Mukoma's Marriage and Other Stories

The book launched in Harare at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. Although I was not there to witness this birth, the first copies fell into the hands of friends Memory Chirere and Ignatius Mabasa, shown in the pictures above, standing with the book's editor, Emmanuel Makadho, on the right. This is important because Chirere and Mabasa are some of the friends who pushed me to consider publishing the Mukoma stories in a collection. Nearly all the stories in the book were originally published in American literary journals, so this puts them in one book, under one title.

A Brief History of the Mukoma project

The oldest story in the collection, "The Bull of Mototi", was written in 1997 in a journal book. In the original version of the story, the then nameless narrator is asked by a friend at the Students Union cafe at the University of Zimbabwe to talk about his childhood in Mazvihwa, Zvishavane, and he goes on to tell this specific story, before the two friends finish their lunch. The reader gets the sense that the narrator will continue and tell other Mazvihwa stories, as a series, but that never happened at first. So the story simmered for two years, and then reappeared in an edited form in 2000, this time as part of an assignment for a Master's writing class, and it was workshopped by fellow workshop participants at California State University. They liked it! And when it was graded, it received an A, so I thought I could just submit it and receive an immediate acceptance. No, that didn't happen: out of the stories in the collection, this one is the most rejected; in fact, no journal ever accepted it. But it is one of my favorite pieces! And by the time it was published in the collection, it had gone through over twenty revisions. I hope then that it should seem to the reader like the most polished of all the stories.

The youngest of the stories is one entitled "My Lily's Promise', whose original first sentence was "Mai Lily bit Mukoma's penis behind Chinendoro Primary School", and it made it into a journal with this first sentence intact, but by the time we were working on the collection with my Gweru editor, the sentence experienced sudden demise. Given a chance, I will continue to work on the story, give it five or more years of revising. By far it was one of the most difficult stories to work on.

The Mukoma stories started as a novel in which an uncle in the Diaspora is telling his late brother's story to a niece in Zimbabwe, over the phone. The niece is the brother's daughter. But I made the mistake of submitting chapter 2 of the novel as a short story to an American journal that accepted and paid me for it, my first payment for a short story, which actually paid one or two bills. This was in 2008, when the story was published as "Mukoma's Marriage."  That's what became the title story for the collection. Since then, I continued dropping these Mukoma stories, and  when friends noticed, they advised me to publish a book of these Mukoma stories! That's what I have done now.

The book is currently available in Zimbabwe, but plans are underway for its distribution to other countries.  My job is done, now it's time for the readers to do their work.  I have felt a sense of relief, to move on to other projects, older ones at that, because before the Mukoma stories, there were things I was working on, and now I want to go back to those and see what kinds of improvements I can make.

Questions from early readers

Some of the early readers of these stories have asked if they are autobiographical, and I have told them the stories are fictional, which is what they are, conceived and processed as fiction. I am not Mukoma, neither am I Fati, the narrator. But I grew up in a world dominated by brothers who were eighteen plus years older than I was, and what enriches these could be something I learned while observing these brothers live their lives. The Maiguru's, the wives of the brothers, played a major role in raising me, so the stories seemed quite informed on what it means to be raised by Maigurus.  The brothers in question are all dead, which makes the book, at some level, a way to deal with grief. In fact, one British publishers that almost published the book changed their minds on the basis that there was too much aggrandizing of a mukoma character, a man, an African man, acting out certain African roles, etc. Although I didn't respond, I sensed that the publisher failed to see the [more] important role given to the Maiguru character, and African woman, a woman acting out certain African [human] roles. But I will leave this to the readers. The work begins now.