Writing Free

Description

In this fifth anthology of Zimbabwean short stories from Weaver Press fifteen writers respond to the topic of writing free, and offer their thoughts about how and why they wrote as they did. The stories reflect a wide variety of freedoms: from tyranny, from hunger, from abuse, from the shackles of tradition, and even from the traditional constraints of narrative convention. But there are cautionary tales, too. Political change may be liberating for the adults who suffered for it, but will their children share in the euphoria of new-found freedom? Will a departure from domestic poverty to the calm waters of the diaspora deliver all that was hoped for it? Is the grass always greener beyond the fence of a stifling marriage? Zimbabwe has had more than its share of social and material deprivation in recent years, and people's responses have taken many forms. Writing Free offers an engaging and kaleidoscopic sample of these, and in doing so gives an intimate portrait of a country in transition.

Sujets

• Collection
• Collections

Informations

• Publié par: Weaver Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781779221780
• Langue: English

Extrait

Writing Free
Writing Free
edited by
Irene Staunton
Published by Weaver Press, Box A1922, Avondale, Harare. 2011 < www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com >
This collection Weaver Press Each individual story, the author
Typeset by Weaver Press Cover Design: Danes Design, Harare Printed by: Benaby Printing and Publishing, Harare
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: 978-1-77922-157-5
Contents
Running In Zimbabwe - Jonathan Brakarsh
Miss McConkey of Bridgewater Close - Petina Gappah
Crossroads - Tendai Huchu
Time s Footprints - Ethel Kabwato
The Situation - Donna Kerstein
The Novel Citizen - Ignatius Mabasa
An Intricate Deception - Daniel Mandishona
The Missing - Isabella Matambanadzo
Shamisos - NoViolet Mkha
When The Moon Stares - Christopher Mlalazi
Eloquent Notes on a Suicide: Case of the Silent Girl - Blessing Musariri
Danfo Driver - Ambrose Musiyiwa
The Donor s Visit - Sekai Nzenza
Eyes On - Fungisayi Sasa
African Wife - Emmanuel Sigauke
Writing free words that perhaps offer a small provocation, a small challenge to writers to extend their boundaries, to think something through from a lateral perspective, to approach a topic differently, to turn a persepctive inside out. Good writing searches beneath superficial exteriors, seeks for insights that resonate, reaches beyond the known, the clich d, the tendency to evade what is hard to confront.
In this collection, each writer helps us to explore and appreciate an idea anew. As Ana s Nin aptly wrote, The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say .
Freedom is something that we often don t realise we possess, until it is taken away.
Irene Staunton
Authors biographies and commentaries on Writing Free
Jonathon Brakarsh is a health professional and writer who moved to Zimbabwe in 1993. He began his career working in the off-off-Broadway theatre district in New York City as a playwright and stage manager. Zimbabwe is a continuous source of inspiration for his stories as each day presents challenges which Zimbabweans face with grace, resilience and ingenuity.
Running in Zimbabwe was inspired by the announcement from Irene Staunton, seeking contributions to Weaver Press s anthology Writing Free . After reading her e-mail, three stories, which had been sitting in my mind, suddenly started coalescing, fighting for places in the larger narrative. Being given the opportunity to write free was an offer I could not refuse. So, I spent an intense period of time writing and revising. What emerged was a story about the desire most people have for freedom, and how the oppression present in Zimbabwe insinuates itself into every action of life. Love, a sense of belonging and the social fabric which bonds neighbours and relatives together can dilute the poisons that have mixed into the motion of our daily lives. How we obtain our vision of freedom continues to be discovered. This story puts these issues on the table using black humour, irony and a hope for change. Thanks to my son, Sam, for suggesting an ending to this story, which until recently was in search of itself.
Petina Gappah is the author of An Elegy for Easterly (2009), a collection of short stories which was awarded the Guardian First Book Award and short-listed for the Orwell Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times First Book Award, the Frank O Connor Short Story Award and Zimbabwe s National Arts Merit Award. It has been published in more than a dozen languages. Taking a sabbatical break from her career as an international trade lawyer in Geneva, Petina currently lives in Harare, from where she writes, travels and chairs the Board of the Harare City Library. Her first novel will be published in 2012.
At the heart of my story, Miss McConkey of Bridgewater Close , is an exploration of the social burdens that came with Zimbabwe s freedom, with its independence, particularly the burdens borne by the black children who were the first to go to formerly whites only schools and thus integrated these schools. I was one of those children. The sharpest memory I have of those days is the constant fear that I had done or said something wrong, something that would expose me to the stares and humiliating comments of my classmates. While the nation was celebrating its independence, while black parents were celebrating the opening up of educational opportunities that had been closed to their children, these same children were experiencing freedom as agony. However, my story is also about another kind of being free, it is about the freedom that comes from forgiveness, the freedom that comes with letting go of the memory of pain.
Tendai Huchu , author of the Hairdresser of Harare was born in Bindura, Zimbabwe. He has a great love of literature, and currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
My first thought when I was asked to submit a short story for Writing Free was, I m not getting paid for this am I? The Writing part was easy to understand but the Free left so much breadth for imagination - an artistic licence to create anything at all. In imagining Crossroads I fused childhood memories with fiction and borrowed styles from authors I admire. I thought the narrative of a man bound to his wife and job in a foreign country reminiscing on his careFree childhood would fit well in the anthology, but if you look at the story closely, even this idealised childhood has subtle limitations imposed upon it.
Ethel Irene Kabwato was born in Mutare, Zimbabwe into a creative family and has a BA in Media Studies from the Zimbabwe Open University. She participated in the British Council Crossing Borders Project in 2004 and has had her poetry published in the anthology Sunflowers in your Eyes . Currently, she is working on a project called Slum Cinema, a voluntary initiative that seeks to empower disadvantaged communities through multimedia work. Her inspiration is derived from her two daughters, Nadia and Wynona.
Footprints of Time is a story set in rural Zimbabwe after the inception of the Government of National Unity. The story explores the theme of migration and how it has affected some Zimbabwean families. My story can be defined as writing free because it centres on the disturbances that rocked the country after the disputed March 29 elections in 2008, and the choices that people made in response to the situation. In this case, the main character, Steve, who is now based in the United Kingdom, struggles to come to terms with the death of his wife, Hannah, whom he abandoned after she had been gang-raped.
Donna Kirstein was born in 1985. Raised in Zimbabwe, she has led a fairly nomadic life, growing up in various towns and farms during which she developed a passion for reading. She has always harboured a secret desire to write and she has recently been fortunate enough to study towards a joint degree in Fine Art, English and Creative Writing at the University of Chichester in the UK. She intends to continue travelling and to return home to Zimbabwe one day soon.
The Situation is an experimental short story that stems from the frustration of reading and watching the news about the problems in Zimbabwe. In writing the story, I was strongly influenced by news stories about the crisis. My story offers four voices: the three voices in the main section are fragmented, and can be read individually or in varying combinations. The concept is that no single voice can be wholly right or wholly wrong. The Situation was inspired by newspaper articles but takes as its starting point the resilience of Zimbabweans. Writing Free is a positive concept, and can be seen as a celebration of the will to survive and adaptability of Zimbabweans in the face of difficulty. Both The Situation and Writing Free represent writing with the freedom of individual voices and writing a way into a new future; the concept allows for self-determination, regardless of style, genre or ideas. It s about moving forward with hope for the future.
Ignatius Tirivang ani Mabas a is a writer and storyteller who primarily writes in Shona. Although now well-known as a poet and novelist, Ignatius says, I started telling stories before I could write, re-telling the stories my grandmother told me, and adding new twists to the plot. You could say that this was the process by which I became a creative writer. He has published two novels to date: Ndafa Here? and Mapenzi both of which have won local awards, and he has poems and short stories published on various websites. In 2010, Ignatius was the writer and storyteller in residence at the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture at the University of Manitoba in Canada for three and half months.
The Novel Citizen is an almost bizarre, multi-layered, metaphorical story, that attempts to explore certain thought processes in the life of a writer and the art of writing using madness as a device. What makes this story exciting to me is how it is being told by a vagrant who invites the listener to be an active participant and finish the story for him when he gets murdered by the real writer of the story. Yet, there is the question, who owns the story? Who is the teller of the story? What is the role of a writer and how alive do the characters in a novel become? The novel, through this story, is a contested area and readers and characters are not passive.
Danie l Mandishona is an architect. He was born in Harare in 1959 and brought up by his maternal grandparents in Mbare (then known as Harari township). In 1976 he was expelled from