To say the least, this Zimbabwean debut is an extremely difficult book to talk about. It’s much more than clever or ambitious though it is both of those things, too. It is certainly not perfect, but it’s also big and strange enough that its faults just seem like so many tiny blips against the reader’s overall satisfaction.
In the opening section, we meet a tenant named Zamani, 24 years old, who wants his landlord to be his father and his landlady to be his mother he wants them to love him even more than they loved their missing son, Bukhosi. A simple enough premise. But Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is a sly writer, as sly perhaps as her main character; for whenever the reader thinks they have got hold of where this story is going, the narrative takes an abrupt swerve.
Bukhosi disappeared in 2007 during a secessionist rally in Bulawayo: the demonstrators are calling for what will be known as Mthwakazi a majority Ndebele republic named after a precolonial kingdom. Their uprising has its roots in Robert Mugabe’s government’s massacre of Ndebeles in 1983: this slaughter was Gukurahundi “the early rain that washes away the chaff before the spring shoots” Zimbabwe’s original sin and here its central and recurring concern.
Zamani was conceived violently symbolically on the night of these massacres; Tshuma digs up her country’s history from Cecil Rhodes landing through King Lobengula and Queen Lozikeyi being defeated to Ian Smith prime ministering war of independence tinged with cold war realpolitik and finally independence and beyond.
On Independence Eve (17 April 1980) Bob Marley performs in front of the new black leaders while police whip and teargas the masses: “The police, overcome by fear, slipped into animated violence like a second skin; they began thwacking the people with their batons, and the people wailed, so that their independence brimmed over into the night in a collective howl.”
This broad retelling of history is counterpointed by Zamani’s personal narrative and those of his hosts Abednego and Mama Agnes, achieved through Tshuma’s almost giddy ability to switch focus from one character to another. Whisky and drugs are Zamani’s method for seducing his “surrogate father” a recovering alcoholic into telling his personal history or “history”, as Zamani likes to punningly refer to it on account of its fragmented nature as well as Zimbabwe’s.
House of Stone is not a book for the faint-hearted. There are rapes and the cutting open of pregnant stomachs; a barn full of screaming women and children set ablaze. No heroes here, only people forced by circumstances to do unspeakable things to survive. But it’s not that all characters are bad guys: there is Thandi, beautiful Thandi who wants to be the mother of the revolution Zimbabwe’s Angela Davis instead she settles for Abednego who turns out to be very disappointing and gets killed by agents of the new independent Zimbabwe.
This is how nations are built, Tshuma seems to be saying: nothing ever is what it seems like. The past hurts and makes ashamed. The truth is Abednego’s father isn’t really his father. In addition, when whisky & drugs can’t make Abednego cooperate or control him anymore, Zamani shifts focus onto Mama Agnes; but Mama Agnes isn’t who she appears either. She has been involved in an adulterous relationship since her teenage years.
Sometimes this book is too much: just as soon as we’ve acclimated ourselves with one revelation another one blindsides us still we continue suspending disbelief cause at this point we’re accomplices with the writer in this playful yet serious “re-creation” of “hi-story” game. We wait to see how far our two-faced narrator will go in order to endear himself with hosts even while he hints at why behind his scheming. There does seem some method after all…
She can’t write a boring sentence: Tshuma lives every word so deeply that even most ridiculous and stupid actions become credible. Wordplay & absurd plot lines serve as comic relief but author never lets us off hook from seriousness for minute it ’s this balance which makes book succeed. By finish she has managed not only summing up Zimbabwean history but African colonial history too : from devastating colonialism through bitter wars of independence into self-rule euphoria and present disillusionment; it’s quite an accomplishment for debut novel.
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