One character from
Almanac of the Dead
whom I didn’t mention the other day is Clinton, the African American
Vietnam veteran and homeless man whose researches into the history of
slave revolts in the Americas and the intermingling of African American
and Native American peoples prove quite intriguing. While his personal
hold on sanity might be precarious, he is a compelling character who
brings a lot to the table. He is, in effect, the novel’s principal
liaison between the indigenous of the American and African continents. A
common motif in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel is the African peoples’
retaking of their lands in the 20
th century and their
standing, thus, as an inspiration and a model for indigenous America’s
eventual reclaiming of its own – as prophesied.
But to what end this liberation of African nations from their
European overlords? Isn’t Africa today wholly a tale of ecological and
human degradation, of continuing and continual bloodletting and mass
starvation, of the mere replacement of white rulers for black tyrants?
What does liberation mean in this context? Is the future a hopeful place
at all or a recipe for despair?
With these questions in mind it was with considerable interest that I picked up Zimbabwean writer Tendai Mwanaka’s
Keys in the River: Notes from a Modern Chimurenga,
which the Hawaiian publisher Savant Books brought out this year. In
these stories Mwanaka does indeed wade through a territory rife with
atrocity and yet also humor, love, and resilience. Answers to the
questions posed above are not directly given in these stories, but a
hope that the African peoples will eventually find their way is at least
suggested. These matters are difficult and complicated, to be sure, and
unique from nation to nation; and likewise nothing comes easy in the
starkly realistic world of these stories, though their harsh realities
are leavened now and then by a romantic tone – bringing the work, at
last, to a high note of hope and dignity.
For “dignity” the author might say “nobility.” In his prologue,
explaining the significance of the word “chimurenga” (which most
approximately means “struggle”), he comments in this way on the book’s
theme: “Even when a people are faced with a chaotic and turbulent world
due to the machinations of despotic leaders, the terror of ongoing
pandemics, the chronic poverty stemming from poorly designed economies,
the human heart continues to pump with courage, with conviction. A
chimurenga, then, is not just a struggle but also a noble stance in the
face of the struggle” (p. 1).
One
of the most affecting stories to me – and stunning in its effect – is
“Limpopo’s Bones.” The Limpopo is a crocodile-infested river and one of
the hurdles in illegal crossings between Zimbabwe and South Africa, the
latter in a sense being to the United States what Zimbabwe is to Mexico.
The bones, as we eventually discover, belong to an infant who is
abandoned beside the river when this particular crossing goes bad. The
protagonist is a young man who relates the wrenching story of what
happened (and of his responsibility in it) during the time he was a sort
of Zimbabwean counterpart to the Mexican “coyote” – “a Malaitshas, a
border gangtster, helping people cross over to South Africa illegally”
(p. 50). The story itself becomes witness to the ordinariness of the
perpetrators of crimes against humanity whom we call Monsters – the
evil-doing Other – while in fact they are just human beings much like
us, only pushed by various combinations of fear and hate, cynicism and
circumstance to commit their cruel acts (though the presence among them
of sociopathy might not hurt either). At the same time the story puts a
face on the so-called “illegal alien” of a portion of our political
discourse in the USA.
How does one read such a story and still manage to see the average
illegal crossers as merely criminal – for no other act at all than the
crossing of the border itself, an act that people have been doing for
millenia in response to the moment’s needs? What I am pointing out here
is simply an illustration of Kenneth Burke’s notion of literature as
persuasion to attitude.
Another story that took my breath away is the short piece “Breaking
the Silence,” which deals, within this African context, with the problem
of disappearances and death squads that has been so prevalent in Latin
America. “In those days,” Mwanaka’s narrator says, “people were
disappearing even in broad daylight” (p. 81). The horror of what occurs
here to one young couple, the wife who is pregnant with what was to be
their first child, is chilling. The horror that the story names is well
expressed in this narrator’s phrase: “this terror, this monstrosity of
patriotism” (p. 83). How safe are we ever, even in our land, from the
violence of our own monstrosities of patriotism?
These stories of barbarities are broken up, thankfully, with stories
about other things including love and even containing humor. The two
most successful love stories, in my view, are an early story called “And
She Said ‘Yes’” and a late one called “Hearts Are Victors”; these are
the happiest, in any case, and very sweet. Of the predominantly
humorous, the funniest is “Thus Far; No Further” which involves a
nighttime raid by haughty boys to rescue their unjustly impounded cattle
from the local mission’s enclosure. Against the spiteful nun and her
acquiescent priest – those are who stand to profit by the usurious fines
on an impoverished people’s straying cattle – the mischievous boys are
triumphant. The little tale is itself quite charming.
The collection’s first story, “Sunset,” deals rather dramatically
with the AIDS crisis as it affects one young man in particular. This
story is directly tied to the last, “Sunrise,” which explores the
experience of the girlfriend who might also be infected. These two
stories in their unity, starting in tragedy, become a paean to hope that
is also implied by the boys’ outwitting of their oppressors. The book
ends, then, with this simple declarative sentence: “It was time to let
tears run dry” (p. 243). Coming right after the joyous “Hearts Are
Victors” the effect of this last story is very strong, and lends to the
whole collection a sense of redemption.
This isn’t a perfect book. There is some linguistic awkwardness here
and there, perhaps stemming from the author’s writing in a second
language – though, on the whole, he writes very well. Some of the
stories seem too heavy on the explication, which merges into a sometimes
annoying moralizing – which in turn speaks to an occasional confusion, I
think, between author and narrator (a confusion helped along by the
introducing of a younger Tendai himself into two or three of the tales).
But overall these are mere quibbles. The book strongly deserves a wide
readership.
***
The
visual image and text that introduce this last segment come courtesy of
my son, Jonathan, who posted it last week to his Facebook page. In this
context – and I hope that the association with a book about one corner
of Africa won’t encourage another round of birther madness; the forever
re-asserting, alongside other baseless and racially-tinged conspiracy
theories, of the disproven allegation that President Obama was born not
in the state of Hawaii but in another corner of Africa – in this context
it seems to me that regardless of whatever else anyone might rationally
say against Obama he cannot be accused of an unwillingness to negotiate
with the Republicans in Congress.
Perhaps his primary fault was just to keep believing – despite the
open declaration of contempt for his authority and of a determination to
see him fail – that they would compromise back.
What a sad commentary on the present state of the Republican Party!
about 1300 words
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Aug 18, 2012 -
Yeats, in “The Second Coming”: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”–Regards, Ron Pies MD