Shamiso receives a stone pendant of Nyami Nyami from an elder relative, a heavy, fragile talisman shaped like a snake with a fish's head. The pendant embodies her contrarian nature and marks a turning point in her passage from girlhood to womanhood. Shamiso navigates a fissured post-independence Zimbabwe where suspicion and social unrest pervade daily life. Family life is unstable: an alcoholic mother who carries a brick has abandoned her, and a remote, former soldier father enforces order that clashes with Shamiso's dreaminess. An elder, Babamukuru Jimson, provides spirited support. Shamiso undertakes arduous climbs outside Harare in pursuit of something beyond her constrained home.
A stone carving of Nyami Nyami, the River God, the spirit snake. My first instinct was fear that one day I would break it. It looked fragile, a needle of stone with Nyami Nyami's serpentine body coiled up and gathered at the top, where instead of a snake's head, a fierce fish's head sprung out bearing sharp teeth. It was surprisingly heavy.
A snake with a fish's head. It was a strange form, as if all life forms were connected and fluid in their existence. No one had ever given me anything like this before. It's telling that Chikwava's usually peppy narration slows to scrutinise this keepsake. The pendant is an emblem of Shamiso's twisty, mixed path from girlhood to womanhood, a path reminiscent in places of both NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions.
This vibrant, sometimes surreal picaresque begins in a post-independence Zimbabwe. The country is fissured by suspicion and social unrest. Disquiet marks Shamiso's family life, too: she has been abandoned by her unstable mother, who lives for the bar and carries a brick in her bag. She lives instead with her remote father, a former soldier whose desire for orderliness is at odds with Shamiso's dreamier sensibilities.
Collection
[
|
...
]