Mind Picker: Glory

He dreamt of the days of glory when Jidada was such an earthly paradise animals left their own miserable lands and flocked to it in search of a better life, found it, and not only just found it, no, but found it in utter abundance and sent word back for kin and friends to come and see it for themselves — this promised land, this stunning Eldorado called Jidada, a proper jewel of Africa, yes, tholukuthi a land not only indescribably wealthy but so peaceful they could’ve made it up. His Excellency also saw himself in his dream as he’d been back then — beautiful and brimming with unquestioned majesty, a horse that stepped on the ground and the earth agreed and the heavens above agreed and even hell itself also agreed because how could it disagree? Tholukuthi lost now in Jidada’s past glory, the Old Horse nestled deeper in his seat and began to snore a sonorous tune that the Comrades around him identified as Jidada’s old revolutionary anthem from the Liberation War days.

Like many reviewers, I found Glory to have been a bit of a slog — too long, too circular, too committed to an allegorical conceit that seems unnecessary — but I also found myself entranced by the exotic language and rhythms and could recognise that this was not meant to be my story; it was not being told to me in a way that preferenced my own comfort and expectations and I grew to embrace the challenge. As a satirical allegory of Robert Mugabe’s last days as the dictator of Zimbabwe (and the out-of-the-frying-pan-and-into-the-fire of what came next), this is an undeniably important act of witnessing and recording his abuses; and as a Zimbabwean author, NoViolet Bulawayo is reporting from inside the story, and making art of it. I may not have connected completely with the material because of the format and length, but I can recognise why this is an important novel and that’s enough for my four stars.

Don’t even be fooled by how things may appear right now — I mean the terrible roads that kill people, the potholes, the broken sewer systems, the decrepit hospitals, the decrepit schools, the decrepit industrial sector, the decrepit rail system, or should I say a generally decrepit infrastructure. Then of course there’s the poor standard of living, the millions who’ve crossed and still cross borders in search of better, the misery and such things that may look depressing at first glance, that’ll make you think you’re maybe looking at a ruin. All these things happen to countries, it’s a fact of countryness, but rest assured we were in top form once. Plus, the point is not to judge a book by its cover. Because what remains is that Jidada is still a jewel, Africa’s jewel. And that right there is the Father of the Nation’s God-given legacy, reigning over a real gem. And moreover, he liberated and has protected that jewel so that Jidada will never be a colony again!

Because the novel is allegorical — the characters are animals: the ruling class are horses, the army dogs, the commoners sheep and goats and chickens — I have seen many reviews comparing Glory to Animal Farm, but I wonder if Bulawayo wasn’t using the animal device to say something important about the lingering effects of colonisation on African countries: just as the novel form itself has its roots outside of Africa, perhaps Bulawayo purposefully chose a classic of British literature onto which she could graft the language and rhythms of oral Zimbabwean storytelling; a marriage that doesn’t feel totally successful, and that just may be the point. The donkey wife of the “Father of the Nation” even says, more than once, “this is not an animal farm” (and I couldn’t help but notice that characters namedrop classics of African/African American literature when they use the phrases “things fall apart”, “a raisin in the sun”, and even “we need new names”; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there were others inserted that I didn’t twig to.) So, between the importance of what this novel actually memorialises (from Mugabe’s brutal dictatorial reign, through the Gukurahundi genocide of 1982-87, to the coup of 2017 which saw Mugabe replaced by his Vice President) and what the format has to say about the lingering effects of colonialism in Africa (and especially the ways in which the formerly oppressed are forced to communicate in the language of their oppressors), this truly did feel important, even if I wasn’t really enjoying it (and again, that might have been the point).

We heard and told stories of pain, stories of the Seat of Power’s violence so impossible sometimes animals simply tilted heads up and stared into the glowing Nehanda bones — reeling. Tholukuthi through these tales we learned there were in fact many untold narratives that were left out of the Seat of Power’s tales of the nation, that were excluded from Jidada’s great books of history. That the nation’s stories of glory were far from being the whole truth, and that sometimes the Seat of Power’s truths were actually half-truths and mistruths as well as deliberate erasures. Which in turn made us understand the importance not only of narrating our own stories, our own truths, but of writing them down as well so they were not taken from us, never altered, tholukuthi never erased, never forgotten.

Glory ends on a more hopeful note — with the populace recognising that the brutal oppression by the few is only possible with the compliance of the frightened multitudes — and it is my sincere wish that this hopefulness is alive in Bulawayo’s Zimbabwe. I am glad that this novel exists — even if I didn’t love the reading experience — and am also glad that it is being acclaimed; the true story of Zimbabwe deserves to be written down, artfully.

When those who know about things say there is no night ever so long it does not end with dawn, tholukuthi what they mean is that there is no night ever so long it does not end with dawn.