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| Memory Chirere (Photo Credit: Jan Bibliothek) |
Book: Tudikidiki
Author: Memory Chirere
Publisher: Priority Projects Publishing (2007)
Memory Chirere’s dynamic toolkit reframes a familiar world with touches of humour and novelty in his second short story collection Tudikidiki.
The stories, fit to a template which equates less with more, are at once tantalising, frustrating and amusing. Chirere carries his audience along the well-worn paths of love and hate, hope and frustration, resilience and triumpheach time overlaying his didactic import with deceptive simplicity.
Brevity is a constant throughout his thread. From one angle, it seems to point to the transience of artificially contrived relationships which the author satirises in some of the stories. It also makes the anthology tight and jam-packed for variety.
Tudikidiki occupies its own stack in local literature as the only individually authored short story collection in Shona. Although Zimbabwe is inundate with short story anthologies in English, writers are yet to export their prolificacy in the genre to local languages.
Chirere’s departure-pointis a notable effort. The subtlety with which the stories are told disarming. Storytelling becomes an apparent end in itself such that the less observant reader may not both to drill past the alluvial layer for nuggets of meaning.
The anthology is evocative of the fireside narratives where the storyteller has a way of riveting his audience with imagined pictures and sounds, often in the conveyance of a message but sometimes just for the fun of it.
Simplicity (or is it deliberate oversimplification?) in “Tudikidiki” belies a significant depth of field in some instances, while other parts seem to be only written to make readers laugh.
If you are one for superimposing your ideological scruples on every page you flip, you will find “Tudikidiki” code-protected, reserved for Chirere’s eccentric stock characters alone to tell their own stories, your own and the world’s,chiefly from infant lenses.
Ignatius Mabasa warns in the preface against downplaying the stories for their brevity and simplicity and maintains that these are about children not stories for children.
“Tinodada naChibvongodze” demonstrates a deplorable condition may find themselves in especially politically and religiously – that of suspending your own mental faculties or opening them to the sway of popular opinion to be part of a bandwagon or to blindly ride on the coattails of a revered personality.
The result is that morally depraved acts like outright lying, flattery and malice against those out the camp as a way of consolidate the artificial relationship become the norm.
When an individual demobilises their rational power and deigns to all possible means for ingratiating with others, double standards become inevitable.
“Mandiziva?” is about a stagy tramp who goes around claiming to be related to the hosts, a ploy he executes over and over,as his claim to daily bread. The story shows both the unorthodox means people resort to for survival and also the unaffordability of city life for disadvantaged people. Mandiziva’s trick is one of the many ploys people devise in the city to exploit tenderly disposed well-wishers and rip them off for their own interests.
As in all the stories, Chirere does not sit in judgement over the offender. He neither condones situational ethics nor condemns dishonest survival tactics but leaves it to the reader to pass the verdict.
The pain of divorce, pangs of being jilted, are handled in “Ariko.” The story is in second person and addresses the one who wrote the relationship off on the plight of his estranged companion. It is difficult, if not impossible,for her to get over a broken relationship. The pictures and melody of their happy past keep streaming back, flooding her consciousness.
Separation is official yet it cannot be final. She yearns for the part that was severed from her life. She reminisces, cries and stalks. There must be a possibility for reunion.
“The person you jilted yearns to know what you are up to. Your address – she has it! She knows the new clothes you are wearing. She asks your acquaintances about you. She frequents your street. She knows whether you are eating or sleeping,” relates the narrator.
The ultimate love story is “Ndikakuregedza Handizokuoni.” It is that familiar story about mystical realignments conniving in favour of a man who is too poor to secure the love of his life.Timidand penniless, he is apprehensive of visiting the girl he loves. He keeps deferring on the strength of the excuse that he has nothing to give her that can compare to gifts of the other suitors.
In the most unlikely of situations – a thunderstorm! – he summons sudden courage and paces up the door of his dream girl’s house. There being no one else who could possibly brave the rain to visit a woman, our hero revels in the triumph of a feat his own. Touched by thesacrificial gestureand melting with love for the poor man, she insists that he take her out so she can be with him in the rain to experience what he has experienced for her.
As they head away to a lovers’ paradise in the downpour,lightning strikes the girl’s home and everyone else dies. Looking back, the married pauper observes that his wife’s life is the only thing he gave her when he could give her nothing else.
“Pembani Pembani” is about a complex character by the same name. Defined but not confined by his background he is a subject of mean speculation and patronisation. He is dismissed as a mental case yet he is a genius and a master of art. Shock and awe betides his peers when he outcompetes them in the examinations. The story is about resilience in a stifling environment and the tamper-proof nature of genius.
In “PasiPengoma” procrastination and cowardice have highly taxing rewards. This is a hilarious story about another timid fellow who backs away from proposing a crushworthy girland makes way for his friend. He is pushed into a reluctant go-between and watches in dismay as the girl slowly softens up to his friend. When they are finally together he is cut to heart as they take turns to taunt him.
“Chichena, Chirefu, Chinonhuwira” is a didactic folk tale about how we chase things which do not matter, piercing ourselves with many unnecessary sorrows and destroying ourselves as a result.
“Pikicha” presents another side of life where uncertainty is the only constant. A despondent crew ekes out a living by washing and keeping them. They are joined by a girl Maria who has something to hide; a picture in an envelope. A nagging suitor eventually gets her to divulge her secret: A father who wanted to sell her! There is no saying what atrocity the love of money can conceive.
Chirere has earned the admiration of elders Charles Mungoshi and Chenjerai Hove as an exponent of a turning point in local literature.
“I sense a new direction in the Shona short story, releasing it from the usual hidebound traditional oral rungano, to throw it in line with its written counterpart in the other, international languages, but the flavour is strictly here, now, homegrown and home brewed,” observes Mungoshi.
Hove believes that with contemporary Zimbabwean writers “at it like this” the country will soon witness another literary boom more exciting than the 1980s and early 90s.
Chirere is a renowned literary critic and academic. His inventory also features “Somewhere in This Country” (2006), “Toriro and His Goats” (2010) and “Charles Mungoshi: A Critical Reader” (co-edited with Prof Maurice Vambe, 2006). “Tudikidiki” won the NAMA Best Fiction accolade in 2009.
