Bones

By Chenjerai Hove

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Weaver Press
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781779223913

Book preview

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.

Chigumadzi, Panashe. These Bones Will Rise Again. The Indigo Press, 2018.

Dangarembga, Tsitsi. Nervous Condition. Women’s Press, 1988.

––––––. The Book of Not. Ayebia Clarke Publishing , 2006.

––––––. This Mournable Body. Graywolf Press, 2018.

Farah, Nuruddin. Knots. Riverhead Books, 2007.

Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. Edward Arnold, 1924.

Hove, Chenjerai. Ancestors. College Press, 1996.

Iweala, Uzodinma. Beasts of No Nation. John Murray, 2005.

Mihai, Mihaela. ‘The affairs of political memory: Hermeneutical dissidence from national myth-making.’ Angelaki, 24:4: 52-69, 2019.

Mutswairo, Solomon. Feso. Oxford University Press, 1956.

Ndebele, Njabulo Simakahle. The Cry of Winnie Mandela: A Novel. New Africa Books, 2003.

Okara, Gabriel. The Voice. Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1970.

Kareithi, Peter J. ‘Africa: Outdated Representations Continue to Deny Women Autonomy of Their Personhood’ .Feminist Media Studies, 14:2: 334-337, 2014.

Ranger, T. ‘Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe’. Journal of Southern African Studies, 30:2: 215-234, 2004.

Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English. Longman African Writers, 1994.

Tshuma, Novuyo Rosa. The House of Stone. Atlantic Books, 2018.

Tutuola, Amos. The Palm Wine Drinkard. Faber & Faber, 1953.

Veit-Wild, Flora. ‘Dances with Bones: Hove’s Romanticized Africa’. Research in African Literatures, 24:3: 5-12, 1993.

Vera, Yvonne. The Stone Virgins. Weaver Press, 2002.

––––––. Butterfly Burning. Baobab Books,1998.

––––––. Without a Name. Baobab Books,1994.

––––––. Nehanda. Baobab Books,1993.

Zhuwarara, Rino. ‘Men and women in a colonial context: A discourse on gender and liberation in Chenjerai Hove’s 1989 Noma award-winning novel – Bones’. Zambezia, 21:1: 1-21, 1994.

1

Janifa

She asked me to read the letter for her again today, Marita, every day she comes to me, all pleading, ‘Janifa, read the letter again for me, please read it, read it all the time for me if you have the strength,’ but I just read it, for the first few days, like those little letters that girls receive from naughty boys… I love you, you are my margarine, my butter, my peanut butter for my heart… But she calls me to read the letter all the time without end, even in the night, everybody else asleep in their huts, on their mats, but she still wants to hear what he wrote to me. Marita, I say all the time, you shame me, I feel ashamed when I read this letter, a love letter to me. But for you I will read it, for you and no one else – but the shame in my heart weighs on me like a stone. Can you think of anything that can shame a young girl more than a letter from a boy? But Marita still calls it the best thing I have ever done for her.

To bring that letter to her, just to say, Marita, he once wrote me a letter that I still keep with me. Yes, in truth, he wrote me a letter which I will be too ashamed to read to you. I do not know how it is with me, when I read it I smile as if it were the best thing that ever happened to me, just like that. I smile as if to say I would have loved him if he was still here. Strange, strange really how such small things take us this far. But Marita stares at me, gaping, while the soot from the burning leaves and grass gathers in her mouth as she stares at me… speechless, without a word from her mouth, just her heart telling me that I have something which is more important than I know. The first day she came to me, walking in the sun, sweating on the forehead, to say she wanted a few words with me: ‘Yes, what is it, mother?’ I say. She stares at her feet, feet cracked with neglect, and lifts up her coarse finger to point at the nearby anthill. ‘Can we go out, behind the anthill so that we can be ourselves there?’ she says without any sign of anger in her voice. ‘Come behind the anthill so that no one can steal with their ears,’ and she sits, removing a few pieces of dry meat stuck in her teeth. Then I feel old, like the old women when they have a few words to share about the mischief of their husbands.

I remember one day when two women came to share the secrets of their husbands behind the anthill when I was helping myself. They were so full of stories in their hearts they could not wait to see if there was anybody behind the bushes. I just sat there long after I had finished what I went to do. How could I stand up in the middle of their secrets? So I just sat there, behind their backs, with the smelly thing under my buttocks. …Yes, the men are