Bones

Chenjerai Hove

Description

Bones is a powerful, heart-rending novel that provides a sensitive evocation of Marita, a farm worker, whose only son joined the freedom fighters in Zimbabwe�s war of liberation. He does not return after the war and Marita is determined to find him or find out what happened to him. This is perhaps a single clear theme in a landscape where women, particularly the poor and the marginalised, suffer many layers of oppression. Marita�s courage and endurance are reconstructed through the memories of those who knew her in a language steep in poetry and Shona idiom. Bones, which won the Noma Award in 1989, was Chenjerai Hove�s first novel in English.

Informations

• Publié par: Weaver Press
• Date de parution: 16 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781779223913
• Langue: English

Extrait

Bones
Bones
Chenjerai Hove
First published by Baobab Books, Box 567, Harare. 1988
This edition published by Weaver Press, Box A1922, Avondale, Harare. 2020 <www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com>
© Chenjerai Hove, 1998, 2021.
Typeset by Weaver Press Cover Design: Farai Wallace

All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without the express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-77922-390-6 (p/b)
ISBN: 978-1-77922-391-3 (ePub)
ISBN: 978-1-77922-392-0 (pdf)
C HENJERAI H OVE (1956-2015) was born in Mazvihwa communal lands, southern Zimbabwe, near the mining town of Zvishavane. Novelist, poet, essayist and lecturer, his published fiction includes Masimba Avanhu? (1986), Bones (winner of the 1989 Noma Award for publishing in Africa), Shadows , (1991), and Ancestors (1994). His nonfiction includes Shebeen Tales (essays, 1994), Guardians of the Soil (with Iliya Trojanow, 1997), Palaver Finish (essays, 2002). His poetry includes Up in Arms (1982), Swimming in Floods of Tears (with Lyamba wa Kabika, 1983), Red Hills of Home (1985), Rainbows in the Dust (1997) and blind moon (2003). His poetry is also available at https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/5753/Chenjerai-Hove/en/tile
He travelled extensively throughout Africa, Europe, and the United States on lecture tours, and was writer-in-residence at the universities of Zimbabwe, Leeds and Lewis (UK), Clark (Oregon), and Leiden (the Netherlands). He lived in Rambouillet, France, and Stavanger, Norway – writing, lecturing and giving poetry readings.
Hove’s novels have been translated into several languages, including French, German, Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, and Danish.
For the women whose children did not return sons and daughters those who gave their bones to the making of a new conscience, a conscience of bones, blood and footsteps dreaming of coming home some day in vain
Contents
Foreword
1 Janifa
2 Janifa
3 Murume
4 Janifa
5 Chisaga
6 Janifa
7 The Spirits Speak 1897 –My Bones Fall
8 The Unknown Woman
9 Janifa
10 The Unknown Woman
11 The Unknown Woman
12 Chisaga
13 Janifa
14 The Spirits Speak
15 Janifa
Foreword
This new edition of Chenjerai Hove’s novel Bones , first published in 1987, is a timely work of recovery and a reminder of its importance in the Zimbabwean literary canon. Bones also participates in the creation of the intertextuality that has come to define the Zimbabwean literary text with its referential style that alludes to prior texts and writers. The title of the novel is taken from the words spoken by Charwe, the medium of the spirit of Nehanda, a few moments before she was hanged during the First Chimurenga of 1896. Her heroic but tragic encounter with the colonial project is summed up in the prophetic words, “My bones will rise”. This return of the past to haunt the present and to demand justice is key to understanding indigenous systems as readers cross ontological and epistemological boundaries, an interesting crossing that elsewhere is mapped by Antony Burgess in his novel, Earthly Powers, as he writes back to E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India .
Charles Mungoshi, although not usually credited with initiating the referencing to bones and the theme of haunting in Zimbabwean literature, alludes to Solomon Mutswairo‘s Feso in his novel Waiting for the Rain , especially in the dream chapter. The haunting in Mungoshi’s novel reflects a failure to resolve crises in ways of being, knowing and developing a national consciousness. Chenjerai Hove writes back simultaneously to Mungoshi and Mutswairo. In Mutswairo’s novel a patriarchal construction turns Nehanda into a muse of war. The narrative also celebrates copious shedding of blood as part of a patriotic agenda underpinned by a militarised masculinity. This reconstruction of the Nehanda figure shows little connection with the historical Nehanda, step-sister of Chaminuka and daughter of Mutope, the first emperor of Munhumupa Empire. In Bones , Chenjerai Hove represents the first rescuing of the Nehanda figure through literature.
Contrary to the narrow nationalist, patriarchal and ethnic agenda that emerges in Mutswairo’s works, Hove becomes one of the few Zimbabwean male writers to rescue the representation of Nehanda from the abduction mentioned above. In the political allegory of colonialism the colonised men, despite their capacity to abuse, rape and objectify the colonised woman, are emasculated and feckless. It is the women, represented by Marita, who represent defiance. Bones offers a complex rendering of the figuration of colonised womanhood through Marita, Janifa, and the anonymous woman as they are linked to Nehanda, whose spirit articulates a sisterhood that does not respect temporal boundaries. This discourse is framed in the context of a larger historical trajectory that centres on justice for crimes against specific groups, reconciliation, and the forging of a nationalist consciousness on the basis of an intransigent national conscience that is not determined by the political vicissitudes of a particular political order. Bones is implicated in “the making of a new conscience / a conscience of bones, blood” as it is also an obituary to those who died in the Second Chimurenga and those who did not return home in 1980.
Bones has an unique narrative style and plot in which most of the chapters focus on characters who work on Manyepo’s farm and are connected to Marita: Janifa, Marume, Chisaga. The characters, particularly the colonised women, are traumatised by history. The two chapters by an anonymous woman, and the two in which spirits speak, reinforce this focus on trauma and the sisterhood of women that gives Janifa, despite the connivance and betrayal of her mother, the power to unchain herself, and as the “black bird with broken wings” she is able to fly from a psychiatriatic penitentiary.
Early critical response to the novel by Flora Veit-Wild (1993), which she labels a “a romanticisation of bones”, has been dissatisfaction with its style and ideological orientation. This reading fails to recognise the particular brand of womanism produced within the constraints of the nation, and its attempt to create black women’s solidarity. The novel’s strength lies in its creation of this solidarity in the face of egregious disempowerment, exploitation and violence by colonial and postcolonial masculinities. Marita’s resistance is a continuation of earlier struggles that begin with the iconic figure of Nehanda.
Hove’s style is neither eccentric nor abstruse in the context of African literature and the decolonizing of the English language that has been associated with West African writers such as Amos Tutuola, Gabriel Okara and Ken Saro-Wiwa. In his perceptive reading of Bones , Rino Zhuwarara (1994) concedes that Hove experiments with language to good effect. The deviation from standard English continues to be noted in a number of post-2000 African writers, notably Chris Abani, and is a critical element in the democratisation of literary aesthetics that has for some time been dominated by university educated writers. Brian Chikwava’s Harare North , for instance, emulates the writing in ‘rotten English’ of Saro-Wiwa. Bones may have provided him with a model for experimenting with non-standard English in the creation of a unique fictional and cultural universe.
The first generation of Zimbabwean women writers – Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera – in writing back to their male predecessors, contend in different ways with women who resist domination and misrepresentation. It is in the interests of the bones motif and intertextuality that Yvonne Vera becomes important as she writes back to Mutswairo in The Stone Virgins , Butterfly Burning and Nehanda. The violent images and the character of Sibaso in The Stone Virgins attend to the toxic masculinity that has been hyperactive in the production of bones. Hence an urgent demand for both retributive and restorative justice. Recent novels by Zimbabwean women writers – These Bones Will Rise Again (Panashe Chigumadzi) and The House of Stone (Novuyo Tshuma) – continue to invite readers to attend to this demand.
Of particular relevance to the reader today is not only the way in which Bones connects with contemporary writers in terms of the archive in a very broad entangling of its oral and written parts, but also in the ways it deals with narrative and the politics of memory. Terence Ranger, in his critique of Zimbabwe’s patriotic nationalist history, writes that sovereign power speaks with a single shrill voice that silences other voices and presents a simplified but rigid memory. Hove belongs to a generation of African male writers who, like Njabulo Ndebele in The Cry of Winnie Mandela and Nurrudin Farah in Knots , deconstruct phallocentric and monolithic versions of national memory, acknowledge the role of women in national struggles, and show the potential of women to reconstruct nations from the ruins of toxic and masculinised nationalisms. In an age of the globalised policing of memory, the rise of monovocality that threatens cultures of polyvocality, and the rape of women in southern Africa and in allegedly safe havens in the West, Chenjerai’s Bones continues to challenge the nationalist literary archive, and the “self-serving hegemonic visions of history institutionalised by the state and dominant memory entrepreneurs” (Mihai: 52).
Kizito Z. Muchemwa
2020
References
Abani, Chris. Graceland: A novel . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
Burgess, Anthony. Earthly Powers . Hutchinson, 1980.