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Elliot Ziwira @the Bookstore
He has mastered the autobiographical mode in a reflective way, which makes it easier for the reader to locate himself/herself in the many physical, emotional and psychological sites that the fictional experience purveyed brings forth.Robert Muponde, like Shimmer Chinodya, has a way of taking the reader into his space through reflection on shared experiences. He has a certain way of telling his own story in such a way that it becomes our story; yours and mine.

Muponde draws you into his storms, with such astounding ease that leaves you aghast. He nostalgically takes you back and forth along his time travails.

I first had a romantic encounter with Muponde’s works in “No More Plastic Balls and Other Stories” (2000), which he co-edited with Clement Chihota. Like Chinodya, Muponde has a way of running riot with your experiences as if they were his own, or well, he tells his story as if he were telling yours. The way he morphs metaphors, images and symbols into the ordinate and inordinate alike, to create characters whom the reader feels like hugging, caressing, haggling with, kissing or strangling, is masterful. His use of the conventional setting hoists the reader onto a therapeutic pedestal, or infectious nostalgia, depending on the mood.

The storms he alludes to in his stories in “No More Plastic Balls and Other Stories”, seem to have a source, and come to a cirque that combines the many disjointed discourses that the writer endured in the process of becoming a man. It somehow reminds me of Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors”.

There is one character that features prominently in Muponde’s stories; Ronald Guramatunhu. He seems to be pursued by raging storms wherever he goes, yet there is so much barrenness in his travails. Storms and barrenness; the extended metaphors that relentlessly pursue Ronald, cannot really be products of creative genius, I have always thought. There is intense passion in the way he is portrayed; he appears in many ways to be the writer’s slough.

Ronald intrigues me, Linda makes my heart thaw, Elijah brings my blood to the boil, Maurice makes me sad, and Gomango, gosh, I feel like strangling him, yet there is something about him that makes me want to hug him and tell him, ‘Man it is only a phase, it will pass’! But all the more the fictional experiences depicted somehow touch my soul. Such is Robert Muponde’s storytelling prowess; he involves the reader in the storytelling, the way my grandmother would do.

And then, and then gentle reader I met Chikoko, as the professor-writer is affectionately known, in July 2017, at the University of Zimbabwe where he was presenting a paper titled “Grounds for ‘rights reading’ practices: A view to children’s literature in Zimbabwe,” in the English Department Seminar Room.  The paper torched a stormy debate that raged on our WhatsApp group for days, pitting the Lion’s camp and the Hare’s camp, as Muponde reread Charles Mungoshi’s “The Hare and the Animals of the Jungle” (1989).

You surely remember that folktale gentle reader, in its many versions, from your reading or from the many stories that your granny told you.

“In “The Hare and the Animals of the Jungle”, fantasy suspends quotidian animal common sense. Community is reconvened on new, though tenuous terms,” Chikoko insists.

The tiff was on whether Hare was supposed to be allowed to drink from the well that all other animals laboured on, without his lazy and cunning self, or whether Lion had any legitimate power, and who exactly was responsible for the literal and metaphorical drought that brings the situation on the animals in the first place.

Brickbats were thrown from one end to the other, with academics, writers and journalists flexing mental muscles. In the house were such luminaries like Ruby Magosvongwe, Memory Chirere, Tanaka Chidora, Rosemary Chikafa-Chipiro, Francis Matambirofa, Spiwe Mahachi-Harper, Monica Cheru, Tinashe Muchuri and others. Naturally, Muponde and I were on Hare’s side; the vulnerable Hare, the marginalised Hare, the tiny Hare; weak, yet cunningly capable of standing his ground in the Jungle where only the shrewd make it to another sunset.

Man did we hold our forte? And the brickbats, dear Lord!

The interview I had with Muponde afterwards is the gist of this instalment, not so much because it was the first one we had, but because it is a mirror through which the writer’s work is reflected, especially his upcoming memoirs “The Scandalous Times Of A Book Louse: A Memoir of a Childhood”.

Ronald, poor Ronald, the one whose star always shines brightest when mother luck deserts him, is unlocked in this interview, whose contents I will not reveal as of now, because it will be kind of pre-emptying the memoirs, a glimpse of which was revealed to me. In the interview Muponde intimates his childhood experiences, which honed the writer and professor in him.

“My name is Ronald Guramatunhu. I descend from my father Jega, who was derived from Chatambudza, who in turn was founded in the loins of a man whom he said had my looks. This ancient Ronald lookalike was an iron smith, making spears, axes and hoes and women’s bangles. He came from my grandfather’s stories. I am a wordsmith, like my mother Soko and my father Jega. I come from books” intimates Muponde in the introduction of “The Scandalous Times Of A Book Louse”.

The introduction is scandalously headlined: “A Book Opens thighs like a Newspaper in the Wind.” Does it not?

Chikoko intimates that it was his cousin, Akizha; gosh, who inspired him to write when she said to him, “Sekuru, when you write books thighs will open before you like a newspaper in the wind.” If that introduction does not whet your appetite as it does mine, wait a bit. Ronald, who is Muponde himself, is a wordsmith, who comes from books, yet he is inspired by his parents, who are great storytellers.

“This book is a conversation with many voices and moments that would otherwise be muffled by the raucous narratives of prefabricated public histories. Mine is a tiny, but insistent narrative that radiates across the sanctioned public gathering of memories. I have gagged it for a long time, but it bloats itself inside me like a disturbed spotted toad; and whenever I hear others tell their own stories I lose the handle on my own, slide down the rails, and wallow in the telling of the self by others,” the artist-narrator continues.

Dear reader, have you ever been in such a situation in which you are burdened by a story that you feel like losing your handle? You feel tired of listening to others’ stories, that when they tell them, you feel like sliding “down the rails”!

The memoirs are divided into two parts, under separate headings, cascading childhood experiences that are intertwined into familial, communal and national discourses in which the individual psyche is heightened. As Chikoko informs, the book is “about those memories and moments that provide a context that defines who I was, who I could have become, and who I am not becoming”.

Whatever storms the individual finds himself/herself in, he/she has a way of weathering them, or bringing the same on others. The storms determine how he/she responds to a world that seems intent on bringing suffering on his doorsteps.

In Chapter Seven: “The witch-weed and the perfect corpse”, the narrator tells of the many challenges they face as a poverty-stricken family that seems to be deserted by the goddess of fortune. Every time something good portends on the horizon, something is bound to obliterate it, which prompts his father to conjure his death in a perfect posture when he feels that fortune is ephemerally on his lap, before it deserts him.

Ronald tells us: “I loved my father for coming home with a quart of Lion Lager in his hand and putting himself in a coffin. Happy enough to die and be buried that day, he placed the Lion Lager at the head of the box and took off his dusty and torn blue tennis shoes. He slowly stretched himself in the coffin (which was the raised earthen bench that snuggled against the kitchen-hut wall), crossed his fingers over his groin, put on his Seed Co-op farmer’s hat with the green brim and white crown, and closed his eyes and mouth. . . He said: “I am going to be a perfect corpse.”

The mundane images purveyed here in juxtaposition with the Lion Lager, an elixir out of suffering, prepares the reader for death, another escape route for the downtrodden. But here the narrator’s father Jega does not only wish to die, but he wants to die a happy man, knowing that his family will remember him for dying in triumph and not in vain.

The narrator tells us of his father’s shenanigans with a beautiful woman, Mai Sylvia, who seems to be well provided for, despite the fact that she is neither married nor has a child. Ronald takes a liking to her, not only because she pampers him, but because of her physical attraction. Doesn’t she remind you of that enigmatic beautiful woman in your neighbourhood? To me she does, but I leave it for another day.

To the boy, poverty wears so many faces that it is impossible to tell love from hate, loyalty from deceit, pretension from reality. Along with his siblings, survival for the narrator is a hand-me-down experience from the largesse of his fathers’ sister Auntie Jessy.

Jega wants to die happy because fortune seems to smile at his family. He has secured a tractor through his labour, to plough his fields for the first time in his life, and he has won the rights to keep his aunt’s “motherhood cow” from which progeny he expects to raise his own herd. But the witch-weed has other ideas, and the heifer brings forth another horned scandal.

Could it be a curse, or witchcraft is at play? Why should it always rain on us, when others are always basking in sunshine? Was the word suffering invented for only us?

The narrator takes the reader along to the veld were a horned scandal brews, rages and perforates all in the name of bitter-sweet love. Miss Kanyimo, the heifer, becomes the belle of the five villages, much to the chagrin of Makandishora, Mr R.G Muvengwa, their neighbour’s ancestral bull. A bullfight ensues between Makandishora and Chaka, who “had no shortage of females, being the most dominant bull in all the five villages”, and the village femme fatale seems to have fallen head over heels for him.

The ugly fight draws in the owners, fellow villagers and herdboys. You also remember this from your childhood, right?

And what happens in the end is intriguing, nerve-wracking and disheartening; and trust Muponde to tell you how it feels to lose all in a moment of madness, when all frenzy is lost on the receding horizon, and hope wears so many shades that the only discernible hue remains a mirage.

I just can’t wait for a complete copy of Robert Muponde’s “The Scandalous Times Of A Book Louse: A Memoir of a Childhood”, which he promised to avail to the Bookstore soon.

Just watch this space!