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Lovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
Conversations with local Zimbabwean writers are sometimes mentally draining. There is always a latent siege mentality. Like an endangered species, they find comfort in herd mentality and in the process fail to critically and objectively offer new realities of existence for a writer in Zimbabwe.

Half the time you hear of past glories. How things have changed, piracy, the death of local languages – all superficial conversations and very little illumination.

Then there is another crop of writers who always want to be treated like a special breed, above reproach, beyond blemish and take lightly any sort of criticism of their creative works.

Bamboozled by their bombastic attitude, other fellow writers literally worship these writers who give the impression of people who have transcended the constricting Zimbabwean space. In the end, no one critically inputs any ideas to improve each other’s work and readers are forced to celebrate and eulogise mediocrity.

This draws me to a very pertinent question. Should writers review each other’s work? Most local authors think there is absolutely nothing wrong with peer review.

However, writing in The Guardian of October 2011, Chris Cleave thinks otherwise. He fervently believes that “peer reviewers” tend to be gentler than full-time critics, particularly if they know each other.

In Cleave’s view, there is always an absence of a juicy negative truth when it comes to “peer review” of fiction and if by some chance it develops it often ends up in a thrilling feud or a grudge that lasts for decades.

In the era of self-publishing, I have received hordes of books from enthusiastic authors keen on making it big on the literary terrain. But to me the first impressions are always the best. If a book is captivating – it doesn’t matter the subject, one is unlikely to leave it. But there are some books that I struggle to go beyond the first chapter and it’s always a painful process to candidly tell a writer that his or her book needs improvement? Most writers – established and budding – don’t normally take criticism lightly and it is even worse when the writer is an acquaintance.

As suggested by Cleave, I am a firm believer of books being reviewed by people who are not essentially writers but professional critics, if there are such people. Fellow writers tend to be gentler to their comrades.

Peer review tends to be nothing but self-serving and mostly responsible for run-of- the-mill kind of stuff that makes a mockery of Zimbabwe’s literary terrain.

It is always a problem when the reviewer and the reviewed are in some way connected. I have often found it hard to review a book of an author for fear of sliding into praise-singing.

Oftentimes, I have been drawn to review books from “big names” that I like and the results have always been a disaster. It is precisely for this reason that I think there is need for reviews to be undertaken by professional reviewers and not fellow writers.

Some writers have failed to develop because of lack of critical analysis of their works. Where does one draw the line between positive criticism and inflicting a death knell on one’s confidence?

Being a book reviewer inevitably leads one to be so much involved in reading, writing and reviewing and the creation and cementing of more personal and professional connections. How does one rise above such personal connections with fellow writers and be able to objectively review a text?

Writing a bad review creates enemies for life, no writer ever forgets a pan especially these days when so many writers work in academy, and an enemy can be a real threat to one’s career. It’s worse when such a writer happens to have a coterie of social media cheerleaders ready to pounce on any perceived enemy.

Yet criticism is a way of understanding one’s vision, of discovering themselves. A writer cannot be great without a touch of some kind of aggression, the intolerance of artistic error.

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