Real Life of an MSW

“The advice of the mother to Zenzele – as you go to new places, do not forget where you came from, respect your ancestors and culture, as that made you what you are. Assimilation in a new place should not mean cutting your ties or deriding your origins.”

Zenzele a Letter to my Daughter by J.Nozipo Maraire, (1996, 194 pages). This is an insightful short novel, told in the form of letters from a Zimbabwean. Shiri, the mother, tells stories from her own life and lives of those around her while the daughter is studying abroad at Harvard. As you might expect, the book doesn’t have a traditional plot, Each chapter (letter) contains a conversation between the mother to her daughter, giving her some life lessons, so she doesn’t lose her roots, her culture, and the values her family and village have instilled in her before her flight to America. “Each chapter has its own focus teaching change and embracing it even when it hurts! There are so many layers to understand and relate to things we can connect to our world today. The characters are quite vivid, including Shiri. The author does a fantastic job of characterizing her through her writing, which is gentle but profound and expertly crafted: the imagery is vivid. The look into life in Zimbabwe is fascinating, giving a sense of the history while keeping the focus on the characters’ experiences. It is notable that there is really only one point of view represented here – we know what the mother (narrator) thinks about things and we see her trying to understand other people, but her struggles to empathise and to comprehend viewpoints that are alien to her are as close as we get to hearing a contrasting point of view. This is perhaps most movingly expressed in her struggles with the alienation she felt following the death of her first lover and the awareness that all depictions of the Gods and angels had white skin. It is also thrown into sharp relief in the stories of a friend who became a freedom fighter and a cousin who was regularly beaten by her husband but refused to leave him. This single perspective and struggle to understand others’ points of view from this perspective, is partly what, I think, gives the novel its strength. And as this simplicity of viewpoint and the attempts of the modern world to destroy and confound it are a central theme to the novel.Overall, a gem of a book that made me think about the kinds of stories that are told about Africa and why that might be.