LET me continue with just another nudge to remind you of the duty of every serious critic to fill in historical, semantic and pragmatic detail where the author simply provides art-for-art’s sake bird’s eye-view of events.
This is what I mean by going an extra-mile with appreciation–making more sense out of the story for the rest of your followers.
There lies the literariness of literature; the quality that separates it from mere entertainment.
This gift is not common among critics of literature.
A good number rely on simplistic observations.
Let us take one, Mukai-Vukani,’s analysis to illustrate this shortcoming.
Here is what our critic observes:
The central character is Onai Moyo, kind to all and loving, a loyal wife and deeply caring mother of three children, loyal to her husband even though love has long died and he, a drunkard and womaniser, abuses and assaults her so badly that she has to seek treatment in hospital, hiding the true cause of her injuries from the doctor.
Katy, her best friend, urges her to leave her abusive husband: “Do you want us to take you out of this house in a coffin?”(6). And Katy’s daughter Faith, a law student, reflects angrily: “Why should a woman allow herself to bear so much at the hands of a man?
Her own husband?
Had his act of paying bride-price reduced her to nothing more than a possession?” (26).
One of her husband’s other women is Sheila, though Onai does not know it, who says, “You know what, Mai Moyo? When I was a prostitute, I didn’t care about catching HIV.
I thought I would die from hunger, anyway. Kusiri kufa ndekupi?
As a prostitute, I could at least die with a full stomach.
Now that I know I will die of AIDS, I think dying of hunger is far much better.
If I could have another chance.” (62).
Women are vulnerable, not only Sheila and her colleagues, but also Onai, so anxious to preserve her status as a respectable married woman.
Marital intercourse for her, though, is not a matter of love, but of self-defence.
Female condoms “made her feel more in control of her sexuality and definitely less vulnerable to Gari’s demands.
During his various degrees of drunkenness, he often failed to notice when she had a condom on.
This meant that the fights about him wearing a condom were less frequent than before.
What a relief it was that on most evenings he was drunk, almost to the point of paralysis!” (70).
Gari comes home only to eat and sleep, but does not provide for the family.
Onai has to do that as a street vendor which takes up her whole life.
She cannot even go to church any longer. “The need to make a living for her children had been much greater than the desire to spend her Sunday mornings in prayer and worship. Somewhere along the line, the core of her faith had disintegrated.” (127).
If you have read the text, you will agree with me that there is nothing new in this analysis.
She is almost re-telling the story or summarising it or paraphrasing it even.
There is hardly any interpretation and analysis.
The artist, the critic remains with several unanswered questions such as: Is Onai’s husband an archetypal character?
Is his abuse of Onai representative of all African men in respect of their wives?
Is bride-price justification for abuse?
What is the role of lobola in the African context anyway?
Is faith asking the correct question when she wonders whether lobola has a role in the abuse of Onai?
What kind of law is informing her curiosity?
Roman-Dutch Law!
Can such a system of law appreciate African practices such as payment of lobola with contextual accuracy?
Is abuse of women or any other vulnerable persons sanctioned by African culture?
If not what explains this aberrant behaviour?
What historical forces shape such dog-eat-dog vicious cycle?
And prostitution!
Is it just a question of personal moral failure?
To what extent is it a function of colonial-capitalist order?
Are predatory and wanton therapeutic sexual pleasures no symptoms of a bigger problem themselves?
Where do colonialism, neo-colonial capitalism, arbitrary urbanisation models and colonial industrialism fit in the entire scheme of things where Africans, being the main victims, feed off fellow victims.
Put differently, we are saying such literal observation by Mukai lacks literariness.
One would have expected her to make judgements about the historical and artistic and ideological consistency/accuracy of the writer to save society from being unsuspecting victims of the ‘fetishism of print’ or the ‘tyranny of definition’.
Some of the above questions can be raised in respect of Murambatsvina (Operation Clean-up) as well.
The author is content to observe as follows: “On arrival, she was shocked to find shards and splinters of wood and asbestos where her three shacks had been standing only that morning.
The bulldozer was just reversing slowly back onto the road.
It had flattened a portion of her fence and the flower-bed in its wake” (137).
Her lodgers have to take their belongings to Tsiga grounds and stay in the open.
Faith, the budding lawyer, is again outraged.
Her fiancée Tom, a ‘new farmer’ and businessman, plays it safe and adopts the official line.
He is alarmed when she calls the assault on the Mbare people ‘a gross abuse of humanity’.
“It wasn’t as if he didn’t care about people’s suffering.
He did.
It was just that he wanted to get on in life.
He had done well so far, and he knew too well how the wrong word and at a wrong time or in the wrong place could set one back.”
He has benefited from the land redistribution and cannot afford to turn against his benefactors.
Faith feels deeply for her parents and mainini Onai, but she, too, is not going to risk either her future career or her prospective marriage.
Success in life is getting out of Mbare.
Even her parents who make their money by dealing in foreign currency hope to move eventually to a stand in Mabelreign.