Absent. The English Teacher

John Eppel

Description

When Mr George loses his job teaching English at a private secondary school in Bulawayo, �his pension payout, after forty years of full-time service, bought him two jam doughnuts and a soft tomato.� When he backs his uninsured white Ford Escort into a brand new Mercedes Benz, the out-of-court settlement sees him giving up his house to the complainant, Beauticious Nyamayakanuna, and becoming her domestic servant. Through the prism of this engaging post-colonial role reversal, and spiced with George�s lessons on Shakespeare, John Eppel draws down the curtain on one particular white man in Africa. But before it�s time to go, George will delight us with the antics of his literature classes; his various arrests � all timed to coincide with the police chief�s need for help with essays on Hamlet and A Grain of Wheat; his keen eye for flora and fauna; and the long trek back through the hundred years of his family�s Zimbabwean past, as he returns an abandoned child to her home. Eppel has satirized the racial politics of southern Africa in many of his previous novels. In Absent: The English Teacher he turns his gaze inwards for a generous and richly rewarding parody of the land of his birth.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Weaver Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 6
• EAN13: 9781779221858
• Langue: English

Extrait

Absent:
The English
Teache r
Absent:
The English
Teacher
John Eppel
Published by Weaver Press, Box A1922, Avondale, Harare. 2009
John Eppel, 2009
Typeset by Weaver Press Cover Design: banana republic Printed by Pinetown Printers, Johannesburg
The publishers would like to express their gratitude to HIVOS for the support they have given to Weaver Press in the development of their fiction programme.
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means - photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise - without the express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978 1 77922 082 0
FOR CONNY, WHO INTRODUCED ME TO WHITE-BROWED SPARROW-WEAVERS.
Born in South Africa in 1947, John Eppel was raised in Zimbabwe, where he still lives, making his home in Bulawayo near the Matobo Hills. He teaches English at Christian Brothers College. His first novel, D.G.G. Berry s The Great North Road , won the M-Net prize in South Africa and was listed in the Weekly Mail Guardian as one of the best 20 South African books in English published between 1948 and 1994. His second novel, Hatchings , was short-listed for the M-Net prize and was chosen for the series in the Times Literary Supplement of the most significant books to have come out of Africa. His other novels include The Giraffe Man, The Curse of the Ripe Tomato , and The Holy Innocents. His book of poems, Spoils of War , won the Ingrid Jonker Prize. His other poetry books include Sonata for Matabeleland, Selected Poems: 1965-1995 , and Songs My Country Taught Me . In addition he has written two books which combine poems and short stories: The Caruso of Colleen Bawn , and White Man Crawling . Awaiting publication is a book of poems entitled Landlocked , and a book of short stories entitled White Man Walking .
CONTENTS
Introduction: Kizito Muchemwa
1. Pale Moon Rising
2. A Glint of Copper
3. A Weekend in Elsinore
4. Wabenzi
5. Letting Slip
6. A Little Touch of Georgy in the Night
7. For She My Mind Hath So Displac d
8. A Hard Day s Night
9. Deus Ex Machina
10. Hope Deferred and a Longing Fulfilled
11. Reason Not
12. The Need
13. Words, Words, Words
14. Return to Elsinore
15. Doing It
16. The Enormous Turnip
17. Salmagundi
18. A Sentence is but a Chev ril Glove
19. Long Day s Journey
20. Into Night
21. Westering
22. George Jorge George of the Bushveld
J OHN E PPEL AND THE P LACE OF L ITERATURE
IN THE P OSTCOLONIAL W ORLD
Kizito Z. Muchemwa
It is not often that one reads a Zimbabwean novel that provides such a wide range of pleasures to its readers. Absent: The English Teacher by John Eppel displays an exhilarating verbal agility (which lends the novel much of its humour); a powerful evocation of place and historical period; and the vivid creation of memorable characters. His plot s construction draws on a rich linguistic inventiveness, his denotations and connotations of words leading the narrator, the (former) English teacher, to new incidents, thoughts and feelings. A sense of the incongruous and grasp of historical detail are also connected as language, characters and events are connected in a web of their referential and allusive power. The narrator has the comic genius of Feste and Hamlet, and this allows him to see all kinds of possible connections in a world that has gone awry. Satire, arising out of a compulsive play on words as both a mental disposition and a mode of viewing a cock-eyed reality, allows the writer to use humour therapeutically as the narrator engages with actuality.
Eppel creates vivid landscapes that provide the setting for his novels: landscape that is invested in the weight of historical and cultural memory, a contested site for the location of identities in an endless cycle of migration and displacement. It also represents many aspects of ecology: its diversity, its miraculous capacity to sustain life, and its fragility. Nature, in the raw, reveals that landscapes are far from idyllic despite the tender evocation of the acacia savannah surrounding Bulawayo. What emerges from these descriptions is not only Eppel s intimate knowledge and love of the local flora and fauna but an abiding concern for the environment; he brings into his writing the expertise of the botanist, ornithologist, zoologist and game ranger. In Absent: the English Teacher , the suburban garden becomes a site of what George describes as ecological imperialism , as well as a symbol of change in the country s history. Ironically, when Mrs Nyamayakanuna invades George s suburban home she makes sure that all the indigenous fruit trees, previously planted by George, are destroyed leaving only exotic ones. The traditional English garden is transformed into a maize patch. The agents of change are not flattered for their actions.
Eppel makes his flat characters the butt of his satire, though in some respects they also provide the novel s moral centre. His ingenious use of names provide condensed expos s of characteristics that we at once recognise and find ridiculous: Mrs d Artagnan-Mararike; Minister of Child Welfare, Sweets and Biscuits, Comrade Pontius Gonzo; Mrs Beauticious Nyamayakanuna; the twins Helter and Skelter, and a school girl named City Lights. He plays with names to convey psychological and moral attributes. Possessions are assumed as accessories of personality, markers of ethical and aesthetic positions.
Collapsing the distinction between the historical and imagined allows for entertaining inventiveness in plot construction. Historical and invented occurrences are recast and amplified to create a fictional world in which the incredible happens. Change turns a white school teacher into a domestic servant for a black family; the black madam, in a parody of her white forebears, speaks to the white lackey in Kitchen Kaffir and forbids him to speak to her in English; cabinet ministers maintain a string of mistresses; and wilfully destructive programmes are foisted on the country by a reckless and ruthless elite. If there is a whiff of improbability, it must be remembered that the comic mode that dominates the novel thrives on its capacity to stretch credibility to the limit. Zimbabweans need no reminding, however, that the so-called real world has recently been shaped by what most people would understand as the incredible and unimaginable.
In Absent: The English Teacher the writer mocks the excesses: corruption, vulgarity, greed, and insensitivity of the new black elite. He unhesitatingly refers to those events which he sees as characteristic of both the tragedy and the comedy that is post-independence Zimbabwe - the ethnic cleansing in Matabeleland during the 1980s, political repression, absence of the rule of law after 2000, the general collapse of the economy and services, man-made famine, the pauperisation of workers and professionals, and the amazing greed of the nouveau riche.
George, the school teacher, come down in the world, and as such becomes a synecdoche of white Zimbabwean identity, a victim of a xenophobic invasion of urban properties and now the domestic servant of a mistress of the Minister of Child Welfare, Sweets and Biscuits. He tells his pupils, They say there s always an ironic gap between author and persona, but I m not so sure, really not so sure. This can be read as an admission that the novel includes autobiographical features. Self-writing occurs in a post-2000 Zimbabwe that has become increasingly politicised, impoverished, vulgarised, and brutalised. Neither the fictional narrator nor the writer can escape this historical context, and this is the subject of this novel. Literature of commitment calls for the self-implication of writers in the ethical demands of their times. Eppel illustrates this in his exploration of the instability of genres.
Literary genres rarely have clear boundaries but ones that collapse, blur and merge. The novel that is ostensibly satirical in conception and method insists on exceeding satire. Eppel shows that satire, tragedy, and comedy are premised on instability and paradox. This allows the writer to treat life as an oxymoron and to view it in its complexity. Consequently, this leads him to contain the horrors of life, to put up with random violence and various forms of dispossession and displacement in both real life and within a fictional experience in the novel. Absent: The English Teacher is a multi-layered novel: autobiography, historical fiction, satire, inverted pastoral, and a parody of an adventure story constantly crossing the formal and stylistic boundaries separating prose fiction from drama. There are so many literary motifs and intertextual references that this text is an ideal, even exemplary, literary novel. It would, however, be a mistake to think that it has little significance beyond its aesthetic games . At every turn, the novel demands that the aesthetic and ethical aspects of literary creativity be integrated. It is as much about literature of ethical commitment and responsibility as it is a literary novel in which the writer is engaged in formal and linguistic games. As with autobiography there are many areas where it becomes difficult to separate the fictive from the historical and the separation is perhaps not necessary for it would detract from the novel s effectiveness. Eppel, like Marechera, brings to the Zimbabwean novel vast erudition and a sure sense of style.
The novel begins as a farewell to the class of uninspired learners, and combines comic and sad moments, though it returns to the concept of teacher in reconstructed circumstances. A textual reference, one not signalled in this t