Mlalazi talks about writing from the township
Tinashe Mushakavanhu talks to NAMA Award winner and NOMA highly commended, writer, playwright and poet Christopher Mlalazi about his work, growing up in the townships of Bulawayo. Hailing from the city of Bulawayo made famous by the late Yvonne Vera, Mlalazi is among a group of young local writers whose talents were fine-tuned in the Crossing Borders Creative Writing Project, a British Council and Lancaster University (UK) initiative.
Though he writes across genres – from poetry to plays and to novels – his maiden publication , Dancing with Life (2008), exhibits his genius as a short story writer with a keen sense of detail and an astute awareness of the pervading influence of the socio-political environment in Zimbabwe and its affecting forces on people’s characters and behaviour. His stories set in the townships of Bulawayo animate the soul of life in present day Zimbabwe.
His second book, is the highly acclaimed novel, Many Rivers (2009), a thrilling narrative about Zimbabwean immigrants fighting for survival in South Africa. It is a daring narrative.
Can you say something about the germination of the stories in Dancing with Life? What came first – was it the idea of the collection, specific situations, plots, characters or simply the desire to make a statement about life in Zimbabwe? What is the collection all about?
I was born and bred in the township, and I still live there. I also drink at the bottle store, a place which is good for a laugh at any time of the day or year – there is always so much craziness happening there – the blasphemy, the fights, the prostitutes (both male and female), the political commentaries, the drunken gossip, and this human drama for me is a metaphor of life. The stories for my collection started from there, just simply writing about guys getting drunk and doing their funnies. Bottle store stories, just like any stories anywhere, are a good sensor of the collective mood of society. Whatever happens in our society and leaves deep impressions the bottle store will package it in a hilarious and sometimes wise version. That is the voice I try to use as much as I can in my short story collection, Dancing with Life.
The collection has been published in Zimbabwe, how has it been received?
I think my publisher can best answer this question as they are also the ones selling the book. But what I know is that with the current hyper inflationary conditions in the country, no one is buying books. The book was made title of the month in August 2008 by the African Book Collective who are managing the international sales.
How do you yourself work, coping with different genres – written and spoken poetry, short stories, theatre, now a novel? How do you fit in all of these roles?
This is a difficult question to answer. I have heard of some people who concentrate on only one genre, and some saying if you try to do too many things at once you do not get anything down. Surprisingly, juggling many apples in the air seems to be working for me. I guess I am one of those queer ones who are never satisfied with doing only one thing. Experimenting in many genres teaches one a lot about story telling, because that is basically all that we are trying to do, no matter the approach. I guess I am hooked.
One of your recent plays – Crocodile in the Zambezi – was banned for performance in Zimbabwe. How do you circumvent the two kinds of censorship that ensue from such heavy-handedness (a) self censorship (fear to express exactly what you want), and (b) political paranoia of the ruling establishment (fear to raffle any feathers)?
The play Crocodile in the Zambezi was co-written with Raisedon Baya, one of the country’s most prolific and controversial playwrights. I must say we did a kamikaze in this play. We collaborated on the writing of the play, but to circumvent political censure we did not mention any names or places. Despite that its easy for people to deduce what we were talking about, which basically was our intention, but as we all know, most political commentary in the so called Third World is the same from one country to another, so the story can apply elsewhere. As for the paranoia of offending the ruling establishment, we didn’t think about it because we write what we like.
Ruby Magosvongwe of the University of Zimbabwe has described “Zimbabwe as a short story country.” Do you agree/disagree and why?
It depends on the context this was said. Yes, Zimbabwe is currently producing a lot of short story anthologies, but this is only so, because as Irene Staunton of Weaver Press once remarked, publishing multi-authored anthologies is a chance for many writers to be published during a period of crisis, rather than publishers investing scant resources on single writers. There are many writers in the country with novel manuscripts – in fact, about 90% of the writers who have their short stories published have novel manuscripts waiting for publishers. Are we saying when our economic situation improves and the novels start coming out Zimbabwe will become a novel? I guess what Ruby Magosvongwe meant is that currently Zimbabwe is publishing a lot of short stories and not that writers are writing short stories only.
Do you think literature has a role to play in a time of crisis?
It definitely has. The role of the story teller is not only to entertain, but it is also to inform and make humanity aware of the vicissitudes of their surroundings. I write mostly from the heart – and what touches my heart ,both negatively or positively, I make it the subject of my work, but in a creative and honest manner. When the story gets published and read by a wider audience, it gets the news out, it makes both the aggressor and the victim aware of their follies, and that can bring about change in the away people think and act.
What do you think about the direction and momentum of Zimbabwe literature?
The fact that we currently have a few active publishers means that competition is stiff. Imagine a hundred writers fighting for one publishing spot every two years. What this means is that you really have to be good to win that spot and that results in the production of quality stories. I have read stories published in country’s where publishing is plentiful which would not have seen the light of day in Zimbabwe. I foresee a time when our economic situation improves and there will be a surge of good stories.
What are the challenges you face for being a writer in Zimbabwe today
The biggest challenge is getting published. Because of the economic challenges in Zimbabwe, most publishers have folded, and we currently have only two active publishers in the country at the moment, Weaver Press and ama’Books Publishers, but these also publish sporadically, and cannot cater for the many writers in this country. Then there is the politics, most writers loath to engage with politics because of fear of intimidation, but of course this sphere is personal – those who want to write politics must write and those who don’t must not write.