"The Immigrant" by Helon Habila

Came across a short story by Helon Habila that I hadn't seen before this morning. Excrutiatingly beautiful. Excrutiatingly sad. Perfectly fits my state of mind right now. Exactly why Helon Habila is one of my favourite authors.

You can find "The Immigrant" at African Writing Online.

Interview with Helon Habila at Pambazuka News

Last week I had the privilege to finally meet Helon Habila in person (at George Mason University), after many years of reading his work and communicating by email. He was a gracious host, and it was delightful to hear about his most recent projects.

Tonight I came across this interview Mildred Kiconco Barya did with him back in May for Pambazuka News. Enjoy.

Mukoma wa Ngugi nominated for Caine Prize

I found out yesterday that my buddy Mukoma wa Ngugi has been nominated and shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. The winner will be announced on July 6, 2009. Past winners have included (oh yes) Helon Habila, Monica Arec de Nyeko, Binyavanga Wainaina, Leila Aboulela,Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, S.A. Afolabi, and others. You can read Mukoma’s nominated short story “How Kamau wa Mwangi Escaped into Exile” , which I was privileged to read still in draft a few years ago before its June 2008 publication in Wasafiri, here.

Congratulations, Mukoma! And good luck! So exciting!

Image courtesy ME (Talatu-Carmen)

Click below, to buy Mukoma's book

Nairobi Heat

Mukoma wa Ngugi on the Upcoming U.S. Presidential election

Beautiful poetry and incisive analysis on the upcoming presidential election by my friend Mukoma wa Ngugi here on BBC.

The Novel Jiji by Plateau-based author Changchit Wuyep

Several weeks after I arrived back into Nigeria, I had the pleasure of attending a meeting of Jos ANA (Association of Nigerian Authors). I was quite involved with the Jos ANA chapter when I lived in Jos from 2001-2003, but the membership has almost completely changed. Nevertheless, I don’t know if I have attended another ANA meeting in which I have been so impressed by both the quality of the works read and the level of commentary and discussion about writing. While there, I met Mrs. Changchit Wuyep who read from her novel Jiji, a mythic novel set in pre-colonial Plateau State. I bought a copy and finally got around to reading it on a 12 hour trip on a bus from Ibadan (where I had gone for a conference) to Jos last week. I was enthralled, and wanted to write a little blurb for it here. This weekend I did an interview with Mrs. Wuyep, which I will post, together with the blurb on my other blog.

Jiji by Changchit Wuyep

With a storytelling flair remniscient of Amos Tutuola, Abubakar Imam, Flora Nwapa, and Zainab Alkali, nurse and writer Changchit Wuyep spins a tale about a Sinbad-like hero that is rooted in the worldview of the Tarok people of Plateau State:

In one of the worst storms ever seen in the village of Jangnap, a child is born who will bring both misfortune and deliverance his people. Claimed by a river goddess who will not be appeased, the child is miraculously saved from drowning by a gorilla and is raised by mountain people, propelled from one adventure to another by multiple warring gods, who desire him as their champion. The novel takes the form of a journey in which the hero and his faithful gorilla companion are pulled between two forces of dark and light, the water goddess and the mountain god. While given supernatural forces by the gods, his strong sense of justice comes from what he has learned in his years of travel in the mountains, the forest, the desert, and the sea, and his interaction with hermits and villagers, spirits and gods. After having grown from an infant to a man, Jiji arrives back to Jangnap. It is his sense of justice learned of his wanderings, even more than the gifts of the god, that bolsters him in his final battle against oppression.

To read my conversation with Changchit Wuyep, see my other blog.

The subversive power of new technologies....

(written Friday... now in an internet cafe singing along to Boyz 2 Men, "Now, we come to the end of theuh rooaad, still I caaaan't leet go-ooooo....")

I got back to Kano from Jos yesterday to the news that I had taken the light with me. No PHCN/NEPA for five days straight. In Jos, it was off for at least three of those days. My father visited the local PHCN office to have a long detailed conversation with the workers about a national power grid failure… ai me…

Here is a story I was told last night that excited me and made me think that my desire to write on the way technology is exploding existing power structures is on track. The family friend who told me this is a young Bakane man, let’s call him Bashir, who is waiting for NYSC, having completed his degree this past year. There was a lecturer at his polytechnic who was a known “tribalist” and chaser of female students. According to Bashir, this lecturer did not like him because Bashir is Hausa-Fulani, and although Bashir had made Bs on both of his exams, the man failed him. Bashir took his case to the HOD, upon which the lecturer claimed that he had seen Bashir cheating, and that is why he failed him. When asked to prepare another exam for Bashir to retake, since he had no evidence that Bashir was cheating, the man brought an exam in which he filled it with things that had not been taught in the class. When Bashir protested that this was testing things they had not been taught, another student from the class was brought in, who confirmed Bashir’s story that none of the things on the new exam had been taught in that course. Finally, the lecturer cornered Bashir and told him that unless he paid him N10,000, he would not pass him.

“I went back to the hostel and cried,” Bashir tells me. “What else could I do? Where could I come up with the money? If I told my father, he would not give me since he has always advised me that I will advance in life from my own hard work, not whether I am rich or poor.”

Typical story, right? One played over and over again in Nigerian literature and popular culture. (See Buchi Emicheta’s Double Yoke, Eedris Abdulkareem’s “Mr. Lecturer,” Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino’s Hausa novel, Wani Hanin Ga Allah) Here is where it gets interesting. Bashir tells me that he remembered an episode of 24, he had seen in which a girl had alerted police to what was going on by dialing a number and keeping her cell phone open. Bashir realized he could use his cell phone in a similar way. So, he went to the lecturer and pressed “record” on his cell phone and proceeded to beg his lecturer. “I don’t have the money. I cannot come up with 10,000 naira,” he told the man. “If you don’t have 10,000 naira, bring N5,000, he told him.” Bashir begged him some more to reduce it to N2,500, and they finally settled on N3,500. Bashir told him he would bring it the next week, and the lecturer said that he must bring it by the next morning or he would fail him.

“I went straight to the HOD,” Bashir said. “I told him that the lecturer asked me for N10,000 to pass his class.” The HOD said, “No, not him. He wouldn’t do that. Where is your proof?” “I pulled out my phone and played him the recording. He sat with his head in his hands, saying ‘oh no, oh no.’ From there, there were some who wanted to sack him, but there was a powerful professor, who is of his same tribe and also a cultist, who fought for him. (Because he is involved with the cults everyone fears him, even the other lecturers.) So, he was suspended for 6 months. Shege wawa….”

This powerful professor succeeded in (according to Bashir) reducing his 2.1 degree to a 2.2 (even so, he graduated first in his class), trying even to give him a 3^rd class until one of the other lecturer’s argued that there would be trouble from the external examiners if they saw that he had graduated at the top of his class but had gotten a 3^rd class.

What excited me about this story, whether or not it is embroidered in Bashir’s favour, is recognizing the ways in which new technologies are exploding hypocrisies. The power of the cell phone in exploding secrets is clear enough in the Hiyana scandal, in which the adultery that would normally have stayed the secret of the businessman and the actress became public knowledge. (Of course a professor here tells me that similar sex phone videos created by students had been seized at the university even before the Hiyana scandal, but the fact that an actress was involved in the phone video gave the critics the ammunition they had been looking for to confirm the “iskanci” of the film industry.)

What interests me, however, is how these new technologies are challenging entrenched power structures of society, in which filmmakers (and musicians with music videos) tell stories that expose (or at least make accusations about) the secret lives of the rich and powerful. These stories, which the critics try to pass off as mere “entertainment”/ “spoiling society with the corruption of the West” /“what sales,” are actually often profoundly political statements by disenfranchised youth against the excesses of their elders. Ado Ahmad Gidan Dabino’s novel In da So da Kauna first published in 1991 (or 2) anticipated this: The heroine Sumayya suffers through many trials (most prominently including her grandmother taking bribes from a wealthy suitor) to finally marry her poor but virtuous lover, Muhammad. After the marriage, her grandmother comes to the house and tries to break up the marriage. Unknown to her, Sumayya records their conversation and then plays it back to her father, thus discrediting her grandmother.

Such examples turn value systems which value elders, wealth, and “minding one’s own business” or “keeping secrets” on their head. The argument from the youth seems to be that the elderly and the powerful have forfeited their right to respect by abusing their privileges. New technologies (cell phones, digital video recorders, internet, etc) now give youth a power to challenge the entrenched power structures.

Now if there were some viable cheap technology to challenged the entrenched power (or non-power) structure of PHCN (other than generators....)

The Heroism of Ordinary People: An Interview with Helon Habila

Thanksgiving day in America... a cornbread dressing in the tradition of my Louisiana grandmother is in the oven and a pumpkin pie is done and cooling on the counter. I'm going to my advisor's house later for dinner to celebrate with some other African students. My interview with Helon Habila was published this week. I am thankful:

This is the 1000 word (ie. gutted) version of an interview with Helon Habila I conducted via telephone last Tuesday before he left for his book tour in Nigeria. (The easy part was transcribing. I spent hours cutting it to get it to 1000 words... ughh...) The story of the interview itself is a longer one, which perhaps I will post about sometime, but Habila was one of the most gracious people I have met via telephone.... The following was published in Leadership this past Monday, 19 November 2007. Unfortunately, the link is no longer up, but this is how it appeared in the newspaper. (In an interesting aside, my dad met him today after the reading at the University of Jos.) Perhaps I'll post the entire interview on my other blog when I have a chance to edit it properly; it will be published in the journal Abiku early next year. But here is the short version:

"The Heroism of Ordinary People: An Interview with Helon Habila"

Award winning novelist Helon Habila grew up in Gombe State. After earning his BA in English at the University of Jos in 1995, he taught at the Federal Polytechnic, Bauchi. Moving to Lagos in 1999, he became the arts editor at the Vanguard and wrote a novel, published as Waiting for An Angel in 2002, which won the Caine Prize for African Fiction in 2001 and the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2003. Habila has published stories, articles, and poems in journals world-wide and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of East Anglia. After a stint as the first Chinua Achebe fellow at Bard College in New York, Habila took a position at George Mason University where he teaches creative writing. He is in Nigeria from November 17 to November 24 to promote his second novel Measuring Time. In this interview on behalf of LEADERSHIP, he speaks with Talatu-Carmen [my real name used in the publication; i suppose i should stop this ridiculous attempt to protect my identity--pretty much everybody who reads this blog knows who I am], a PhD student at a university in the USA, about his writing.

Talatu-Carmen: I was wondering what your creative process is like. Where do your stories come from?

HABILA: I really cannot say exactly, but I am really inspired by books. Sometimes I write in reaction to books I have read. Then there is also my experience: Measuring Time has a lot of that—my experiences as a child growing up. There was a time when I realised that I wanted to write about my hometown. From that moment whatever I did I viewed it through the eyes of fiction, thinking of how to represent the people I met, the things I did, the places I saw. I was thinking of them as already a part of my book that I was going to write. I was going to write Measuring Time even before I started writing Waiting for an Angel.

In both of your novels the act of writing itself seems to take on a political significance. What, to you, is the political responsibility of the writer?

Well, quite a lot, especially as an African writer. I think there is that tradition which started from the first generation of African writers. They were writing against the whole colonial system, which was very repressive, very racist, very dictatorial. They actually used to have congresses where they would discuss the best way to write fiction in a way that would address the political issues of the day. Even before that, in traditional African society, from the folk tales, there’s always a kind of moral lesson, a kind of didacticism that is seen as an aesthetic part of that story. So politics more or less becomes an aesthetic in African fiction. There are no boundaries between what is purely political and what is art. Art becomes politics and politics becomes art. So I think people like me who find themselves in that tradition, and have that temperament, that awareness of what is going on, who feel that things shouldn’t be the way they are, have a duty to speak out. It is tradition and it’s also a matter of temperament, because there are definitely writers in Africa who don’t write about politics. They write art for art’s sake, or whatever you want to call it.

Could you say more about the influences of Hausa literature on your writing?

Definitely. I grew up reading the translation of One Thousand and One Nights in Hausa and the works of Abubakar Imam, Magana Jari Ce, Ruwan Bagaja, etc. So there is that magical or folkloric representation of reality, which is very different from pure realism. I was definitely influenced by that. And before that I was also influenced by folktales told to me by women in the compound. So, these Hausa books I discovered later were almost a continuation of that story tradition with the magical elements, spirit figures and things like that.

Both of your novels deal with history. In Measuring Time, the character Mamo wants to write a biographical history. Is this one of your own goals?

Definitely, I think so. Because so much that we have is fast fading away and being taken over by the modern, I see writing itself as cultural conservation. That is exactly what Mamo’s project is, conserving the history of people…, because they were misrepresented by the [missionary] Reverend Drinkwater. If you represent what has been misrepresented, you are putting the records right. And that is what history is supposed be. Taking moments of glory, and also ordinary moments—moments of humanity, of value to the community, and putting it down in books. It doesn’t have to be about generals, it doesn’t have to be about chiefs, it could be about ordinary people, their heroism. That is the whole point of the book, that lives should be celebrated, regardless of what office or what lack of office that person has.

Newton Aduaka, the winner of the Golden Yennenga Stallion at the FESPACO film festival, is making a film based on Waiting for an Angel. How involved have you been with this?

I’m not really involved. I’m just the author of the novel. I see film as being totally different from literature. They are both narrative art forms, but they have different ways of representing their story, their subject. I trust him as an artist. I think my novel is strong enough to stand on its own, even if the movie is a bit different in some of its portrayals.

Have you ever thought of writing a screenplay or becoming involved in film?

I really want to do that some day. Some people approached me to write a movie script. I started writing it and then it became a novel! I’m really enjoying the experience. I don’t know how far it’s going to go, but I’m definitely going to go into movies one of these days. To write, or even direct, if I have the chance. The movie industry is just incredible, and I think this is the moment to get involved.

All right, thank you so much.

Thank you, you’re welcome.

Photo credit: Helon Habila with Jeremiah Gyang and Ola Soyinka. Kudus to amazing middlebelt artists! From Naijablog

Rest In Peace Cyprian Ekwensi

This is a little bit late, but a post in honour of the late Cyprian Ekwensi, author of Jagua Nana, Burning Grass, and others. He died at age 86.

Here is a 2006 interview that Basil Okafor conducted with him for the Daily Sun.

Illustration credit: Basil Okafor

A Brief Biography of Helon Habila

Here is another bit that I've excised from my introduction, but which I am keeping in an appendix. Any corrections or comments welcome.
[NOTE: updated 10 January 2008]

Appendix 3:
A Brief Biography of Helon Habila:
Helon Habila[1] was born in 1967 to a Christian Tangale family in Kaltungo, Gombe State, in the northern middlebelt region of Nigeria. His father, Habila Ngalabak, started out his career as a preacher with white missionaries, and later become a civil servant with the Ministry of Works, which meant that the family often moved around when Habila was a young boy. Habila’s mother contributed to the family income with her work as a tailor. Habila completed his primary and secondary education in the city of Gombe. According to the introduction of his interview with Helon Habila “Everything Follows,” Frank Bures notes that Habila’s skill in weaving stories was noticed early on by his teachers: “In his fifth year of primary school, his teachers … took him to various classrooms to spin his tales for the other kids.”

In the introduction to his short story “The Night of the Monster” on the Crossing Borders African Writing website, Habila describes the very first influences on his own storytelling ability, noting that that his “first encounter with fiction was oral, not textual. I grew up in a tenement house with about six other families, and in the nights our mothers would gather all the children, more than a dozen of us, and tell us stories… I can now see the influence of those stories in my fiction—I like compelling story lines that grip you, like the ancient mariner, and force you to listen.” However, after learning English at around age seven, he “never stopped reading.” The third of seven siblings, Habila describes himself growing up as “the outsider, watching, unable to fully participate. (I am the only one in my family who is not fluent in my mother tongue). I grew up reading anything I could lay my hands on…. I was going to be a writer, and that was it.” His early influences he cites as the Bible in Hausa and English and later in his teenage years Western classics such as Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Henry James, Dickens, and so on. (Habila, Introduction “The Night of the Monster”). In an Encompass Culture interview hosted by Susan Tranter he claims that his literary idols range from “Shakespeare to Soyinka. I am always open to impressions and ideas. The beauty of the novel is that it can absorb as many styles and philosophies as one cares to throw into it, and it gets the better for it.” The authors he still hears “ringing in my sentences and opinions, are Stephen Crane, Achebe, Ngugi, and Shakespeare.”

Although he had fallen in love with stories and literature at an early age, he initially attempted to follow his father’s dream for him to become an engineer, enrolling at the Bauchi University of Technology and then the Bauchi College of Arts and Sciences (Bures and Habila). However, his studies did not interest him, and he finally returned home “directionless and despondent.” He confided to interviewer Jason Cowley “‘I had no idea what I would do or what would become of me,’ he says. ‘I used to quarrel so much with my father.’” In 1989, while still at home “holed up in his room, reading and writing,” (Bures and Habila) Habila’s father and one of his younger brothers was killed in a car accident, an incident which seems to inform the heartbreaking story “Bola” in Waiting for an Angel.

After the deaths of his father and brother, Habila enrolled in the English BA programme at the University of Jos. There, he thrived. And there he met his friend Toni Kan, a young man from Delta State who had a similar interest in literature and writing. The two young men entered into a friendly rivalry that pushed them further in their literary pursuits. Professor Kanchana Ugbabe remembers how the two students would often come to her office after class to talk and borrow books. Helon Habila was the quieter one, she said, while Toni Kan was more outspoken, but the two young men seemed to spur each other on. In his article “Another Age” in Granta, Habila describes how “each of us wanted to be the first to achieve literary glory. We went in for the same BBC competitions, then hid the rejection slips from each other, claiming our manuscripts had been lost in the post” (152). Shortly after Kan won an essay contest which garnered him a six-week trip to England, in 1992 Habila’s published his first short story “Embrace of the Snake” in an anthology of Nigerian writing, Through Laughter and Tears edited by Chidi Nganga(152). However, after the two graduated from the university in 1995, Habila relates that Kan’s life seemed the more glamorous. While Kan moved to Lagos to work for a magazine and soon became a literary “star,” Habila found more prosaic work at the Federal Polytechnic in Bauchi, where he lectured in English and Literature from 1997 to 1999 and published the biography Mai Kaltungo.

In 1999, at Kan’s invitation, Habila moved to Lagos and became a columnist and editor in Kan’s romance magazine Hints. (Blog Note: More on Hints as experienced by Kayode Ajala here.) He went on to become the arts editor at the influential newspaper the Vanguard and became involved with the Lagos chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors. It was in 2000 in Lagos that he began to receive serious attention for his literary writing. His poem “Another Age” won first place in the MUSON (Musical Society of Nigeria) Festival Poetry Competition in 2000 and his short story “The Butterfly and the Artist” won the Liberty Bank Prize. His poems “Birds in the Graveyard” and “After the Obsession” were published in the collection of poetry 25 New Nigerian Poets, edited by Toyin Adewale and published by Ishmael Reed. It was also in 2000, that Habila self published his collection of short stories Prison Stories and submitted the opening story of the collection “Love Poems” for the Caine Prize for African Writing, a substantial prize awarded for “a short story by an African writer published in English” (“Rules of the Caine Prize 111). Frank Bures relates how “When the Caine Prize committee wrote back to tell Habila’s publisher that he’d been shortlisted, he replied anonymously. ‘Thanks for your mail. We’ll let the author know immediately. We hope that God will guide the judges in their choice’” (Bures and Habila). After winning the 15,000 pound prize, he received a book contract with Norton to publish the collection of short stories as the novel Waiting for an Angel. The novel, which came out in 2002, went on to win the 2003 Commonwealth Literature prize for the best first novel by an African writer. Since publication of Waiting for an Angel, Habila has been at the University of East Anglia in Norwich England where he was awarded a writing fellowship for two years and where he is currently doing PhD work on the life of Dambudzo Marechera. He has also been a fellow at the University of Iowa International Writing Program, a Chinua Achebe fellow at Bard College in 2005-2006. Currently, he teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University. His second novel Measuring Time was published by Norton in February 2007.

Here is a link to my November 2007 interview with him that was originally published in Leadership on 19 November 2007 and republished in the DailyTrust. Here also is my review of both Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time.

(Update 10 April 2012) To purchase Helon Habila's books through my amazon associates account, click on the following links:

[1] The information in this brief biography has been gleaned from multiple sources: Toyin Adewale ed., “The Poets,” 25 New Nigerian Poets. (Ishmael Reed: Berkely, 2000). Jason Cowley, “To finish my book was an act of will.” 26 July, 2001. Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4228260-103680,00.html Downloaded 29 April 2006.; Frank Bures and Helon Habila, “Everything Follows: An Interview with Helon Habila.” Poetsand Writers. 2006. <http://www.pw.org/mag/0301/bures.htm> Downloaded 2 September
06.;Helon Habila with with Susan Tranter, “Helon Habila.” Encompass Culture. http://www.encompassculture.com/readerinresidence/authors/helonhabila/ Downloaded 14 March 2006.; Helon Habila, “Another Age,” Granta. 80 (2002): 147-154.; Helon Habila. Introduction. “The Night of the Monster.” Crossing Borders: New Writing From Africa. British Council<http://www.crossingborders-africanwriting.org/writersonwriting/helonhabila/> Downloaded 2 September 2006.; Helon Habila. Email to author. September 6, 2006; “Biographies,” Timbuktu, Timbuktu: A Selection of Works from the Caine Prize for African Writing. Jacuna: Durban, 2002. p. 109-110.; Professor Kanchana Ugbabe. Personal conversation with the author. University of Jos, 21 August 2006.

Photo Credit:http://www.mywritingworld.org.uk/writersimages/Helon-Habil.jpg

The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Here are my first impressions of The Book of Not

by Tsitsi Dangarembga. I'd welcome a dialogue with anyone else who has read this book. (Warning: spoilers ahead)

Dangarembga, Tsitsi.

The Book of Not: A Sequel to Nervous Conditions

Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke, 2006.

I’m trying to figure out whether my disappointment in this novel is that of a literary critic or merely that of a reader who had loved Nervous Conditions
and identified with the forceful yet ambiguous narrative of the main character Tambudzai. Perhaps it is unfair to impose my own expectations of a sequel so long awaited on the author, but this is the sequel I had imagined: Tambudzai continues at the Sacred Heart academy, does well, receives a scholarship to study in England, and discovers in exile the regretful, cynical voice with which she narrates both novels—finding too late that in her desire for advancement in the European world she had lost her connection to family, to history, and to herself. In the second novel, I imagined, she would begin to retrace her steps to find what she had lost. In any case, I expected that I'd still like the plucky yet imperfect narrator, whatever obstacles she may have to overcome.

This is not what happened. Instead the hints at selfishness and the craving for acceptance that we see in Nervous Conditions (her lack of grief over her brother’s death, her relief to get away from the homestead, etc) develop into a character who, by the end of her first person narrative in The Book of Not, is thoroughly un-likeable. Tambudzai dreams of greatness—greatness being that which will propel her ahead of her classmates, to a position where her family have no option but to be proud, a position in which she can have the vengeance of success to hold over her disapproving mother; she will demonstrate to her white classmates and teachers that she is capable of surpassing them. Although Tambudzai is clearly capable of achievement, her frustrating desire to please, her suppression of her rage, results failure. Tambudzai’s interest in school has little to do with an actual interest in what she is studying but with honours, awards, and exam results. Nervous Conditions is a Dickensonian bildingsroman tracing the successes of the homestead girl who had the support of a benevolent uncle, an optimistic structure ironically undermined by psychological loss of self a la Black Skins, White Masks. In The Book of Not, Dangarembga systematically tears down Tambudzai’s accomplishments achieved in Nervous Conditions. The trajectory of the narrative is a steady descent into lower and lower levels of a self-negating hell.

Like Nervous Conditions, the story is told through Tambudzai’s unreliable first person narration, yet there are fewer moments of tenderness here. The author doesn't seem to like her narrator very much. Dangarembga takes a particularly bitter swipe at Tambudzai when she comes back to the mission on vacation and finds her subdued cousin Nyasha reading Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat. Although Tambudzai has been attempting to memorize the complete works of Shakespeare for her exams, she displays an aggressive ignorance of African literature, saying, “[Nyasha] was reading a book she had not bothered to share with me, which rather than being revolutionary seemed to be about agriculture for it was called A Grain of Wheat, written as far as I could see by someone like poor Bongo in the Congo, a starving Kenyan author” (117). Not only is she ignorant of Ngugi’s work but she disdains the efforts of the other African girls to speak Shona together: “These seniors were planning to spend the entire evening trying futiley to turn back time by speaking Shona! Just imagine! Inviting a mark for refusing to accept which language was allowed and which was not when you were as far as the sixth form!... I was not going to identify with a group that spoke in the only language, out of all the ones that were known at the school, which was forbidden” (169). Success for her is in becoming what she is told to become, in rejecting that which is African to embrace that which is European. To speak Shona is to be out of date, to be insubordinate. Having had her early rebellion over using the white girl’s toilets beaten out of her, she no longer questions any rules placed upon her. This is the point where I miss the fiery character Nyasha, who plays only a peripheral and sedated role in this sequel, and whose blunt observations might have provided a balance to Tambudzai's desperate self-delusion.

The history of Zimbabwe here presented is bitterly cynical. The book opens with Tambudzai’s disjointed, almost incoherent, description of her freedom-fighting sister’s leg being blown off and her uncle Babamukuru being beaten by the villageres for being “not exactly a collaborator, but one whose soul hankered to be at one with the occupying Rhodesian forces” (6). This opening accounts for the terror the elite African students as well as the white students at Sacred Heart feel for the Zimbabwean freedom fighters. Tambudzai locks away her memories of her sister’s leg, until her classmate Ntombi comes to weep in her room about a baby cousin being drowned by “terrorists,” because “[t]hey said my aunt is feeding terrorists… Yes, she talked because of what they did to the baby. But it was too late. My little cousin was broken, just broken!... Then my aunt killed herself, because when it’s like that, you’ll never live… No one is alive!” (172). In an initial reading it is hard to tell whether the “Rhodesian” army or the “Zimbabwean” army has committed these atrocities. Tambudzai’s pain is so deep that she tries not to think about it at all.

Despite the struggle for freedom from white rule, the new Zimbabwe, which has emerged by the end of the narrative, mirrors the old. Language is cloaked in political correctness. At school, the girls are "consumed by ... terror" that they might inadvertantly break the school rules about physical seperation between the white and black students. If a black girl should accidentally touch a white girl in an assembly queue "looks of such horror flooded their faces at this accidental contact that you often looked around to see what horrendous monster caused the expression, before you realised it was your person" (58-9). This history is countered with hypocritical inter-racial hugs between the co-workers at the end of the story. But under this shallow familiarity lurks the old racist structures. Tracy, the white student, who knowingly stole Tambudzai’s trophy for the best 0-levels in secondary school, becomes Tambu’s boss. A white copywriter praises Tambudzai’s advertising copy for a hair straightening product and then takes the copy as his own, going on to win a company prize for the text. (The hair straightening product represents the continued structures of idealizing Europeans ideas of what is good, under new leadership. And Tambudzai’s ability to write sentimental copy about it demonstrates her imbrication in these mental structures.) Tambudzai’s dreams are crushed over and over again. She is the ultimate victim. Although she gets the best O-level results in the class, a white girl gets the prize, while Tambudzai goes unacknowledged. Upon becoming a senior, she chooses to focus on math and science, yet because of her race she is not allowed to attend the national boy’s school the other girls from Sacred Heart attend for the science classes. She is left trying to make sense of the sciences from the handwritten notes of a white classmate. Despite hours of study, she miserably fails her A-levels.

The reader sympathizes with her victimhood, until it becomes obvious that Tambudzai is unwilling to take any action to protest these inequities. She seems to almost aggressively seek a silent martyrdom in pursuit of her own interpretation of unhu, “that profound knowledge of being, quietly and not flamboyantly; the grasp of life and of how to preserve and accentuate life’s eternal interweavings that we southern Africans are famed for, what others now call ubuntu, demanded that I consoled myself, that I be well so that others could be well also” (103). Despite her resentment of racist rules which segregate bathrooms by race, she volunteers to knit socks for Rhodesian soldiers in the fight against her “elder siblings,” to comfort the children of a farmer killed by the “elder siblings,” to ensure that she is viewed favourably by the administration. When Tracy is announced the winner of the prize for the best O-levels, most of the girls know it is a lie because they saw Tambudzai’s results. Yet, when her classmate Ntombi urges her to go talk to the headmistress, telling her that she will come along with her for moral support, Tambuzai refuses and silently sits through the award ceremony in an agony of self-mortification. When the white copywriter takes her out for coffee to inform her that he will be stealing the credit for her “brilliant” advertising copy, she deludes herself that it is a sacrifice she must take for future credit. When he receives an award for the copy, she resigns the job, but she does not even take the satisfaction of claiming her rights in her resignation, but lies that she is quitting to get married.

Much of Tambudzai’s problem is the suppression of her rage: she accepts the position given her by the whites, while taking out her aggression on those who have not achieved her level: the chirpy secretary, her vengeful mother at the homestead. Indeed, although Tambudzai has spent her whole life trying to get away from the bitterness her mother represents, Tambudzai has become exactly what she resents about her mother: she is consumed by bitterness, passive-aggressive vengeance, self-defeating negativity. Like her mother, she is so eaten by self pity that she has no friends, nothing that she enjoys except her own martyrdom.

By the end, the reader has become wary. Even Tambudzai’s smallest goals must be viewed with suspicion, since it is obvious that she is to be allowed not even the smallest of triumphs. At the end of the novel as Tambudzai takes an account of her failures, she realizes that “I had forgotten all the promises made to myself and providence while I was young concerning carrying forward with me the good and human, the unhu of my life. As it was, I had not considered unhu at all, only my own calamities, since the contested days at the convent” (246).

The question I had after plowing through this swamp of self pity is whether Tambudzai, whose cycle of self-imposed goals for recognition, victimhood, and aggressive self flagellation repeats again and again with little new insight, has remained an interesting enough person to warrant the 250 pages Dangarembga spends on developing her voice?

Note: 9 December 2007

Today I googled reviews of The Book of Not and came across these three reviews by Helon Habila, Percy Zvomuya, Helen Oyeyemi.