Those Chickens Along Mukuvisi River: Thoughts on Guchu's "Sketches..."

I always knew it, that those chickens along Mukuvisi river were up to no good. Now having read Wonder Guchu's "The Black Hen", a little, mysterious story about 1990s Harare high density life, I can't help revisiting all those sightings of Mukuvisi chicken. It didn't matter where you were along Mukuvisi when you saw them--whether you were crossing from High Field to Waterfalls, or you were taking a nature-admiring stroll into Bonongwe forest, just outside of Glen View, or you had left maFlats in Glen Norah and were taking pictures of maLizards because you had to use your camera somehow, imagining that one day you would be a popular photo journalist, because then you had just started A-Level, and did not know that you would become, first, a temporary teacher, then, a university student, before life took you thousands of miles away, to become, first, many things, then a teacher again, a teacher with a camera, when by then everyone around you also had a camera, before the country changed--you would still see these chickens and wonder who had left them there. Well, Wonder Guchu's story answers part of the question, and leaves more questions, because such is the power of art, the questioning, the answering without exhausting, because the questioning should continue.

Those chickens of Mukuvisi river, poor creatures. I knew, everyone had to know this, that they were here because a n'anga had said they should: that was the only way that someone would get a job, if they had looked everywhere and had not found one, yet they were experienced, qualified and ready. But the chickens could be used for other more deadly purposes too, casting a spell on someone, getting rid of bad spirits or appeasing bad ones so they would decide to be good.

Guchu's story is a flash fiction piece,a glimpse into just one example of animal sacrifices. It raises many questions, answers some, leaves others unanswered. If there are fissures, a reader can seal them or peep through them to other possibilities of meaning. But the total effect, as Toni Morrison has tirelessly demostrated in her writing, is seamless.

The beauty of the collection Sketches of High Density Life, which I have been trying to get since 2003--until I finally tried hard enough and got it in the mail today-- is that, as Memory Chirere points out in his review of the book, its stories are more than sketches. They are the real deal, for me, the kind of stories I always look for; ones that do not exhaust a terrain I want to explore too; stories that inspire more stories.

The collection was published by Weaver Press in 2003. As the synopsis points out, many readers are likely to ask, "Did this really happen?" And that's not the question I am asking as I finish each story; mine, always directed to the narrator, is: "Tell me, buddy, what else happened?" And the narrator, a sharp, non-judgemental observer, delivers, in small, measured, let's say moderated, thrifty, doses. As I prepare to move on to "The Wooden Bridge", that I already read in a Weaver Press collection, a story about ghosts and other things, I am getting ready to laugh, seriously, because of the creepiness of those footsteps on the bridge, and the mystery of what lurks in the darkness ["All around me, the night kept on pressing hard,advancing with the precision of a serial killer."], and by the end of that story, I am likely to do what I have always done: ponder about the meaning of it all and grab the pen.