Easterly on the short list of the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award

Some great and surprising news: my book has been short-listed for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award which is funded by the Cork City Council and organised by the Munster Literature Centre. I have been shortlisted along with Charlotte Grimshaw from New Zealand, Shi-Li Kow from Malaysia, Phillip O Ceillaigh from Ireland,  and Wells Tower and Simon Van Booy from the United States.  

This news was broken to the world yesterday afternoon not by a newspaper, but by a blogger, Women Rule Writer, at 13.14.   All bloggers hail thee, o fair Nuala.  See also the Munster Literature Centre website and this report from the Guardian.

The award has in previous years been won by my girl Yiyun Li, Haruki Murakami, Miranda July and Jumpha Lahiri, so it is a real honour to be on the short list.  

This means that I get to go back to visit my new love, Ireland, of valley green and towering crag. Until I went to Ireland, I was always amused by those white (and African-American) tourists who go to one African country or city and come back proclaiming their love for Africa, all of  it, but I am telling you, I  went to Galway for two days and I fell in love with Ireland.  And I fell in love with the Irish. Well, not all of them, I mean, not the murderers, or thugs, or men who hit women or kids who throw litter everywhere -  unlike the Western tourists who love all Africans, I am more discriminating in my taste. 

So I am really pleased to be going back to  Ireland, to Cork this time. 

I am looking forward to meeting the other writers, and reading them, the only one whose work I know is Wells Tower, whose book (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned ) I really liked. You will recall that he was one of the five writers reviewed by James Lasdun in his brilliant examination of the state of the short story a few months ago in The Observer.  I also like what I have read about him, I loved this statement, from an interview in the New York Observer:   

Being a human being isn’t just all misery and despair.  There’s a lot of available joy out there, even if we don’t often find it. I think that fiction should find opportunities for joy.   I think what people really want is fiction that in some tiny way makes their life more meaningful and makes the world seem like a richer place. The world is awfully short on joy and richness, and I think to some extent it’s the fiction writer’s job to salvage some of that and to give it to us in ways that we can believe in. 

I will drink to that. And to the Frank O'Connor award too. Cheers all round!

"The surprise is not that we have lost him, but that we ever had him at all": Germaine Greer on Michael Jackson

Like all of you, I spent the weekend remembering the genius that was Michael Jackson and reading some lovely tributes . This heart-squeezing picture of a very young Michael Jackson in a garden is from the Guardian, and accompanies a piece by Germaine Greer which is one of the most beautiful tributes to Michael Jackson that I have read. Here is an excerpt, but be warned, serious tearing up ahead.

_________________

Ever since Dionysos danced ahead of his horde of bloody-footed maenads across the rocky highlands of prehistoric Greece, dance and song have been the province of boys. Like Orpheus, Jackson was destroyed by his fans, whose adulation and adoration prevented his living in any kind of normal society. The creativity ebbed away day by day. He became a parody of himself. It is time now to forget all that and salute the miraculous boy who will triumph over death as Dionysos did, becoming immortal through his art.

Nowhere will his contribution be more obvious and his influence more strongly felt than in the world of dance. No choreographer of the last 30 years has been unaware of Jackson's achievement. He rewrote the vocabulary of dance for everyone, from kids competing in talent shows to the royal ballets of Europe.

If the dance establishment did not often acknowledge his influence it was because there was no need. His shapes, his moves were everywhere.

Nijinsky and Nureyev also died young. They, too, were transcendent dancing boys, but they chose to interpret the choreography supplied to them by others.

By contrast Michael Jackson's art was astonishingly innovative. No one could dance like him, until he showed them how, and then they were never as good as he was. His concept of the dance was utterly 20th century, extravagantly multi-dimensional, and not in the least middle class.

Nijinsky may have been the greatest Spectre de la Rose, Nureyev the greatest Corsair, but these two candles pale in the light of Jackson's blazing star. The surprise is not that we have lost him, but that we ever had him at all.

_____________

Photograph of Michael Jackson: Henry Diltz/Corbis, via the Guardian.

Of the Prime Minister's Southwark experience, the importance of talking about sausages to butchers and the pernicious influence of donors

The Zimbabwean blogosphere and internet papers have been awash with discussion of the Prime Minister's call to Zimbabweans to return home, which led to him being booed in Southwark Cathedral in London last week.

Now, people, let's get one thing clear: the MDC is a political party whose main reason for existence is to come into power. To achieve this, its leaders and members will say and do what is necessary. When they needed international support, they played the human rights card for all it was worth. This is not to say that there was no repression, and torture, beatings and killings, of course there were: they simply used those violations for their own purposes. Now that the very same international supporters are offering money only if the situation in Zimbabwe stabilises and the rule of law is established with human rights being respected, the MDC would like the world to believe that this is being achieved. Hence the call for Zimbabweans to return.

If you look at it from the MDC worldview, therefore, what the PM said makes a lot of sense. But it was certainly not the right message for that audience, the PM may well want to work on his tone deafness. I recommend that he take some advice from Jacob Zuma, who, whatever you may think of him, is the consummate politician. As someone said of him once: when talking to butchers, he speaks of sausages, and when talking to bakers, of bread. The PM, by contrast, chose to talk of bread to butchers, and as they would have rather been talking about the meatier subject of meat, the result could only be mutual disappointment.

I was struck by Farayi Maruzani's defence of the PM in The Zimbabwe Times mainly because of a number of paragraphs in which he talked about the influence of donors on his entire life. His message, I think, is that donors are important to Zimbabwe, and we need to get them back in again. He is right about the differences that donors have made in the lives of the poor in Africa, but he also, albeit unintentionally, paints an entirely depressing picture of government failure. I have many points of divergence with Dead Aid author Dambisa Moyo, but on one issue we agree, which is that the reliance on foreign aid makes African governments abdicate their responsibility to their own people.

And Mr. Maruzani provides the evidence.

Here is what he had to say.

________________


I was born in Buhera South at Muzokomba Clinic. The clinic was built by donors. My father and mother survived on food donated by foreign donors. I grew up doubling breast feeding and donated powdered milk which was donated to the Ministry of health by the European Economic Community in Brussels, Belgium. When I was one year old I started feeding on donated cereals from the department of Social Welfare at Murambinda Growth Point.

I received free medical immunisation and I do not even know where all those vaccines came from. My mother does not know who donated the vaccinations that saved my life either. From the age of two to seven I had food at feeding points and we ate very highly nutritious porridge donated by the Kellogg Foundation based in London. At the age of seven I went to Primary School. Here again there was popular mahewu donated by the Red Cross Society whose Headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. That was my main diet. The water that all the school children drank was wholly pumped and piped to school by donors who provided the funds to DDF.

I had this donated mahewu for seven years at Primary School. I then went out to secondary school. The secondary school was started by missionaries but all the important building like the laboratory, the administration block and dormitories were built by funding donated by the Japanese government. The equipment and chemicals in the laboratory were also donated by the Japanese Embassy in Harare using funds from Tokyo.

After this I went to the University of Zimbabwe. The donors paid my fees and payout. There were many other students whose fees were paid by donors, both local and international ones. We preferred foreign donors to local ones although The Harare City Council was actually a better donor than some foreign sponsors at UZ.

After graduation I went to work but there again my office and all the safes, vehicles, tents, were donated by UNICEF. All the fuel I used was donated. My salary and the salaries of my eight subordinates came from donors. Even my boss’s salary was paid by donors.

_______________


First published in The Zimbabwe Times, 26 June 2009. For the rest of the article, click here.

Books that Made a Difference to me, Part Two

Four more books that made a difference to me.

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Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

'We three Fossils vow to put our name in history books because it's our very own and nobody can say it's because of our grandfathers.'

The story of Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil who were adopted by the fossil-hunting Great-Uncle Matthew (known as Gum) took hold of my imagination when I was ten and never let go. I longed to be a dancer even though I had never had a single ballet class in my life. I used to rewrite Ballet Shoes in my mind: Gum would come to Zimbabwe looking for fossils and instead, he would find me and take me back to the big house in the Cromwell Road and make me a Fossil, Petina Fossil, which was just as it should be, as I was already a P like the others. To be adopted, I had to be an orphan, and so I conveniently killed off my parents and brothers and sisters – thus I learned early how to dispose of characters who are superfluous to my plots.

The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster

I am delighted to have only recently discovered Paul Auster, which means that I have books and books to read still before me. I absolutely loved Moon Palace and In the Country of Last Things, but this touching memoir about his relationship with his difficult father, and his own identity as a father, is my favourite of his books so far. I love the deep intelligence he brings to all his subjects, and the clean spareness and musicality of his writing. I was profoundly astonished, and not a little disturbed, to discover that the second part of this marvelous book is called The Book of Memory which is also the working title for my novel in progress.


A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li

I wish I had read this short story collection before I started writing my own stories. On the other hand, I am glad that I didn't because I might not have written it at all. Yiyun Li illuminates the lives of ordinary Chinese people in Mao's China with compassion, intelligence and beauty. This is quite simply the best short story collection by a contemporary writer that I have read. You can imagine my delight when she told me how much she liked my book: it is perhaps a form of vanity that the best kind of validation is from writers that I admire.

Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

My five-year old son Kush has many favourite books, but this children's classic is his favourite, and mine too. It is a wonderfully-illustrated story about love and loneliness and the power of the imagination. Kush and I read it together at least once a week, and like the best rereading, each reading is different from the previous one. Through this book and others, I hope to pass to my son a love for reading which I believe to be one the most precious gifts that I can give him.

Did you ever see a chameleon catch a fly?

"Did you ever see a chameleon catch a fly? 

The chameleon gets behind the fly and remains motionless for some time, then he advances very slowly and gently, first putting forward one leg and then another. At last, when well within reach, he darts out his tongue and the fly disappears.  

England is the chameleon, and I am that fly."

Lobengula, the second King of the Matebele, just before his kingdom was swallowed by the British Empire. 

Image from Animal Discovery. 

Books that made a difference to me, Part One.

O, the Oprah Winfrey magazine has a feature called"Books that made a difference to ...", where they invite writers, actors etc. to talk about the books that mattered to them. I am featured in the South African edition of O, my feature will appear in July. I was delighted to be part of O, and to share some of the most meaningful books in my life. Here are four of the books I discussed.

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Pafunge by Thompson K Tsodzo

Pafunge is the book that made me fall in love with the literature in my native language Shona. A playful and comic romp, but with a deeply moral sensibility in the style of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding, Pafunge is the story of young woman, Rudo, who unknowingly has an affair with the very man who abandoned her mother after Rudo's own conception. That man, Josiah Rugare, is known to his large army of drinking companions as the notorious thief Joe Rugg, and the result, as one character says in his memorably vocabulary-laden but broken English, demonstrates "the kwenzikwenzi of dananability". It is one of the most memorable of all Shona novels and also one of the funniest.

The World According to Garp by John Irving

Funny and heartbreaking and generous and wise, this novel is just wonderful. I love Irving's loony characters, his affection for them, his largeness of vision, his inventiveness, humour and his manic energy. I first read this book in Vienna in 1995. Part of the novel is actually set in Vienna, so that it felt like I was right in the book discovering Vienna with Garp and his mother Jenny. I remember, in a surreal moment, reading Garp inveighing against Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer, and looking up to find myself on Grillparzerstrasse, the street named in honour of Grillparzer

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

"Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone, Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home".

If ever there was a book that shows the power of fiction to move, to uplift, and to transform, it is this novel. I remember first reading it in a state of stunned suspension. Rereading it always evokes the same feelings of mingled pride and humility that I get in the presence of the highest of human achievements. Like listening to Mozart's Queen of Night aria, or coming face to face with a Rembrandt, to read Song of Solomon is to be immersed in beauty so ferocious that it hurts. As I read it, I feel proud to be alive and to be human at the same time that I realise my own insignificance.

Emma by Jane Austen

Writing of Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf said of all great writers, she is the "hardest to catch in an act of greatness". This is particularly true in Emma, where nothing exciting happens in the book beyond a foiled gypsy attack and the pilfering of a henhouse. There is no real action, and yet Jane Austen's genius is such that this novel about couplings and comic misunderstandings, news and gossip matters deeply. I love this book because it is the most complete of Austen's later novels, because it is infused with her legendary wit and acute social observation and because it teaches me that everything, even Miss Bates's mother's old petticoat, matters, and nothing is too mundane for a writer's attention.

Kush and the statue

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

I never thought I would ever have occasion to use Dorothy Parker's great line above. If you do not know the writings of this great lady, you need to read her now. She has an incredibly funny interview in The Paris Review, one of my favourite, in fact, where she was asked "Ms Parker, what motivates you to write?" and she responds "Money, darling". She also said "Money cannot buy health, but I'd settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair".

Hee.

But back to the matter at hand, and what a matter it is: I have always said that I would only talk about books I like, but I think I may actually have read the worst book of my life. The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, by Colleen McCullough, the Australian author best known for The Thorn Birds, and for her firm statement that the rape of young girls is an acceptable cultural practice, is possibly the worst novel that I have ever read, and the worst that I will ever read, ever, even if I live to be a hundred.

I kept going because I could not believe just how ghastly it is, I kept thinking, no, surely, this is some sort of macabre joke. It is a sequel to Pride and Prejudice ... yes, yes, I know, I know, that should have warned me ... and it focuses on the ignored Bennet sister, Mary Bennet, who, at the age of 38, and after some dental work and removal of pock marks(!) is suddenly transformed into a raving beauty. She sets out to write a book about the ills of England called The Ills of England, but before she can do so, she is kidnapped, in rapid succession by a highwayman, a dastardly henchman and by the leader of a cult who asks her to write down his version of the Bible(!) And if you think that the highwayman, dastardly henchman and cult leader were the villains of the piece, you would be wrong because that role goes to none other than Fitzwilliam Darcy: the master of Pemberly turns out to be a terrible husband and father and an inheritor of ill-gotten gains to boot, all he has in common with the real Fitzwilliam Darcy is the name, and not even that because here he is called Fitz, even by his dastardly henchman and forlorn orphans(!) And he has ambition, damn it, he wants to be Prime Minister and put the Great into Great Britain(!!)

And he sneers. Contemptuously. A lot.

As in: Fitz sneered contemptuously, "The man is no Frenchman! He is a Corsican peasant."

Take that, Bonaparte!

(!)

Not only is this a really poor sequel, which goes without saying, as most such sequels tend to be pretty bad, in and of itself, and outside the shadow of Jane Austen, it is a really, bad, bad novel. All I could think was, HarperCollins? Why? Really, why?? If you think I am being harsh, dear reader, this is gentleness itself compared to the reviews on Amazon, where the general consensus is that this book alone should change the Amazon policy of allowing one star as the minimum you can award a book as no stars at all would be more appropriate.

The other statement I remember most from Ms McCullough, in addition to her rousing defence of the Pitcairn rapists was that JK Rowling is a "lousy writer". On the strength of The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, I would say Ms McCullogh knows all there is to know about lousy writing.

In which President Morgan Tsvangirai meets President Hillary Clinton ... and then I wake up

Now readers of this blog know that Hillary Clinton is my girl, and that last year, I was rooting for her over Barack Obama. Then Barack Obama won me over, mainly because of Michelle Obama, and then I was really happy that he won, and then there was the whole unity agreement thing and Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State which sort of makes her the International President of the United States.

And of course you know that I believed that Morgan is More, as his presidential campaign said last year, or at least, I believed then that Morgan is more qualified to be the President of Zimbabwe than the other three people he was running against (and yes, there were four candidates, it still grieves me deeply that the world has so quickly forgotten Langton Towungana, whose economic, political and social policies were all derived from The Bible). So then Morgan Tsvangirai did not become President, and then there was the whole unity agreement thing and he became Prime Minister which sort of makes him the International President of Zimbabwe.

And here is a picture of the two of them taken this last week at the State Department.

Source: The Zimbabwe Times, which has done a marvellous job covering the Prime Minister's first official visit to the United States.

How I became a lawyer and a writer - a personal essay published in Wordsetc

I love the new South African literary journal, Wordsetc, which was established last year by Phakama Mbonamba, and I was delighted to contribute to their growth with this personal essay on how I became a lawyer and a writer. I am not going to put all of it here, of course, to read it and many other great features, and to get back issues, please subscribe to Wordsetc, I promise that it is worth every penny. 

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On the Sundays that we did not have visitors at home when I was a child, we dressed up in our best clothes to visit relatives. Our hair in pom-poms, my sisters Regina and Vimbayi and I wore dresses of my mother’s creation. They were cut in the same style but were different colours. My brothers Ratiel and Vuchirai wore matching navy suits with open-neck shirts. Our legs and faces shining from Vaseline, we tumbled into our father’s Peugeot 404. Ratiel was always the last one to get into the car. As the older boy, his job was to close and lock the gate.

Of the families we visited frequently, the Takavarasha family in Chitungwiza were the most educated. Our father held them before us as a beacon of possibility. Dr Takavarasha was a medical doctor with his own surgery. His wife, whom my mother called VakomaSesta, was a nurse, and the daughter of my maternal grandmother’s sister. In their living room, we drank Mazoe and ate Choice Assorted biscuits while Dr Takavarasha stretched his long legs before him and the adults talked about people they knew. Their attention turned to us when my father gave detailed reports of our progress at school, and they encouraged us, all four of them talking over each other, to work hard in school.

“Honai zvinoita vamwe,” my mother said, and pointed to the mantelpiece where pictures of Takavarasha graduates were arranged in order of graduation. 

This was my father’s dream for us, that we would all be university graduates and become what he called “professionals”. This was the dream that colonial Rhodesia had denied him, the dream that he thought might happen in independent Zimbabwe for all his five children. 

And as the eldest, it was up to me to lead the way.

I was aware of my father’s intentions, but I also wanted to be a writer. I was not as precocious as some of the writers I sometimes read about who started writing before they drew their first breath, but I can say that writing came to me about the time that I realised the power of a book to create something more real than reality. This would have been in Grade Four, when I was a ten-year-old pupil at Alfred Beit School in Salisbury, soon to be Harare.

The school was a government school named for Alfred Beit who was a sort of Cecil John Rhodes in miniature, a wealthy man who left most of his fortune to the cause of educating empire’s offspring. I would later find memorials to Alfred Beit outside the National Archives in Harare and at the entrance to the Royal School of Mines at Imperial College in London.

I had many friends among the girls in their green and white cotton dresses and matching underpants and among the boys in khakhi and bottle green. With Laura, Jessie, Timothy and Joseph, I learnt my times tables and the recorder, I played hop-scotch and pada at break time. But my best friends, the friends that I spent most of my time with because they were always with me even after the others went home after school, were those within the pages of the books I read: Darrell Rivers, Pat and Isobel O’Sullivan, Pauline and Petrova Fossil, George Kirrin, Frederick Trotteville, whom we called Fatty, and Drina Adams, who was really Andrina Adamo, the daughter of the famous dancer Elizabeth Ivory, but no one at the Dominick was supposed to know.

I lived to read. 

The greatest happiness I knew was the walk back home from the Mabelreign branch of the Queen Victoria Memorial Library, reading all the way home. One day as I played lacrosse with Darrell, I became aware of screams and screeching brakes and emerged from Malory Towers to find that a car had almost run me over. I remember a Sunday when I read four books, one after the other, and emerged from the sea, castle, mountain and valley of adventure, totally dazed and a little unwell.

The results of the European Parliament elections confirm that decisions are made by those who turn up

When I first moved to Europe in 1995, I lived in Austria, and I remember one of the themes constantly under discussion as people watched the rise of the far right in Europe was this question of “Fortress Europe”. Was Europe becoming a place hostile to its minorities, and to outsiders?  I thought of Fortress Europe again as I looked over the results from last week’s European parliament elections. Today’s newspapers are full of the results and the trend is unmistakable, there appears to be a large swing to the far right in some cases. 

Nick Griffin, the bête noire of British politics, is in there now, the British National Party has come in from the cold, winning two seats.  In Austria, the Freedom Party made gains.  In The Netherlands, the anti-Turkish accession Freedom party did well.  The trend is the same, Eurosceptic, anti-Islam and anti-immigration parties are on the rise.   The economic recession has turned people inward, and the appeals to nationalism, and “out with the foreigner” are working on the electorate.

Is Fortress Europe being constructed?

I don’t believe that all of Europe will swing completely to the far right.  For one thing, as Jorg Haider found in Austria, Ariel Sharon in Israel, Christoph Blocher here in Switzerland and even Hamas in Palestine, once an extremist party is in government, compromise will invitably demand the tempering of extremism.  Far from legitimizing extremism, it could be argued that these results may work to dilute it.

Significantly, this result is not a wrinkle in democracy, this is democracy, and the result, uncomfortable as it is for liberals, is something Europeans will have to live with.  Democracy often throws up unpalatable results.  But as long as the election is free and fair, the outcome must and should be accepted. Winston Churchill called democracy the worst form of government except all others.  We have no other system that allows the people to elect their representatives in a transparent manner and that simultaneously makes the elected accountable to the electorate. 

I love Europe and Europeans because their politics have long been based on the principles of the Enlightenment.  And I believe that Europeans will remain guided by these values, which form the basis of their constitutions.  It seems a terrible thing to liberals, this outcome, but I would rather have this, where people freely elect nutcases than where nutcases impose themselves on people as we see in a number of African countries.  There is also this, any anomaly can be corrected again through the democratic process.

And it is striking to see just what factors led to these results.  The recession is clearly a factor.  But there is something else: the voter turn out was appallingly low. Here are a few examples:  In Cyprus, which has compulsory voting, it was just 59%.  In the Czech Republic, it was 28.2%.  In Britain, it was 34%.  Hungary, 36.29%.  The Netherlands, 36.5%.  Poland, 24.5 %.  In Slovakia, it was an abysmal 15%.  In Belgium and Luxembourg, where national elections also took place, the far right parties did poorly, turnout was an incredible 90% for Belgium and 91% for Luxembourg.  Importantly, Germany and France , despite the low turn out, bucked the Eurosceptic trend, which is important as they are arguably the two large countries most wedded to the European project.

What the results show is that in those areas where the right wing parties did well, the moderates stayed away, and chose not to vote. This, then, is the ultimate meaning of democracy: decisions are made by those who turn up.

So for the mainstream centrist parties, the message is this: do better, campaign harder, engage people with innovative policies and you will see them vote for you.  Fail in this, and popular inertia will mean that the extreme right takes control.

It is not democracy that has failed, it is Europe’s centrist parties. 

UPDATE:  I have just seen a great feature on Guardian.co.uk, where the Guardian asked this very question to a number of historians, who all agreed in the main with my analysis above, but put it in a much more sophisticated way, of course, as well as giving a historical context to the whole question. And I am heartily in agreement with David Cameron who said: "What the mainstream parties have to do is prove their worth – get on the doorstep, explain to people how we are going to take up their concerns, how we are going to respond to their issues. That is the way to beat these dreadful people."

Of President Bongo, Roger Federer and Barbara Vine

President Omar Bongo of Gabon is dead. One Big Man dies, but rejoice, for President Bongo's son, the alliteratively-named Ali-Ben Bongo is, from all accounts, being groomed to be the next Big Man. And what do his loyal subjects do, upon hearing the news of the Great Man's death? Do they cover their faces with ash? Do they wear sackcloth and rend the sky with their cries? Do they run to the hills and sacrifice their last born sons?  

They stock up on food. 

There is loyalty for you. 

You give and you give and you give to your country. Years and years and years of public service. 42 years, in fact, in which you ask for nothing beyond palatial housing in the best neighbourhoods of Paris and Nice and this is what your people do. 

There is just no loyalty any more. 

The Swiss city of Basel wants to name a tennis stadium after its most famous child.  That would be Roger Federer, and not Miss Basel 2008.  If you ask me, I think he deserves more than a poxy stadium, I think they should go ahead and rename the whole city in his honour.  I cannot count the ways I love Roger Federer. I have sworn not to give up my Zimbabwean citizenship, but I would be happy to be Swiss just to have that in common with Roger, and Mirka, and their baby and all their descendants.  I love reading Roger's post-match interviews, he is a thoughtful and intelligent man as well as being a blazing talent. 

Speaking of post-match interviews, I have always admired Rafa Nadal, but my respect for him reached new levels after I read the post-match interview he gave following his spectacular defeat by Robin Soderling, in which he was brutally honest about his performance, and refused to accept the excuses reporters threw his way.  Serena Williams, darling, you know you are my girl and I love you and all, but you need to read that interview because your Ilostagainstmyself schtick is getting older than Methuselah's grandpa's beard. 

I have been reading a novel by Ruth Rendell writing as Barbara Vine.  No one does intricate plotting and the whole leaving out information while giving it to you at the same time thing like she does, so I am taking tips from her as I rewrite my novel.  This one, The Blood Doctor, was a little disappointing.  I figured out the terrible thing the Blood Doctor had done a third of the way in, and I could not believe that his descendant, who was the narrator, was so dumb as not to see it.  And he kept moaning about not being in the House of Lords any more, and I have seldom been so irritated by a fictional character. The supporting cast though was vintage Vine.  If you have not read any of the BV novels yet, don't start with this one, but go straight to A Dark-Adapted Eye, one of the best novels I have read, and which I will be rereading next. 

I will be doing a long post about the European parliament results very soon, so watch this space. 

In which I am a running dog and a mouthpiece for my Western paymasters ... and a Judas Iscariot!!

Now, I decided some time ago that I would not respond to reviews, no matter how provocative or erroneous they are, it is simply not a good idea for writers to comment on what people write about their work. But sometimes, a response is necessary. There is a review in today's Herald which is more of a laughable attempt at character assasination than a review, and for that reason, certain things need to be said.

When my book came out in April, I sent a press release to some Zimbabwean newspapers. By the time the news made its way to The Herald, in a story by one Richmore Tera, I had somehow become a UK-based writer, even though the third paragraph of the release said "Speaking from Switzerland where she works as a lawyer ..."

I was baffled by this, I raised it with the scribe in question and Mr. Tera apologised most profusely. I got over it, and sent him an email inviting him to my book launch. He proceeded to write a news article announcing the launch, even though I had specified in my email that it was by invitation only.

He asked if he could bring a colleague, I said yes, and he brought his girfriend, a woman who writes for Kwayedza.

They came to the launch, he spent the whole day tailing me, and talking to my relatives, friends and guests. I also gave him an interview, which we said we would continue over email.

He then asked for a lift home, my brother-in-law drove him and his girlfriend to town, and the next I heard of him was that he had written a very nice piece about my book launch.

It was a lovely piece, and I enjoyed it very much.

I thought he might be embarrassed about an incident at the party, so I thought I would let him make the first move regarding the email interview.

Then came today, and a jaw-droppingly vicious review of my book in the Herald. He actually took one story, completely misread it, and ranted and raved about how I had sold my soul and my country to my Western paymasters for 30 pieces of silver.

This would be actually funny, if it was not so sad.

This is who Richmore Tera is: At the book launch, my aunt made a little speech about how I am not just a lawyer and a writer, I also hold a doctorate, and people should be calling me Dr. Gappah.

Mr. Tera turned to me and said, what, you are a lawyer, a writer and a medical doctor?

This is the level of education and awareness of people working at the Herald, this is someone to whom the term doctorate is so absent from his vocabulary and knowledge that the only doctor he knows is a medical doctor. I felt great compassion for him, I felt that he is out of his depth in his job. I talked  to him about a short story of his that I had read. I even thought I might include him in an anthoology I am hoping to put together on Zimbabwean writing. It was the compassion I felt for him that drove my invitation to my party.

In his godawful piece, he accuses me of insulting the President. He then mixes up the terms slander, libel and litigation, and so it should really come as no shock that Mr. Tera is likely unaware of something called "satire".

The attack he makes is so shockingly personal that I am considering what further action to take. In the meantime, I want to say, Richmore, darling, trust me, it was much more than 30 pieces of silver that I sold my soul for. So much that in fact, it is I who should be called Richmore.

I am more than window dressing, I am a serious politician, me

The best film I have seen in the last five or so years has to be Das Leben Der Anderen, or The Lives of Others.  I watched it with my friend David, who is, like me, a huge fan of German cinema and a German speaker. The film and the discussion afterwards make up one of the most memorable nights of my life. It is the film I keep coming to when I contemplate the political wasteland of my country, and also that of many others  - there is a line I love that echoes Hannah Arendt's observation about the banality of evil, it is delivered towards the end, with wondrous contempt: "to think that people like you used to run a country."

This line came again to me as I followed the extraordinary events in Britain in the last week. Along with South Africa and the United States, Britain is the country whose politics I follow and know the best.  I came very close to it all once, I was once interviewed to be Roy Hattersley's research assistant. I was immensely excited, he was no longer actively involved in politics, but he had been a Deputy Leader of the Labour party, and as Baron Hattersley of Sparbrook, he sits in the House of Lords as a life peer. I  did not get the job, but I still have the rejection letter, on House of Lords notepaper hee hee hee. 

I do not mean to imply at all that the men and women of Britain's Labour Party can be compared to Stasi Germany's leaders, but that line has been in my mind every time I have thought about Hazel Blears and Caroline Flint. To think that women like them, catty, spiteful, and pardon the word,not a little bitchy, used to actually run government departments! 

This is what gives Gordon Brown's tragedy more bathos than pathos.  What is striking about his plight is the smallness of the people who are pitted against him. I watched again, thanks to You Tube, that momentous drama when Geoffrey Howe effectively ended Margaret Thatcher's political career. You got the sense then of real conflict, of a man torn between an ideal, something larger, and his sense of loyalty.

Then you get to Caroline Flint saga and you get, well, Caroline Flint, who, as  Minister for Europe, admitted that she had not read the Treaty of Lisbon, but who found time to pose in vampish  lipstick and a pretty orange frock for the Observer Magazine. According to the journalist who interviewed her for the now infamous photoshoot, the Minister for Europe "did not mention a single European policy until the final minutes of the interview".  

You are treating me as window dressing, Gordon, says she, I am a serious politician, me. 

Ha ha, and double ha. 

24 hours before she was told she would not be in Brown's reshuffled cabinet, Caroline Flint swore herself blue before all the world that she would be loyal to the end. Hours later, having been told there was no place for her in cabinet, she was sticking in the knife. 

That there are some women who are actually treating La Flint as some sort of feminist icon is a joke almost as amusing as that time when Jeanette Winterson made a mockery of the term sexism in defending the poet and Darwin descendant Ruth Padel, who had admitted to sending two emails smearing Derek Walcott as part of her campaign for the Oxford Chair of Poetry. 

The real tragedy here, as Marina Hyde so brilliantly observed, is the smallness of it all.  I keep thinking what a pity that Gordon Brown, with all his abilities, for yes, he is a man of real abilities as well as flaws, should be brought down by such puny people.  

Here is my prediction: Caroline Flint will lose her seat in the next election. She is tainted by the expenses scandal, and Labour will in any event, do spectacularly badly. Then, before you can say Caroline Flint, she will take up a media type role, presenting some show or other that is meant to make politics "accessible". She will award prizes to people who can guess whether the PM wears briefs or boxers, and how many partners the Home Office minister shagged in his/her youth. Her popularity will rise, culminating in a cover feature in OK! magazine, and a spot on I Am A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! featuring those miming guys from Milli Vanilli and what remains of Michael Jackson's real nose.

Oh Gordon Brown, you deserve to be brought down by worthier people. 

Photo credit: Observer magazine.

Andre Agassi, Don Budge, Fred Perry, Rod Laver, Roy Emerson ... and now Roger Federer

Photo  credit: Roland Garros official website

Of two anthologies, Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson and Carte Blanche

I have been away from this blog an age because I have been busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest. I am delighted to say that I recently completed a new story, to be published in an anthology by Amnesty International to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Declarataion of Human Rights. More details when the anthology is published.

Speaking of anthologies, Penguin has a new anthology of African writing out, it is called Gods and Soldiers: the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing, and has a picture of an AK rifle (!) and a winsome little African girl on the cover(!) and one can only conclude that it is aimed at people who associate Africa with gods, soldiers, AK rifles and winsome little girls. Not you and me then:):)

Last week, Alice Munro won the International Booker, a wonderful accolade for a magnificent writer. Coming after the Pulitzer went this year to Elizabeth Strout for Olive Kitteridge, a short story collection, and after the Frank O'Conor award received a record number of entries, this year is turning out to be a good one for short story writers.

On to the best novel written by a woman in the last year: just tonight, the wonderful Marilynne Robinson won the Orange Prize for her third novel Home. I love her because, like Barbara Kingsolver, she is not a cookie-cutter writer, she takes time between her novels, there were an incredible 23 years between Housekeeping and Gilead (!) and she has so many divergent interests, from the British nuclear industry to Calvinism. I love writers like that, with brains bigger than most houses. I would have loved Kamila Shamsie to win, for the wonderful Burnt Shadows, but this accolade to Robinson is one that no one can possibly begrudge.

A lot of the interviews I did while I was in South Africa are now floating about. I will post some to my website in the coming week. Thanks to everyone who sent me comments and good wishes after seeing me on Carte Blanche this last week. Carte Blanche(!) I must be one of the few people to appear on Carte Blanche without having done anything shady.

At least, as far as they know ...mwah ha ha ha ha ha ha....

Of my favourite US Supreme Court Decision, missing Thurgood Marshall and the life experience of judges

I remember reading Brown v. Board of Education - Oliver Brown et al. v. The Board of Education of Topek, Kansas - in law school, in my third year to be exact, when I was doing jurisprudence or legal theory, which, next to international law, was my favourite subject in law school. Our jurisprudence lecturer was Kempton Makamure, he liked to shock us into thinking outside our comfortable frames, and one thing he liked to say was that if you want to hide something from an African, you put it in a book. Then he would give his trademark guffaw and stride across the Moot Room.

He also made us listen to Malcolm X during our classes, seriously departing from the prescribed syllabus of Bentham and Kelsen and the Hart-Fuller debate. The one thing he really taught, and taught well, was critical legal studies, and especially critical race theory. So we read a lot of American scholars and cases - I remember most vividly Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia Williams and Brown v. Board of Education. I found myself recently rereading a biography of Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who argued and won Brown v. Board of Education, and was later appointed by Lyndon Johnson as the first African-American judge to sit on the US Supreme Court. I have, by the way, a special fondness for Thurgood Marshall - on the bench, he spoke out consistently against an issue that is a sore one for me, namely, the death penalty in the US.


Brown v. Board of Education was the first US Supreme Court case that I read, and it moved me deeply. I went on to read other US Supreme court decisions, but this one stayed with me because it showed me, and proved to me, the power of the law and how it is possible to use the law to achieve what is right, and what is good. I was a Marxist, of course, and I wanted the law and state to whither away. I could not help but be persuaded, though, that until that glorious day, the law could be an instrument in the fight for social justice and to achieve social change. And what case proved this more than that in which the US Supreme Court struck down segretaged education as being unconstitutional, and with that, galvanised the civil rights movement in the US, and inspired other movements in countries where blacks were oppressed? In language that is simple and clear, the court explained what was at stake:


Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.


We come then to the question presented: Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?

We believe that it does.


Responding to the extraordinary criticism of SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama reminded the world last week that without the decision in Brown, he would most likely not be where he is today, and it is sobering to reflect just how real racial discrimination has been in the living memory of many non-white Americans. This is why the prospect of a non-white, non-white male going to the Supreme Court is so thrilling.

At the same time, there is a danger in getting carried away, and it is well to remember what Justice Sotomayor has said herself, that momentous decisions like Roe v. Wade and Brown were all decisions by white males who reached these decisions through progressive interpretations of the law, interpretations reached notwithstanding the backgrounds of the adjudicators.