For Want of a Totem

Vivienne Ndlovu

Description

Zonipha is a rural girl newly inaugurated into the city as a domestic worker. Ambitious but righteous, she seeks to improve herself. Life disagrees and Zonipha finds herself ensnared by an abusive man, her employer. Unable to escape, she falls pregnant with a child who can never know his father, and following her unhappy decision will never know his mother. Fate intervenes at a tuckshop when Eugenia, who has longed for child, discovers the abandoned baby. In doing so, she pioneers a movement that seems to defy culture as she tries to encourage the idea of adoption. For Want of a Totem explores the meaning of family and what it means to be a parent. If a child is abandoned, who must raise her. This short but moving novel raised important questions about culture and its adaptability as it responds to contemporary and sometimes contentious issues.

Informations

• Publié par: Weaver Press
• Date de parution: 14 avril 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781779223302
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by
Baobab Books, Harare, 1997
This second edition published by
Weaver Press, Box A1922, Avondale, Harare
www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com
This revised edition, 2018
© Vivienne Ndlovu, 1997, 2018
Typeset by Weaver Press.
Cover Design: Farai Wallace, Harare.
Printed by: Rocking Rat, 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: 978-1-77922-329-6 (p/b)
ISBN: 978-1-77922-330-2 (e-pub)w
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
V IVIENNE N DLOVU is an Irish Zimbabwean writer who works for SAFAIDS in Harare. Her fiction includes Waste not your Tears , and the short stories ‘Homecoming’ in Writing Still (2003), ‘Kurima’ in Writing Now (2005), and ‘Bare Bones’ in Women Writing Zimbabwe (2008).
Chapter One
S he heard the car pull up at the gate and as she opened the door, her son was already walking up the short path, hand in hand with her first grandchild. She glowed with pleasure at the sight of these two closest to her heart, while at the same time she acknowledged her spirit contract with pain as it would sometimes, when she thought how her life had become. If Takura had survived ... These two, without whom she could not consider her life now, would not have been part of it. There had been many times in Mai Takura’s life when she had truly wondered why she was still alive, why life should have treated her so cruelly, but now she thought, my ancestors have interceded for me, for things have changed.
Eugenia had married young and entered marriage with the full expectation that it would be for her as it had been for her mother. Her new husband was delighted with her, for she was youthful and without artifice and he knew beyond all doubt that he was adored. She still remembered the thrill of their lovemaking in those early years – how unexpected it had been to find such pleasure in an act which she had anticipated only with apprehension. Then after about two years, everything started to turn sour, for there was no sign of a child. Her own mother began to ask her anxiously if things in ‘that area’ were all right between them and the happiness that had always seemed so surely on the horizon of her life became shadowy and clouded. At last they went to see a n’anga , but still nothing happened. They brewed beer and held ceremonies and still relentlessly each month her body would cast out its fruitless preparations for the child that did not want to be born. Gradually their lovemaking lost its joy and with it, it’s spontaneity. It was as though the absence of a child had taken away the pleasure of the act itself, even though that pleasure had come simply out of the delight they found in pleasing each other. It became a perfunctory thing, something she did without anticipation and with little hope. Her husband was trying to be patient with her, but she feared that soon he would heed the urgings of his parents and take on a second wife who might be able to bear him sons.
They had been married for almost four years when her husband sat her down gravely and explained that negotiations had begun for him to marry a girl in another village. He didn’t want to take a second wife for himself he said, but he had to try and give his parents a grandchild. They would wait a little longer but after the harvest, if there was still no sign, then he would marry. She said nothing. She understood the position quite clearly. He was being as fair to her as he could be, but she hoped that the other girl would not take unkind advantage of the sterile older wife and goad her with her pregnancy. Then the miracle happened. She was so used to the regular changes of her monthly cycle that she no longer paid them any attention. Within hours, every four weeks on the Sunday, her body would tell her that yet again it had not conceived. Her family were Catholic, but there was no Catholic church or even a priest in the area and so every six weeks a travelling priest would come and hear their confessions and take mass. And he was coming today, but she had not bled since he last came? She held her breath and her thoughts as one. Could it be ... She dared not hope and day by day she watched, both anxious for the sight of blood and fearful of it. As the days progressed she thought she noticed her breasts were fuller, but perhaps that was just in preparation for the bleeding that she was still sure would come. At last when it was now time for the priest’s second visit, she dared to speak to her mother, who almost wept with gratitude.
‘You are pregnant my child!’ she exclaimed, ‘Why, haven’t you noticed that you have been drinking milk? I saw it myself and thought it was just a passing phase, but you are like me! When I am pregnant I must drink milk, even though normally I don’t like its taste.