I’ve just finished Petina Gappah’s collection of short stories, An Elegy for Easterly.  In a recent interview with Emmanuel Sigauke, Gappah said “I think of my writing as a compulsive form of theft.”

You can see this clearly in Elegy for Easterly. The stories explore key issues in modern Zimbabwe – inflation, the Diaspora, family, relationships economic hardships. Each story has a different narrator – which enables these issues to be explored from a range of different angles, by a variety of voices. But, because the stories are all rooted in Zimbabwe – and therefore share a common background, some of the details overlap from one story to the next. A reference made in one part comes back from a different perspective in another.

I found Gappah’s book also gave a useful reminder of what we have lived through in the past few years. Just six months into dollarisation – and the concomitant stabilisation of prices and disappearance of inflation – and the confidence with which I counted trillions and quadrillions, and the ease with which I converted billion dollar prices into US dollar costs at an ever changing exchange rate is slipping. I can feel myself going soft. So it was interesting to read stories that so clearly drew on that period, and be reminded of those times.

But even as Gappah acknowledges the ways in which her own experiences, and others’ feed into her fiction, her stories are still that: stories, works of fiction.

So I was taken aback to read Richmore Tera’s scathing review of Gappah’s work in The Herald on 8 June. Gappah: Today’s Judas Iscariot, the article headlines. It goes on to dismiss Gappah as a running dog of the West, who “sold her soul, words and country to her Western paymasters, all for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver.”

“It is clear,” Tera writes, “that her only mission in the book was to blacken the image of the President.”

Well now. It’s unfortunate if some of what Gappah writes makes Tera uncomfortable on behalf of Zimbabwe’s President. But An Elegy for Easterly is clearly rooted in Zimbabwe. It shines a light not only on the country’s challenges but on its potential, its beauty, its language, its history, the promises of the liberation struggle and its culture and unique identity. How does this make Gappah a running dog of the West?

In her own blog entry commenting on this article, Gappah sheds a bit more light on the author, Richmore Tera, but even she seems confused as to where the vitriol is coming from.

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai has been in the US this week, fundraising for Zimbabwe’s recovery. So far, he hasn’t scraped together nearly as much as he is looking for. But all the money in the world won’t help Zimbabwe if this is the kind of journalism that continues to fill the pages of our state newspaper.

This entry was posted on June 13th, 2009 at 5:11 pm by Amanda Atwood and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.