Is Musariri our own magical realist?
Blessing Musariri

Blessing Musariri

Tanaka Chidora Literature Today
For a Rukovo village graduate like me, dabbling with Latin American literature was not a very difficult venture. In fact, moving from the village at the age of 18, setting my abode in Mbare, and commuting every day to Mt Pleasant High School and then later to UZ from Mbare, did not really expose me to serious (the key word here is “serious”) bouts of schizophrenia.

However, the whole exercise proved more difficult than moving from the village and accidentally entering a Latin American library! A Latin American library is as magically real as the stories that rest in brooding silence on its shelves!

Those of my generation who had the fortune of being born in my village will agree with me that the village supplied its own fair share of magical stories. How many remember the mermaids of the dark pool of the Ndenda River, a mysterious pool that chose to locate itself upstream from where we bathed? How many remember the baboon that cursed that poor chap from the other side of the Chivaka River for prevailing over the CARE social workers to scratch its (the baboon’s) master’s name from the list of those who were eligible for food aid?

For committing such a heinous crime, the baboon declared in its verdict, the poor chap’s sojourn on earth was going to be cut short! At his funeral, the mourners ate the object of the chap’s demise.

What about those tales of the notorious ghost prostitutes from that growth point of ours? They said she would accost you on your way home at 10pm, 11pm, 12pm, 1am, and sweet talk you to accompany her to her house for a night of drunken companionship. If you are drunk to your pickaxe forehead, this offer is too honeyed to be turned down. So you go. The night lives up to its billing, only that the morning will be a different story. You find yourself snoring your hangover away atop a grave!

With such an archive of magical stories from the village, reading Latin American literature is a walk in the park. One Hundred Years of Solitude? Death at Intervals? House of the Spirits? Bring them on Mister!

After much reflection, however, I realised that my comfort with Latin American literature was because of my knowledge that the stories were from another continent, so their undead were only familiar in their literariness. But when a Zimbabwean writer seems to have forklifted your village from the foot of the Chamavara to dump it – its huts, graves, cattle, goats, cats and dogs – on the pages of a book, and go on to call that book a novel or a collection of short stories, you are assailed by this uncomfortable feeling that ambushes those who are on the brink of revising certain long-held beliefs about life (or the afterlife). You see, when we read a lot of books and call ourselves learned, there are certain notions that we consciously discard and say they are beneath us. Unfortunately, there are some books that beg us to rethink.

Emmanuel Ribeiro did that with “Muchadura” and the result was that I couldn’t sleep peacefully for days! There was something familiar about those invisible human flesh-craving chaps! Then Monica Zodwa Cheru-Mpambawashe had the audacity to come even closer to my village in “Chivi Sunsets”. At least Petina Gappah had the good mind to go to Gokwe, far away from my village, in “The Death of Wonder”.

When I encountered Blessing Musariri’s short stories, I couldn’t help but observe how she experiments with magical realism, and with many of the unsaid and frightening things of my village . . . things like witches coming after the footprints left by your cracked feet to use the said footprints to terminate your short stay on earth; or things like sacred “wild plantations” of mizhanje whose mazhanje are like manna: they are not supposed to be carried home. What would happen if you carried them home? But would you dare?

So as I was reading Musariri’s “Eloquent Notes on a Suicide: Case of the Silent Girl” (in the Irene Staunton-edited short story anthology, “Writing Free”, 2011), I kept asking myself, are we not taking these village stories for granted? What if the ghost prostitute is real and not some figment of drunken imagination?

What if my footprints are actually ready raw material for my own witchcraft-induced and untimely demise? And speaking of footprints, the hilarious short story, “These Feet were made for Walking” by Musariri (in the Jane Morris-edited short story anthology, “Moving On”, 2017), plays around with this fear when an elderly fellow decides to put witches to shame by buying shoes (no, slippers) for the first time in 80 years!

To cut the story short, the slippers take long to come because of other unforeseen and bizarre events. And when, the following morning, nature begins its unrelenting call, the old man has to be wheelbarrowed to the toilet!

Later that evening, when the slippers are finally brought to the old man, he experiences what I think is the selling point of this story, that denouement, that sudden moment of revelation which results in the old man declaring that there is no man-made shoe that can beat his calloused feet because “shoes are made by man but my feet were made by God …”

My favourite short story though remains “Eloquent Notes on a Suicide: Case of the Silent Girl”. The first time I read it, I asked a colleague, who is this Blessing Musariri? I never received a satisfactory answer. The stream of consciousness that accompanies this package of magical realism synchronises well with the intention of this short story: to tell us that certain things remain unexplainable.

For instance, how do you explain the suicide of a little girl who was never ill-treated, but who just comes back from a sacred forest one day with her speech faculties gone? What if the things that we are dismissing now because we have read a couple of books are actually real? At this moment, I am still looking for more Blessing Musariri short stories. Maybe, the next short story will tell me if she has found answers.

You Might Also Like

Comments

Take our Survey

We value your opinion! Take a moment to complete our survey