Petina’s star continues  to shine Petina Gappah
Petina Gappah

Petina Gappah

Beaven Tapureta: Bookshelf

Zimbabwean lawyer and award-winning novelist/short story writer Petina Gappah has a deep passion for things literary as manifested in her continuous recognition both at home and across the world. The international progress of Gappah’s current body of three books, which are, the collection of short stories “An Elegy for Easterly”, the novel “The Book of Memory” and the soon-to-be-published short story collection “Rotten Row”, shows her unique genius which Africa at large must be proud of.It is indeed a task, yet a task that inspires in the process, to keep track of Gappah’s industriousness and achievements in the literary world!

Her winning the Guardian First Book Award in 2009 for her debut “An Elegy for Easterly” reclaimed memories of the late Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera who in 1979 won the same award for his book “House of Hunger”. Marechera scooped the award in 1979 when it was known as the Guardian Fiction Prize. The award was re-launched in 1999 as the Guardian First Book Award. Another Zimbabwean writer who nearly won the award in 2013 is NoViolet Bulawayo who was shortlisted for her debut book “We Need New Names” (Chatto and Windus). Indeed, Zimbabwe has made a mark at the Guardian awards.

Gappah’s second book “The Book of Memory” (2015, Faber), which however is her first novel, was long-listed for the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, making her the first Zimbabwean author to achieve such a feat.

The Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction is awarded to the best full-length novel of the year written by a woman and published in the UK within a stipulated period. Any woman writing in English is eligible.

Jennifer Malec of Sunday Times Book Live aptly summarised the plot of “The Book of Memory” as “the story of an albino woman on death row for the murder of the white man to whom her parents sold her as a child”.

Gappah, in another interview with Jeanne-Marie Jackson (US), said this about “The Book of Memory”: “I write stories about Zimbabwean characters, and so I want them to feel true to Zimbabwean readers. But I am published around the world and I would like the specificity of my Zimbabwean characters to find an echo in readers everywhere. But it is an easy thing to pull off, I think, if I write what feels true. Because pain is pain, love is love; it does not have a national character. What we eat may have that character, how we live may have it too, and the names we choose for our children may be specific to our location, history, education and so on, but ultimately, I write about human concerns.”

Her third book “Rotten Row” will be published in November this year by Faber and Faber in the United Kingdom. The book features the short story “A Short History of Zaka the Zulu” which was recently published in The New Yorker fiction section. In a conversation with Debora Treisman, The New Yorker fiction editor, Gappah said, “There is indeed a thematic link in the collection. Rotten Row is the street in Harare on which you find the Criminal Division of the Magistrate’s Court.

The book is made up of twenty stories about crime, seen from different perspectives. I also experiment with different approaches to storytelling: I use a court judgment, an autopsy report, and an Internet discussion forum, as well as other voices.”

This year also, her story “News of Her Death” was shortlisted for the 2016 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award which is considered the world’s richest short story prize. However, the award was finally won by Jonathan Tel for his story “The Human Phonograph”.

Gappah had been longlisted for the same Sunday Times EFG Short Story award in 2010 for the title short story of her anthology “An Elegy for Easterly”.

The short story “News of Her Death” also features in the anthology “Sex and Death” (2016, Faber) which was edited by Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs.

The anthology is described as having stories “about our beginnings and our ends”.

Did you know that Gappah loves translation and that she has together with some friends translated George Orwell’s masterpiece “Animal Farm” into the Shona language?

Well, we will soon be reading Orwell in Shona!

Last month in Zimbabwe, the Harare City Library (HCL) bestowed outstanding honour on the energetic writer when it named its children’s library section after her.

The section is now called the Petina Gappah Children’s Library. The naming was indeed a deserved act of respect for her passion and assistance she rendered in the much-needed upgrade of the library.

In an interview with Bookshelf last week, HCL Assistant Librarian Takunda Masunda said there was no other way the library could thank Gappah for everything she has done for the HCL especially in 2011 when she became the Chairperson of HCL Management Committee.

Masunda said in 2011 alone Gappah accomplished great things for HCL which include fund raising mainly for the library renovation, resuscitation of book collections, computerization as well as for the introduction of new library services.

“The funds were then put to actual use from 2013 to 2015 when Petina had already left the Management Committee. After realizing what she had done for the library, we decided to honour her,” said Masunda.

The year 2011 could be the time Gappah got visibly attached to the library at management level but before that, Masunda said Gappah has always harboured a deep passion for the library ever since she was a child growing up in Zimbabwe.

“Before she became chairperson in 2011, Petina had used the Mabelreign library, one of our suburban branches, as a child. Later, she also used the main library before she left the country. She has always loved the library that when she came back home from abroad, she decided to plough back into the library which nurtured her from her childhood,” said Masunda.

Gappah has said in interviews that when she led the HCL in 2011 as chairperson, she actually gave more time to the needs of the HCL than she gave to the writing of her second book “The Book of Memory”.

“I spent more time working on the Harare City Library than on ‘The Book of Memory’. But I think I’m actually more proud of the Harare City Library,” she told Julie Phillips of the Literary Hub.

The children’s library, Masunda said, is a free service to the community and Gappah has always been passionate about children having free access to library resources.

Although the HCL has bestowed such great honour on Gappah, the biggest accolade would be to make her books available to the Zimbabwean reader. In so far as her books are concerned, they seem pitched ‘far away’ from the local bookshelves.

Born in 1971, Gappah has law degrees from the University of Zimbabwe, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Graz.

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