African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [206]
Where in Europe now would you see young men and boys crowding to listen to an old man telling tales?
If it is being asked, And where were the women?–they were building the fires and cooking the supper for these men, washing the children and putting them to bed, having hoed the fields and weeded the fields and harvested the crops and mended the hut walls and thatched the roofs.
THE STORYTELLERS, THE WRITERS
Tales, stories, jokes, anecdotes come spinning off people’s lips like soap bubbles. You could say gossip, too, but there is always an epic quality to it, because Zimbabwe is felt to be important, and that is because memories of the old kingdoms, like Monomotapa (rather, Munhumotapa) are still near. When, later, the white colonialists said, God’s own country, they did not know their pride was from long before they came, and would continue when they were gone.
Zimbabwe has good writers, surprisingly many, and they have written good novels, but the form of the short story suits them well, perhaps just because when a group of people sit together and the entertainment is ‘gossip’, then accounts of what neighbours or the Chefs are up to fall naturally into shape as tales. As well as the writers who write in English, there are many who use the other languages, Shona, Ndebele and the rest, and these are seldom translated. What are they like? Violent, is the report: they are full of murder, crime, passion, incest, and are bought and read in large numbers.
When the women who came to the Book Team meetings were invited to make up stories, poems–women who first exclaimed, Oh no, and were shy, but almost at once began to suggest ideas, the beginnings of tales–then I was seeing the birth of writers whom we may well hear of sooner or later. Or at least an atmosphere where writers may be engendered.
There is already a good novel by a woman, Tsitsi Dangarembga, but it did not have an easy birth. Nervous Disorders was rejected by four Zimbabwe publishers. The Women’s Press in London published it, and only after that the Zimbabwe Publishing House had the courage to do it. It was criticized for being ‘negative’, presenting an unfair picture of the lives of black women, who for their part say things like, ‘This is the first time I have seen my life as a Shona woman clearly.’ In short, it is a revolutionary book. The critics were all male, all hostile. They continue to be.
Zimbabwe critics are mostly bad, but they have the strength of their ignorance, and the backing of ideology. Not only did the academics not have access to news about the Soviet Union and communist countries, but they knew nothing of the many novels where the jargon and pretensions of marxism were mocked. These novels were not allowed in.
There are groups of new writers who deny any talent to ‘the fathers of Zimbabwe writing’, such as Charles Mungoshi. One might be tempted to cry Impossible!–if the phenomenon had not so often been observed in other countries.
For instance, in the 1970s in Sweden and Norway, newly-arrived writers dismissed all their elders as talentless, using marxism to justify their envy of them: marxism was ever envy’s most useful accomplice. The information about the state of literature in communist countries, where ‘socialist-realism’ and marxist criticism had been reigning for decades, was available to them all, yet their drive to do down their predecessors was so strong they were able to persuade themselves that ‘socialist-realism’ was alive and well. The ’70s in Sweden and Norway are now referred to as the Dark Ages, not least by the writers who helped to create them.
In Britain in the ’80s something similar happened, in this case fuelled by the competitive slash-and-burn known as Thatcherism. She spoke of ‘one of us’, of ‘us and them’ ‘not one of us’–and so did the new young group, who claimed talent only for themselves and their cronies, and imposed a style of criticism so vindictive that European colleagues often enquired, Just what has got into you people? Thatcher! the reply often was,