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Walking StillCharles Mungoshi
Betrayal — actual or suspected, and counter-betrayal — is perhaps the overarching theme of the collection. The fine opening story, “The Hare” — one of the longer ones here — conveys a strange sense of doom or menace. Superficially it is an all too familiar tale of a traditionalist, a paterfamilias who is unexpectedly toppled from a position of considerable prosperity (as a top-ranking executive in a leading firm) when his company folds and he is retrenched. His much younger wife, whom he had made pregnant when she was in her third year of high school, startles him by jumping into the breach; she shows a flair for business, makes new friends and embarks on an entrepreneurial lifestyle that involves frequent trips far away from home, buying and selling clothes. Petty, jealous and weak as the husband is shown to be, Mungoshi makes one empathise with this rather unattractive personality faced with stresses it was never prepared for. Returning to his Harare home after seeing off his wife on one of her innumerable trips to Johannesburg, the husband orders the housemaid to prepare his two small daughters for a sudden visit the four of them are to make to his parents’ rural home, “a strange, irresistible nostalgia to revisit the scenes of his childhood” having “assailed” him (1). Throughout the story, the reader notices that the husband casts himself in the role of someone played upon by powerful forces, sensing (but seldom acknowledging) his own decisions and choices in the changes that are occurring. The hare mentioned in the title is road-kill: “he had wished both to hit and to avoid the hare” (5). Fatally injured as the little creature is, he does not put it out of its misery but merely lays it down in the boot of his car where he will rediscover it, dead, the next morning. Naturally interwoven into the protagonist’s thoughts on the long trip to his parents’ home are the various (and generally both predictable and unjust) sources of a profound resentment against his wife’s growing independence and success. On their arrival we see how the young housemaid observes the protocols of rural behaviour (unlike the protagonist’s wife, apparently) and how blatantly the protagonist’s parents are urging him to take her as a substitute or second wife. He sleeps with her that night, but the next morning at breakfast “they were all very quiet, subdued, as if they were accomplices in something that they couldn’t bring themselves to talk about” (24). The six-year-old girl is old enough to have noticed — and be horrified at — the betrayal. When she expresses her feelings on the way home, her father slaps her — only to have his arm fiercely grabbed by the young maid. As the shock of her instinctive deed hits home, she jumps from the car and runs into the rain — but now the same little girl runs after her, shouting “Mummy! Mummy!” She does not look back, but the protagonist describes her as standing “still like a pillar of rock” (26). At this complex, troubled and baffling moment, Mungoshi ends the story — unresolved, and yet at a moment of irrevocable adjustments. If nothing else is certain (yet), the weak indecisiveness and the waning authority of the protagonist are confirmed by his ascription of a rock-like steadiness to his young employee, and by his recognition of the parental authority and comfort his daughter now seeks from her. Perhaps the most brilliant and moving story in the collection is the brief sketch called “The Homecoming”, in which the central consciousness is that of an old, old woman, the sole surviving relative of a rough young ne’er-do-well, her sixteen-year-old grandson, the son of her favourite (late) daughter. Old Mandisa is utterly unselfpitying, but vividly aware that in her declining years she can exercise no control over the youngster’s wildness, except in a game of pretence that all is well between them, that he has not been expelled from school, that he regards her with proper respect. So when he denounces her in words whose ugliness recognises his own parasitism as much as her decrepitude (“Why … would you want me around you like a fly over rotten meat …?”) and then goes off, she takes to her bed: “the pain was in her heart, her limbs and her back” (29). She has no firewood for the coming winter, and in the roof of her hut the first gaping hole has appeared. Yet the youngster turns up again out of the blue. Knowing that his “insides were so murky, so turbulent” (30), she does not get her hopes up, although he has reverted to respectful speech and to the pretence of normality. All he really wants from her is beer and money for his new “friends”. His grandmother knows this and allows him to have both, but she is now on her last legs — that ignominious collapse of bodily control of the dying. Predictably this repels the hard young man, but something about his grandmother still has a hold on him — “I am the only one left of your own people” (35), she tells him. He walks away, out of her sight, but something pulls him back. The story ends as he carries the dying old woman into her hut. The longest of the stories has an awkward title — “Did You Have to Go that Far?” This is another powerful tale of betrayal, counter-betrayal and resurgent loyalty, this time among children — mainly two boys with almost identical names. The boys are equally poor and very naughty, but whereas the narrator’s father is both strict and just, his friend’s father is indiscriminately and unrelievedly punitive, and his home circumstances deteriorate further when the father becomes a wife-beater as well. A new family, consisting only of a mother and her sickly, clever son, comes to live in the township. As the two friends witness his mother greeting her son, the narrator’s friend’s observation conveys his own affection-starved circumstances: “kissing him — that is a very expensive habit [he says]. People who do it have money” (53). A tug-of-war (for the narrator’s friendship) ensues; although his abandonment of his first friend is validated to an extent, the latter’s loneliness and insecurity end in the discovery of his drowned body. In grief and fury the narrator drives away the wealthier family, and he dares to accuse his drowned friend’s father too. Whether he ever faces his own responsibility is less clear: “a crime I had committed but had somehow forgotten” (76). The social density of the above story (the account of the boys’ fights and friendships being set against the background of the parents’ — particularly the three mothers’ — interrelationships) is matched by its vividly “atmospheric” descriptions, like the indelible, surreal moment when the protagonist’s friend’s corpse is brought out from the dam in which he drowned: I saw how Pamba’s head drooped back unnaturally, how his arms and legs, bent at the knees, hung down, water dripping from them. Intense light was shimmering off the boulders on the green tree-fringed opposite bank of the dam. A lone white bird stood stock still on one of the large grey rocks along the water’s edge as if supervising the events on our side of the water. (80) Both “The Singer at the Wedding” and “The Empty House” are accounts of intense passion and failed idealism, the latter containing a very sympathetic account of an American wife. This contrasts with the bitingly sarcastic representation of a Canadian and (presumably) British pair who employ, host and complain of a Zimbabwean dinner guest’s drunken, uncompromising analysis of lingering neo-colonial attitudes. There is also a story of the embarrassing, painful dilemma of a wife’s belated discovery of her husband’s and their closest friend’s homosexual relationship, but in its rather melodramatic, overwrought tone (intended to convey the wife’s near hysteria) and yet strange matter-of-factness, I find this the least satisfactory of the stories. The final story, “The Little Wooden Hut in the Forest”, is a nativity tale that in its dream-like flow nevertheless incorporates aspects of the Zimbabwean post- (liberation) war trauma and shows oppression and denigration of women; here the Christmas baby is a girl born to a drifting war veteran and a female village victim. When he looks at his wife after the birth, the husband at last sees her vulnerability, beauty and strength. I conclude with a sketchy outline of the subtle tale “Sacrifice”, which depicts a family plagued by an inherited curse that decimates its children — a condition to be alleviated only if the eldest remaining daughter of three brothers is given in marriage to a descendant of the wronged family. This girl is vividly and delicately portrayed as she gradually discovers her intended fate — and the violent fierceness of the tugs-of-war in her extended family. In the main body of the story the reader shares her (and her mother’s) despair at the evident injustice — but irresistible power — of the demand that she become this sacrifice, but her attitude changes under the influence of two charismatic Christian girls, friends of a friend. The strange syncretism of this situation is utterly convincingly portrayed, and the story ends with the girl accepting the sacrificial role and healing the family feud by this gesture. Altogether (as I have been implying), Mungoshi’s is an excellent, enlightening collection, immersed in the Zimbabwean social setting of whose multifariousness it allows the reader some vivid glimpses. The collection is highly recommended. |
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To some extent eclipsed (outside of Zimbabwe, that is) by his more flamboyant compatriots such as (say) Dambudzo Marechera, Tsitsi Dangarembga or Yvonne Vera, Charles Mungoshi is deservedly highly rated as a meticulous, subtle craftsman and a writer whose work has the wide social reach of a fine-tuned observer. In this column I am addressing his 1997 short story collection, Walking Still (published by Baobab Books and reprinted in 1999). Mungoshi’s focus here is on the inner crises and adjustments occurring in the feelings (and the level of confidence) of various individuals, although the larger social shifts, such as job losses, the weakening of rural traditionalism, infidelity, homosexuality, neo-colonial practices, the aftermath of the liberation war, family brutality, AIDS and the continuing grip of “inherited” curses are all touched on in the nine stories (of various length) collected here.