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In “Rotten Row”, Petina Gappah’s characters speak for themselves

Tanaka Chidora Literature Today
Having grown up in Magaba where words undergo serious reconfigurations due to mispronunciations or reinventions, I always thought Rotten Row was pronounced ‘Rotton Ro’.

We rarely ventured beyond the Flyover that runs past Agrifoods because the park near the Flyover was our main attraction. It had perfect turf for our weekend money-game that started at 8am and ended when one team had run out of money, which was very unusual.

Most of the time, the game ended either with fist fights or with the city council workers chasing us or confiscating our plastic ball. So Rotton Ro remained another world for the better part of my growing up. I never really attended the Agricultural Show, an indulgence, which I am sure would have allowed me to experience what Rotton Ro was all about.

Of course later, when eavesdropping grown up people’s conversations became a preoccupation to which we applied ourselves with calculated disinterestedness, the name Rotton Ro started collocating with “courts” and “jail”. It was as if my Mbare-mates were being sent there in droves. But that’s a story for my memoir.

Petina Gappah’s “Rotten Row” (2016) is a brilliant collection of stories. It is “An Elegy for Easterly”, seven years later. Between “An Elegy for Easterly” and “Rotten Row” there is “The Book of Memory”. I have to admit, “An Elegy for Easterly” is not a modest achievement; it’s a masterpiece.

However, what I think makes it a subordinate of “Rotten Row”, besides that it was Petina’s debut collection, is that in “An Elegy for Easterly”, one detects Petina’s voice throughout. She speaks through her characters more often. But in “Rotten Row”, the characters speak for themselves.

That’s why, for me, “Rotten Row”, in terms of narrative style, is more kaleidoscopic than “An Elegy for Easterly”. The characters have more leeway to tell their stories so that the outcome is an assemblage of voices narrating the lives of Zimbabweans of all shades.

The title of the collection might mislead one into thinking that the stories are about the courts, or about acts that lead to the courts, or about clandestine activities that happen kuRotton Ro.

Well, the courts and Rotton Ro feature in this collection, but the short stories are actually about our lives, our acts that lead to the courts and others that do not lead to the courts but still make our lives a series of trials of sorts.

These trials include having your past weigh down on you like those things that want to suffocate us when we are asleep; or those secrets that drive us to commit heinous deeds when they threaten to get exposed; or the things that happen to us, but do not give us the benefit of hindsight because they would have done something to our very short lives (this is where we do not get to learn from mistakes); or the scary stories of vengeful ghosts rummaging for human bodies in a dusty wasteland of a remote village; or the hypocrisy of the world and its institutions that treat our lives like statistical bits and pieces; the list is endless.

Gappah utilises all of these trials and morphs them into a very brilliant collection titled “Rotten Row”.

The raw material she uses for these stories are our sad lives, but the results are not sad stories but hilarious ones. Even the dropper’s contemplation of suicide contains an amazingly crafted stream of consciousness that gives an aesthetic quality to death!

Speaking of the dropper, the short story that bears that name (“The Dropper”) is my favourite. The dropper’s stream of consciousness, captured in everyday lingo, is this short story’s selling point.

His reminiscences of his hangman exploits, which reminiscences will inevitably lead him towards committing one last drop on himself just as the sun is dropping beyond the mountains, has the quality of graphic matching that we usually see in films. The outcome is aesthetically satisfying.

Another favourite of mine is “Washington’s Wife Decides Enough is Enough”.

She sounds like a “back to sender” kind of woman, Washington’s wife, doesn’t she? But the story is not really about Washington’s wife only. It’s about her, yes, but it’s also about others.

It’s about nagging relatives from all over Zimbabwe, especially from Masvingo! Before you go on a pro-Masvingo rant, let me reassure you that the Masvingo reference is what lifts this story of a culturally gang-raped woman to another level. Besides, Masvingo provided a lot of social media comic relief in 2017!

How many times have you come across the “Chabva kuMasvingo” line? So Masvingo is there in exorbitant measure in this short story. At first I thought it was overdone, but I later realised that thinking like that was too Masvingo and I let it go and enjoyed the story.

Here is what makes Vatete Ma’Kere a Masvingo woman through and through: “This dhuku that you see on my head is one I got from a white woman who came to give out donations when I went to Gutu Mission Hospital, kwaMuneri kunopagwa meso.

“She was wearing it around her neck and I said, but it should be on your head and she said show me how to do it, and I did and she said you can keep it. Her eyes, do you know, they had no colour, no colour at all, Keresenzia!”

So there you have it. Vatete Ma’Kere and her daughter, Kere, are also fashionistas who even think that the bubble bath from Dubai should be used to wash napkins, kuti anhuwirirezve!

This is a cross-cutting collection. Tose tirimo. Even our social media forums are there. You remember those Facebook or Twitter wars where no holds are barred? Well, they are in this collection.

Remember those boarding school pranks we played on each other? You find them in this collection. Even our former president makes a grapevine entrance! That’s how Gappah crafts her stories.

In “An Elegy for Easterly”, Petina set the bar high, but in “Rotten Row” she removed the bar.