc, but we were sitting there at the Book fair, in a group of ordinary people (there were four of us at our table) listening to a speech by an extraordinary writer whose success came nowhere near what I now understand were already the accolades of very ordinary-looking Aidoo, who almost didn't introduce herself to the group as a writer.

When people sometimes ask me why I write (because they will know that I write, guaranteed), I often quote Ama Ata Aidoo: "I write because I feel too much." Someone asked her why she featured female characters, and she said something like when she woke up in the morning and looked at the mirror, she saw a woman. If you can, you have to read those Lewis Nkosi interviews of African writers which were done in the eighties. They put things into perspective: these early African writers sometimes didn't have the freedom we now have to write what we want, but the literature they produced marks an important shift in African writing. Some of it reads like junk (because it serves the needs of its publishers, but no generation is free from the dictates of certain publishing interests, hence each generation will produce its junk).

So I am enjoying it all, the good, and the bad. In Mungoshi's US-published collection, there are stories that explain the obvious to cater for a foreign audience. Nowhere is this clearer than in "The Crow", a moving story about two boys whose excitement turns into obsessive animal cruelty when they kills a crow. Here the narrator explains things to a foreign audience: "...birds and animals that people do not eat are associated with the night and witchcraft in our country." But in such a short story you can see connections to larger works like The Lord of the Flies, works in which humans are at their worst in behavior, those human-too-human moments deciphered in the thinnest thread of desire.... I really like "Shadows on the Wall", the story that hints at what could be wrong with traditional culture. The child narrator, who expresses everything through a patchwork of shadows, tells the reader that his father denied him "the gift of language." Yet, if he were to defend himself, the father would argue that everything he did was culturally mandated, including teaching silence to his son (because children's voices are better off silenced).

I am re-reading "Who will stop the dark", and I am already mentally drawing parallels with Hemingway's "The Old man and the Sea", but the old man in this story is much wiser and accepts that there are certain forces of nature that only the young can fight. But don't forget the best of old men ever created by Mungoshi, old Musoni in title story, so I feel the temptation to leave the characters of "Who Will...?" doing their fishing and go to Old Musoni. "The Accident" remains memorable because of its shocking first paragraph, but my very best story in the whole collection is "The Brother", but I often want to enjoy it together with the lucid "Coming of the Dry Season."

In Bessie Head's collection (also published in the 70s), there is a lot of the anthropological exposition that clarifies things to those who may be confused by the strangeness of the setting, especially in "The Deep River: A story of Tribal Migration" where we are told about the origins of a seemingly peaceful village, a village full of angels, but the story redeems itself by the end when the degree of skepticism increases and we know there is adultery, the critique of polygamy and traditional chieftainship, and a woman gets to choose, a point which is emphasized). What I like so far about Bessie Head is how her work is an early reflection of some key works on Botswana. She looks at the society, at first with an outsider's eye, as does Alexander McCall Smith, which is probably where this "outside" feel of the work might be coming from. As you know, she was a South African who became a citizen of Botswana, but maybe as I read more into her, this may turn out to be a trivial detail, especially when we start considering examples of other naturalized writers like Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and...Joseph Conrad (I can't think of other names right now).

I didn't mean for this to be a long post, but it is distracting me from something more difficult, (I should be revising a short story right now). I call it creative procrastination.

Each time I have read The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Short Stories, I have not gone too far beyond Njubulo Ndebele's "The Prophetess"; it's one of those stories about which you say, "How come he got to write it before I did?" It's brilliant, centers on the ordinary, and it demonstrates the power of faith (in anything, really). I like it's narrative POV, and the tension it creates in the reader. A boy has been sent to a prophetess by his sick mother to get a bottle of holy water, and this trip is quite a journey for him, an expedition into some of the key issues of life. I liked how by the time he arrives home the water in the bottle is not holy anymore, or is it holier, considering that he has refilled the bottle with ordinary tape water? Who knows? But it's a brilliant story.

Oh, actually, I have also read the second story, "Amnesty", by Nadine Gordimer: short, but effective.

In the earlier publication, African Short Stories, which carries "twenty stories from across the continent", I have read Sembene Ousemane's "The False Prophet",the first story of this volume. Achebe and Innes were having great fun with this idea of prophets, considering that the second volume starts with "The Prophetess". Or it doesn't really matter. I love Sembene's works though. I will read anything of his I can find. My MA thesis was a comparison of Sembene's God's Bits of Wood and Rudolfo Anaya's Heart of Aztlan. I enjoyed reading the two novels side by side, works from opposite sides of the globe which tell the same story. Looking back now, I can say, emphatically, that we are in the business of recycling stories that have already been told in different contexts and places.

That's it for my weekend reading list. If I discover a unique trend in these works, I may have an opportunity to write a short review essay.