Uzbekistan - The Railway et al.

Country: Uzbekistan
Book: The Railway (Железная дорога)/The Underground (Мбобо)/ The Dead Lake (Вундеркинд Ержан)
Author: Hamid Ismailov
Publication Year: 2006 (1997)/2015(2009)/2014(2011)
Genre: Fiction/Historical fiction

Uzbekistan is somewhat of a curiosity. It is one of only two double landlocked countries in the world (i.e. you have to travel through two other countries to reach a body of water that opens out into one of the world’s oceans). However, the other country with this dubious distinction is Liechtenstein (see: Liechtenstein), which is a tiny country in the Alps. It’s like comparing Kansas City with Colorado.

If the wider world has heard of anywhere in Uzbekistan then it will undoubtedly be Samarkand. Samarkand was an important settlement along the Silk Road that connected Europe to China. It has been a centre of Islamic scholarship for centuries. As we noted when we looked at Turkey (see: Turkey), the Persian poet, Rumi, moved to Samarkand with his family when he was about 5.

Samarkand, along with much of modern day Uzbekistan, was once part of the Persian Empire and part of Iran until Russia expanded its borders into Central Asia during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The city and country at large remained a part of Russia right through the Soviet era. The three books we will consider in this piece all take place (for the most part) during that era.

Hamid Ismailov was born in Kyrgyzstan in 1954, but moved to Uzbekistan as a young man. He lived there throughout the Soviet regime, but was forced into exile in 1992 following the election of Islam Karimov as the first President of the newly independent country.

Karimov remained President for 25 years until his death in 2016. His reign was marked by corruption, censorship and torture and extrajudicial killing. Election results regularly exceeded 90% in Karimov’s favour. In 2002, his security forces were said to have executed two prisoners by boiling them alive. Despite this, the US occupied an air force base in the country for four years from 2001-2005 during their operations in Afghanistan.

 
Hamid Ismailov left Uzbekistan after he was accused of seeking to overthrow the government (“Unacceptable democratic tendencies” was the phrase they used). He settled in the UK, where he worked for the BBC World Service, becoming a Writer in Residence in 2010. He speaks and has written in numerous languages, including Uzbek, Russian, Turkish, French and German. For the most part his books are written in Uzbek and Russian and have been translated into English by other writers.

All of three books under consideration here have elements in common with one another. The central character in each is a child. All of them feature railways of one kind or another. However, each is set in a different country of the USSR. The Underground takes place exclusively in Moscow. The Dead Lake is principally set in Kazakhstan. Only The Railway features Uzbekistan, mostly the fictitious Silk Road town of Gilas. However, even here the book crosses oceans as part of its sprawling narrative.

Ismailov wrote The Railway when he still lived in Uzbekistan. It was published in Russian in 1997 with the English translation coming out in 2006. Despite having written an Uzbek version, Ismailov’s novel, like all of his novels, remains banned in Uzbekistan. He often publishes his books via Facebook in order that Uzbek readers have access to them.

The Railway is one of those novels, like A Grain of Wheat (see: Kenya) or The Forty Rules of Love (see: Turkey), that uses multiple narrators and Point of View characters to create a composite picture of the people and community featured. Central to the story is the unnamed boy, whose italicised narrative runs through the book between its tragicomic set pieces.

The literal railway is also central to the novel as the first line connecting Central Asia to Russia is being constructed. It pulls like a magnet with many of the stories culminating and concluding in the vicinity of the iron tracks.

Gilas is a multicultural town of Uzbeks, Russians, Tartars, Armenians, Chechens, Persians, Germans and Ukrainians. There is a large Jewish population. Also a sizable Korean community, due to the very real fact that when thousands of Koreans fled to Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula during World War Two to escape the Japanese, Stalin had them sent to Uzbekistan because he was as paranoid of them as he was of everyone else.

As translator, Robert Chandler, says in his Preface to the novel, “Gilas is a Noah’s Ark of humanity – and a microcosm of the Soviet Union.” Like a Soviet Leviathan or Moby Dick. Or, an overlong Bob Dylan song with a cavalcade of characters, the roll call of whose names goes on for pages before the book even begins.

The Railway can also be seen, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (see: Dominican Republic) as a history of Uzbekistan and Russia during the first half of the 20^th century as told through it characters. Like Diaz’s book, the novel revolves and recirculates through time, picking up threads as it goes. Like The Great Reclamation (see: Singapore), there is a point in the past beyond which it will not go. For Heng’s novel, that is 1965. For Ismailov it is the end of the Stalinist era and, presumably,. the birth of Ismailov himself (Ismailov was born the year after Stalin died).

Chandler notes in his Preface that the Uzbek capital of Tashkent was regarded as a cosmopolitan city in the years immediately following the Second World War. Gilas  is said to be located  not far from the capital. Characters in the novel travel to the UK and the USA and make the Hajj to Mecca. For all that we think of the Soviet Union as inward facing and inaccessible, life at the margins of the regime are portrayed as broadly tolerable.

Communism is a constant presence of course, but the communists are lampooned like everyone else. As Jean-Jacque Rousseau understood, the larger an empire grows, the harder it is to control and disseminate the message of any central authority. Technology makes this easier to achieve, as we see with China’s mass surveillance systems, but in the Uzbekistan of the first half of the 20^th century, communism had to compete with Islam, Christianity, Judaism and centuries of Central Asian tradition and folklore. It’s strict enforcement was then somewhat diluted.

The Underground is a different beast entirely; set as it is in Moscow, the belly of the Russian bear. The novel is told in the first person by Kirill, or Mbobo, the son of Siberian mother and an African father, who was conceived during the 1980 Moscow Olympics. As we learn in the opening passages, Kirill’s mother died when he was 8 and he died 4 years later. His ghost or soul tells his story more than a decade after his death.

As the railway is a metaphor in The Railway, here the Moscow Metro is a metaphor in The Underground. Each passage of text is sub-titled with the name of one of the stations that make up the Moscow underground system. Though as the narrative rattles past the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, the stations start to be renamed, foreshadowing Kirill’s fate. He refers to his mother as Moscow, which is another obvious metaphor for the decline of the state in the dying years of the Soviet Union.

As a child of an African father, Kirill’s dark skin marks him out in the capital of Russia. He is subjected to frequent racist abuse and even uses racist terminology to refer to himself. As his mother is Siberian in origin, he is doubly prejudiced against. His mother drinks and flits between two different lovers.

The tragedy of Kirill is despite the disadvantages and prejudices he faces, he is academically gifted and reads books far beyond his years. One of his ‘uncles’ calls him Pushkin. in reference to the Russian novelist, Alexander Pushkin. Like the unnamed mother and daughter of Soviet Milk (see: Latvia), the collapse of the Soviet regime comes too late to offer salvation. If salvation was ever even possible in the heart of Russia. Unlike Latvia and other countries that gained their independence, the bulk of the former Communist republic lurched from the collapse of the Soviet regime, to economic collapse and financial looting by its oligarchs to the coming of Putin and the return of political oppression.

In The Dead Lake, we travel to Kazakhstan and the shadow of the Russian nuclear weapons programme. The narrator meets a young violin player while travelling through the country by train. Although he appears to be a child, he is in fact 27. As they travel on though the country, Yerzhan tells his story.

As the atomic tests produced great pools of contaminated water, the locals were forbidden from approaching them. One night Yerzhan dives into one to impress the girl next door with whom he is in love. His curse in to never age, even as she grows into a woman and drifts from his grasp. The narrator doubts the veracity of the boy’s tale, but when he meets two relatives at the end of the line, neither of whom he has seen in many years, the story seems to be verified.

It’s a Central Asian fable, like those we found in Bhutan (see: Bhutan) and Iceland (see: Iceland) and found through the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson. The Tales of the Arabian Nights and many other besides.

Indeed, all of the Ismailov’s books feature folk and fairy tales told to children. The Dead Lake becomes the snake eating its own tail as the story of Yerzhan takes the form of a story told to Yerzhan. But then Ismailov’s books often seem like stories told to his own young self. Yerzhan, Kirill and the unnamed boy of The Railway feel like facets of the author himself.

Hamid Ismailov’s own story is one we have encountered too many times on this journey so far. The writer forced into exile by invasion, civil war or the sheer paranoia of the ruling autocracy. Unlike the rest, Ismailov has been unable to return to Uzbekistan since he left more than 30 years ago. Even the writers we encountered in Afghanistan (see: Afghanistan), have been able to return to their homeland at various stages. Though that now seems impossible for the foreseeable future. The freedom to create and express oneself remains a distant dream for many in the world. Which makes voices like Ismailov’s all the more important.

Uzbekistan seems a curiosity, but it’s repressive government is sadly more the rule than the exception. It might be one of only two double landlocked countries in the world, but there are many more doubly landlocked from truth and freedom of expression. If this project has any one aim, it is to shine a torch on the dark, oppressive corners of our world. Hamid Ismailov and his contemporaries are the motes of light without which thiat task would be impossible.

Hamid Ismailov

 

Singapore - Rainbirds et al.

Country: Singapore
Book: Rainbirds/The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida/Watersong
Author: Clarissa Goenawan
Publication Year: 2018/2020/2022
Genre: Fiction

Country: Singapore
Book: Suicide Club/ The Great Reclamation
Author: Rachel Heng
Publication Year: 2018/2023
Genre: Science Fiction/Historical Fiction

Singapore, it is fair to say, is a country punching above its weight. Since achieving independence in 1965, the small island state has grown into one of the richest countries in Asia. Along with South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, it was named as one of the four Asian Tiger economies, but has since outstripped its contemporaries in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

This is not without its problems. Island states generally become wealthy by serving as tax havens for the mega-rich and Singapore is no exception. However, it is also one of the world’s most important trade ports and an international centre for banking. Unsurprisingly, it is also one of the most expensive places in the world to live.

In turning to our Singaporean authors, we find something of that spirit of internationalism. Indeed of the five books under consideration, only one is actually set in Singapore. That novel, The Great Reclamation (see below), will at least tell us something of the history of country.

Clarissa Goenawan is perhaps the perfect Reading the World author. Born in Indonesia to Singaporean parents, she lives in Singapore, but has presumably spent time living in Japan. given that each of her three novels published since 2018 is set there. It isn’t easy finding information on Goenawan’s biography online, which, given the issues facing females writers that we have identified elsewhere in this project, is probably for the best. Despite being set in Japan, all her books were originally published in English.

Having read a reasonable amount of contemporary Japanese literature in the recent years, it is easy to see in Goenawan’s work many of the same tropes and social concerns found in the work of native Japanese authors. Of course, no one writing fiction set in Japan can escape the influence of Haruki Murakami (see: Reading Murakami). Yet it is possible to find in Goenawan novels connective tissue to modern Japanese authors such as Sayaka Murata, Banana Yoshimoto, Mieko Kawakami, Natsuko Imamura, Natsuo Kirino and Yu Miri (see: South Korea) amongst many others. How many of these authors Goenawan is aware of or has read is anyone’s guess.

Her first novel, Rainbirds, published in 2018, is in one sense a murder mystery in the same vein as Natsuo Kirino’s 2003 novel, Grotesque. When Ren Ishida’s sister is murdered in a provincial town, he must travel there to put her affairs in order. However, he ends up accepting a temporary position as a tutor at the same school in which his sister worked. As he comes to know the residents of the town, its dark underbelly reveals itself, offering tantalising clues to the circumstances of his sister’s murder.

It’s good first novel, rich in detail and characters. The rich politician who offers Ren free accommodation in return for reading to his listless wife. Rio; the student with whom he forms a strange friendship. There are also dreams and flashbacks to growing up with his sister, Keiko.

That said, the entire novel is told in flashback. The events take place n the 1990s and Ren narrates the tale much in the same way as Toru Watanabe in Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, looking back after many years. Like many of Murakami’s novels, the conclusion is deliberately ambiguous. It is for the reader to decide what conclusions to draw.

2020’s The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is perhaps Goenawan’s most Murakami-esque novel. Certainly many of the same elements are there. Self-harm and the supernatural. Lonely male characters. Bars and the culture around them. Traumatic school experiences. Characters coming to terms with sex and sexuality. Love affairs that lead to the ruination of friendships. Characters running away to some isolated place in Japan to hide and find or destroy themselves.

None of these things are unique to Murakami’s novels of course, but par for the course in Japanese and South East Asian literature. The supernatural is employed at various points in the work of many of the writers mentioned above: Although writers like Natsuo Kirino are able to introduce the viscerally horrific and grotesque without reference to the supernatural.

Indeed, for most of The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, the supernatural is entirely absent and the novel is again reminiscent of Norwegian Wood in many of its elements. It also has elements of Greek tragedy in that we are told about Miwako Sumida’s death in the novel’s prologue. The narrative then spins back in time to show how the tragedy unfolded. The supernatural only comes into play in the novel’s third act.

On balance, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is Goenawan’s most accomplished novel of the three (although, as the first novel of hers I read, this might be a case of the First Love or Point of Entry Fallacy). Unlike the previous novel, it is told in the 3^rd person with the point of view switching to different characters as the novel proceeds. Despite the tragedy that underpins it (perhaps, in fact, because of it), it is also the book with the most clear conclusion. Which might also be its most un-Murakami-like feature. In the land of Haruki Murakami, ambiguity is king (see: Reading Murakami for more on this). It is a reminder that South East Asian literature is not defined by one man. Other Japanese writers (and novels set in Japan) are available.

Goenawan’s third novel, 2022’s Watersong, is a melding of many of the elements of her first two books. The 3^rd person narrative shifts between characters, but does so more haphazardly than the linear progression of The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida. The novel opens in Akakawa, the provincial town of Rainbirds, but shifts to the centre of Tokyo for the lion’s share of the novel.

Shouji Arai is forced to leave Akakawa when he strikes up a friendship with the wife of one of the town’s most powerful men, who is physically abusive to her. He is forced to leave his girlfriend, Yoko, behind, who disappears. A shadowy voice on the phone threatens to kill him if he continues to search for her. The years pass away as he works as a journalist and becomes embroiled in a complicated platonic relationship with Liyun after she moves into his apartment. She occupies much of the novel’s second act.

As a child, Shouji was told by a fortune teller that he will meet three women with water symbols in their names (i.e. the Kanji pictograms used in Japanese script and borrowed from Chinese). One of these three women might be his soul mate. One might also drown, as seen in a recurring dream that prompts his mother to take him to the fortune teller in the first act.

Where The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida was largely unambiguous, many elements of Watersong are vague and, like Rainbirds and the oeuvre of Haruki Murakami, one is left to draw one’s own conclusions.

It is another novel that opens in the mid-90s and runs to beyond the millennium. It allows for noir-ish throwback plot devices like Shouji using pay phones to try and contact Yoko and being threatened by the voice on the phone. Set any nearer in time and much of the mystery could be solved through Facebook, Twitter and Zoom.

Clarissa Goenawan

All in all, Goenawan’s three published novels are well written and a welcome additions to the sum of fiction set in Japan. There is some overlap between them, but that is to be expected. Everyone from writers to rap artists have hooks and tropes to which they return time and again. Try reading all 44 of Philip K Dick’s novels. for instance, and you will find so much bleed between them that they are difficult to separate out from one another (like the tenuous reality of many of his books bleeding into the real world). I look forward to seeing what  Clarissa Goenawan does next.

Rachel Heng’s two published novels occupy the years either side of the world in which Clarissa Goenawan’s books are set. The second, The Great Reclamation, takes place in Singapore between 1942 and 1965. Her first novel, 2018’s Suicide Club, takes place in New York in the not too distant future.

In this version of NYC, people now live for centuries. Certain lucky individuals have the chance to live forever. However, their behaviour is heavily proscribed. When ‘Lifer’, Lea Kirino, is hit by a car, she is suspected of attempting to harm herself and is placed in special measures and monitored.

The accident is triggered by the apparent vision of her long dead father. However, it is no vision and as he is revealed to be alive and re-enters her life, her world starts to fall apart. The titular Suicide Club is revealed to be a secret society dedicated to risk and the rejection of immortality. She enters their circle to bring them down, but comes to sympathise with their cause.

Suicide Club is a meditation on the concept of everlasting life. It asks the question: how much life is too much? For all that religion promises immortality in the everafter, does anyone really want to live forever in anything so sterile as the heaven that is portrayed in most religious texts (as Talking Heads put it, ‘Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing. nothing ever happens’)?

Extending one’s lifespan by a few centuries, even a millennium or two, might be desirable. Anything beyond than that and surely boredom would be bound to set in (look at the listless, sterile lives lived by half the vampires in vampyric fiction). Seemingly even the prospect of immortal life is too much for many ‘Lifers’ to bear. Hence the Suicide Club.

Like Watersong, it’s a decent first novel. Like Goenawan’s proximity to Murakami, Suicide Club has similarities with many of Philip K Dick’s best meditations on the future of humanity’s relationship with medicine and technology (although obviously many PKD’s references have not aged well). Whether humanity will survive long enough to worry about such matters is something which has still to be decided. If AI doesn’t get us, our self-destructive instincts just might.

And so we come, finally, to Singapore and Heng’s 2023 novel, The Great Reclamation. Rather like Junot Díaz’s novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (see: Dominican Republic), The Great Reclamation is a historical novel told through the lives and relationships of one family.

Ah Boon is born to a fisherman family during the 30s in the declining years of the British Empire and its hundred year sovereignty over the island. In 1942, the Japanese invade and occupy Singapore and carry out the kinds of atrocities committed throughout their sphere of influence.

As a child, Ah Boon has little interest in fishing, preferring to play with his neighbour, Siok Mei. However, as the post war period begins and they grow older, Siok Mei becomes part of student protests against the government. Ah Boon submits to his fate to be a fisherman like his father, but soon becomes jaded and instead applies for a job with the same people to whom Siok Mei and her activist boyfriend are opposed.

The Great Reclamation refers to the land reclamation projects carried out by the Singaporean government from the early 1960s. which have increased its land mass by more than 20%. Similar to the projects carried out in the Netherlands in the previous centuries. Except, instead of dykes and dams, Singapore used sand to increase its land mass, to the point where many of its neighbouring countries (Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia) have banned or restricted the sale to Singapore of sand (which is the start of tongue twister if ever there was one). Singapore has also attempted to merge some of the smaller surrounding islands with the mainland.

This effort placed the government in direct conflict with the fishermen and other Singaporeans who had lived in and around the coastline for generations. Many were relocated to government built housing, but these, at least to judge from events in the novel, were poorly ventilated. It should be remembered that Singapore lies just one degree above the equator. It is therefore a hot and humid country. Ah Boon’s Uncle refuses to relocate, preferring to feel the sea winds coming in through the floorboards of his beachfront home.

Ah Boon’s talent as a child and into adulthood is his ability to find mysterious islands that seem to move with the phases of the moon. He is thrown into conflict between his community and his employers, who want to mine the islands for their sand; between his unrequited love for Siok Mei and Natalie, his wife and former boss. As the book concludes in 1965 with Singaporean independence as an island and city state, Ah Boon finally picks a side. The rest is history.

In terms of this project, The Great Reclamation is clearly the best of the five books we have considered. We travel to learn something about other parts of the world and Heng’s 460 page novel certainly delivers on this remit. However, I have a soft spot for Japanese literature and The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is a fine example of the genre, even if Goenawan is not a native Japanese writer. The two books therefore sit at the top of the pile, not that such considerations are particularly relevant. Opinions are only ever subjective and what appeals to me might not be what appeals to you.

What is less of an opinion and more objective is how gratifying it is to find two Singaporean women writing and releasing novels. All five of these books came out within five years of one another from 2018 to 2023. Hopefully one can look forward to many more novels in the coming years. I seem to say this with each new country we visit, but it remains a truth universal: I will be reading Clarissa Goenawan and Rachel Heng’s books long after this project ends.

Rachel Heng

Zimbabwe - Nervous Conditions et al.

Country: Zimbabwe
Book: Nervous Conditions/The Book of Not/
This Mournable Body
Author: Tsitsi Dangarembga
Publication Year: 1988/2006/2018
Genre: Historical Fiction

Country: Zimbabwe
Book: We Need New Names/Glory
Author: NoViolet Bulawayo
Publication Year: 2013/2022
Genre: Fiction

We see a lot of firsts on this journey around the literary world. When Tsitsi Dangarembga’s  novel, Nervous Conditions, was published in 1988, she became the first female Zimbabwean author to be published in English. As we noted with Sia Figiel and Where We Once Belonged (see: Samoa), being published in English is a dubious honour and a patronising one to be invested on a non-white, non-Western author. Doubly dubious when the author also happens to be a woman.

It is also faint praise for an author from a country that was a British colony until April 1980. Or who was educated in England until her A Levels and later studied medicine at Cambridge University. Surely it would be more impressive to learn of an English writer writing in Nambya, Chewa, Shona, or any other Bantu language. One imagines that for many of the 15 official languages of Zimbabwe that are not English, it has yet to happen.

Yet this is where we find ourselves and Nervous Conditions is indeed the first book by a female Zimbabwean author to be published in English. It would go on to spawn two sequels: The Book of Not in 2006 and This Mournable Body in 2018. Each book is told, in one way or another (see below) by the main character, Tambudzai.

The book opens with the death of Tambudzai’s brother. Nhamo had attended a missionary school run by their uncle. Their parents could only afford to send one child to the school. With Nhamo’s death, Tambudzai is able to take his place. She is unable to feel upset about her brother’s death for this reason, although her lack of grief hints at deeper psychological issues that are revealed later in the series.

Like myriad books in this series, Nervous Conditions and its sequels are a mixture of fact and fiction. Tambudzai shares a room with her cousin, Nyasha. Like Dangarembga , Nyasha has spent part of her education studying in England.

Nervous Conditions is in one sense the kind of bildungsroman we have seen throughout this project (see: Kenya, Barbados, Brazil, Morocco et. al.). Yet it is also about the many kinds of oppression that lead to the nervous conditions referred to in the title. The oppression of a religious school in pre-Independence Zimbabwe that is wedded to western ideas of education. To the oppressive double standards to which girls and women are subjected in such schools. Also to the oppression of the ongoing independence war that was fought against the British 1965-1980 and which is always in the background as Tambudzai (and indeed Dangarembga) was growing up. Any wonder that she is in a constant state of agitation?

The Book of Not, written nearly 20 years later, picks up from the end of Nervous Conditions. Tambudzai attends Young Ladies' College of the Sacred Heart, where the prejudices of colonialism come further to bear. The oppression of western religions reasserts itself, as personified by Sister Emmanuel, who states that allowing a handful of black students into a principally white school is proof of their Christian values. Tambudzai becomes increasingly indoctrinated against independence. After graduation, she moves to Harare to become a copy writer at an advertising agency, cutting ties with her family as she does so.

By the time of This Mournable Body, Tambudzai alienation from her nationality and herself is complete. The entire novel is told in the second person with Tambudzai narrating the story to herself. She has left her copy writing job and moved into a boarding house. She finds a job as a high school biology teacher, but violently attacks one of her students, after which she suffers the breakdown which has bubbled under the surface since she was at the mission school. She is hospitalised, where the family she rejected for so many years come to visit her.

In the final act, Tambudzai gets a job with an ecotourism company and is forced to return home at long last. The company want a safe village to which it can take tourists and avoid more dangerous parts of the country. Yet when her mother attacks a tourist for taking a half naked photograph of her, Tambudzai finally appreciates the limits of colonialism and capitalism in improving the fortunes of the average Zimbabwean.

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Nervous Conditions reminds us that Zimbabwe’s story does not begin and end with Robert Mugabe and independence. The trail to hyperinflation and white Zimbabwean land being given to black farmers (of which western critics are curiously less critical when the inverse is done in the West Bank, for instance) begins a century or more before 1980.

The myopia from which we suffer when considering former colonial countries is brought into sharp focus when seen through the lens of works like this. They show us just how insulting it is to congratulate a non-European writer for writing in English (or any European language).

Indeed, many parts of Africa chose English, French or Arabic as their lingua franca because the colonisers were so sloppy in drawing national boundaries that they cut right across tribal lands, forcing rival tribes to share a nationality. Even the Swahili spoken in Kenya, Rwanda and other East African countries is spoken there because it developed from trade with Arabic countries on the other side of the Horn of Africa.

Independent Zimbabwe had already existed for 18 months when NoViolet Bulawayo was born in 1981. Her first novel, We Need New Names, has similarities to Nervous Conditions in being another bildungsroman. However, the childhood of Darling and her friends is all the more nightmarish than that of Tambudzai. Armed guards watching over the white neighborhoods. Dead bodies swinging in the trees. Their houses demolished by the paramilitary police. Their fathers forced to seek work abroad and barely remembered. The consequences of independence and Mugabe’s corrupt regime are like scenery painted in blood behind the action taking place on stage.

Darling is one of the lucky ones in going to live with her aunt in America. Once again we see the refuge escaping to the United States (see: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Dominican Republic et. al.) who later becomes a writer. The second half of the novel is almost pedestrian compared to the first half. Want gives way to plenty. Darling and her girlfriends watch pornography every day, going alphabetically through the categories (they are too scared to look at gay porn).  This aside, her life becomes much the same as any other coming of age story set in America during the last half century.

Through the wonders of the internet. Darling is able to stay in touch with her friends back in Zimbabwe. They become indignant towards her when she hasn’t returned home for a visit in many years. Yet she had entered America on a tourist visit and would be unable to re-enter if she left. Nothing is resolved by the end, which are always the most honest novels. Real lives are only resolved in death, because only them can a person’s life be assessed objectively and not by them.

Like Nervous Conditions, We Need New Names is obviously autobiographical. Bulawayo went to college in Michigan and Texas. The inclusion of the internet suggests the story is a a decade or more after when Bulawayo was a child. Or the American scenes are based on real events that took place later in her life. Either way, they show how little has changed in the country, even since Mugabe’s death in 2019. He was 95. Only the good die young, as they say.

What can we say about Bulawayo’s second novel, Glory? How to begin describe it? Is it Africa’s answer to Animal Farm? Or Zimbabwe’s answer to the Lion King (I haven’t seen the Lion King, liking neither Disney nor musicals, so I am unable to say one way of the other).

What we can say is that Glory is an allegory for the coup that finally unseated Robert Mugabe in 2017, two years before his death. His analogue in the story is the Old Horse, who is overthrown after ruling the fictional country of Jidada for 40 years. Other characters take the form of donkeys, goats, pigs, dogs, cats and a host of other animals. All of Orwell’s farmyard menagerie is represented, as well as more Afro-centric creatures, like the giant crocodile who wreaks havoc when he comes on land.

In most other regards, the animal inhabitants of Jidada behave just like humans. They drive, sit at desks at school and cook and eat food. They also use smart phones, with entire chapters dedicated to social media posts discussing events taking place in real time. At times they behave like normal animals, at others more like anthropomorphised versions. Like a Zimbabwean version of Bojack Horseman.

Glory satarises Zimbabwean politics, but also politics at large with references heard to ‘make Jidada great again’, which as well as the obvious, calls back to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents, where an American presidential candidate first used the slogan with chilling prescience.

As well as Orwell and Butler, Glory calls back to other allegorical stories. Orwell himself was calling on a western story telling tradition that goes back to Aesop. Orwell was also well versed in Kipling, no matter his criticism of the man’s politics. The Jungle Book (I have seen that Disney movie) and the Just So stories are steeped in Indian folk tales. In describing the crocodile as ‘Brobdingnagian’, Bulawayo is referencing Gulliver’s Travels, whose second voyage finds him in the land of Brobdingnag, occupied by giants. On his fourth journey, of course, Lemuel Gulliver meets the race of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms.

Glory is in many ways cyclical in nature. Through repeated chapter titles like, Defending the Revolution, 1983 and Defending the Revolution, 2019, we see how little changes with the overthrow of the Old Horse. Atrocities are still committed by those in authority. Elections are held under the hashtag #freefaircredible. A red flag to be sure. Everyone in Jidada knows corruption has taken place. The final chapter is entitled: Second Revolution. The cycle, like Vico’s ricorso, is about to begin all over again.

Bulawayo has said in interviews that she tried to write about the fall of Mugabe in non-fiction, but found satire to be a more appropriate format to talk about it. Perhaps it is more therapeutic as well. Less triggering. Less traumatic. Indeed, the book Glory best approximates is not Animal Farm, but Art Spiegelman’s holocaust graphic novel, Maus. A way to process the Mugabe’s years and their aftermath from a detached distance. To be able to satirise without dishonouring the dead. Exactly as Spiegelman did with Hitler and the carnage he unleashed.

As Tsitsi Dangarembga was the first black Zimbabwean female author to be published in English. NoViolet Bulawayo became, with We Need New Names, the first black African woman to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize (Glory was later nominated as well). Another dubious honour, given how long it has taken for a black African women to be recognised by the Booker Prize.

We default to women writers on this project for exactly these reasons. To recognise how far world literature still has to go. Marginalised groups are not marginalised for lack of talent. They are marginalised because gatekeepers like the publishing industry are still in the hands of a narrow section of society. The situation is changing, however glacially, and we should recognise that. Yet as Nina Simone famously sung of the civil rights movement, we must also say in refrain of publishing: Too slow. Too slow. 

NoViolet Bulawayo