THE UNSTOPPABLE MARCH OF THE HUMAN CONDITION:
A Review of Inside Harare Alcatraz and
Other Short Stories
Author: Andrew Chatora
Publisher: Kharis Publishing
Pages:188
Published: 2024
Zimbabwe as a literary country isn’t
particularly famed for its short stories, or its short story writers, its
poets, yes, its novelists, yes, its essayists, of course—but rarely and far
between are its short story writers. The short story as an art form and
storytelling medium has been neglected and ignored, uncharacteristically,
because of its capabilities. Short stories like poetry are a lot more demanding
and personal, calling for refinement in both subject matter and style. The
unhealthy obsession with either historical or nationalist literature has on one
hand, left the short story as a medium to completely rot in isolation; on the
other, it has starved artistic exploration. Chatora’s entry with ‘Inside Harare Alcatraz and Other Short
Stories’ makes an attempt at something much grander, much more alive.
The collection takes its shape and pace
from the first story, ‘Inside Harare
Alcatraz’, which follows the narration and sometimes rumblings of Brezhnev
and his subsequent imprisonment at Harare Alcatraz Maximum Security Prison. The
story is narrated in five parts that are, at times, lacking in key details 1)and developments; it feels as though the
story is told from the perspective of a mad man. Brezhnev is in fact insane,
criminally so. A psychosexual serial killer who admits that killing people gave
him orgasms of unimaginable proportions. Which is startling, but what’s even
more startling is he is paid for his insanity—handsomely so, unlike the
criminally insane that were housed at Alcatraz, the real Alcatraz in America,
with the hope of rehabilitation in isolation, Brezhnev is deliberately sent to
Harare Alcatraz by his sponsors for a wet job, a code name for murder. We’d
expect a sadist with just a reputation to succeed on his mission with relative
ease; however, his interactions with his targets and the overwhelming humanity
that they shower him with seem to have thawed his insatiable appetite for
murder. The story ends with Brezhnev on his way to a cubicle to self-induce the
very same poison he had meant for his targets.
‘Black Britain’ is a satirical attempt at
dealing with the systemic and endemic racism that plagues African immigrants
and the black diaspora at large in Britain, taking the form of racial profiling
during Black interactions with law enforcement authorities. Just beneath the
veil of satire, glimpses of a fictionalised ‘Black Lives Matter Movement’ can
be seen. The story follows the narration of Anesu, who witnessed the racial
profiling of his parents at the age of thirteen, only to face the same at a
much later age. Through his account, the readers are taken to the eye of the
storm as an attempt to vocalise such, and more cases of mistreatment are met
with heavy handedness and flat-out denial. Something that Reni Eddo-Lodge
captured in ‘Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race’. Here fact
and fiction intermingle and take a life and form of their own.
Chatora’s short stories are gritty,
unflinching, and unapologetic. But as with any collection, not every story
flows with the same potency and energy or the same refinement of craft; just
like seeds sown during the night, some seeds get stuck between rocks, others
are thrown where they get very little sunlight to grow, and a handful find the
ideal place for full growth and bloom. Stories such as ‘Black Britain’, ‘Smoke
and Mirrors’, ‘Estelle the Shebeen Queen and other Dangamvura Vignettes’ stick
out for their depth and stylistic complexity. Despite that, Chatora's message
is clear and direct: our struggles as Zimbabweans at home and in the Diaspora
are not just institutional; they're also human, the scary side of the human
condition. From the greedy Shebeen Queen Estelle, who operates a brothel and
employs her daughters within the same space to the bigamist in ‘Smoke and
Mirrors’. Chatora takes the possibilities of the short story to greater
heights; he sheds the straight jacket that has been historical and
nationalistic literature preoccupied with polishing the proceeds of
independence. He takes the short story to murkier grounds of the human
conscience, of desperation and deprivation, highlighting where we have failed
as society and as humanity at large.
‘Inside
Harare Alcatraz and Other Short Stories’ is a collection of eleven neatly written stories
that are pulsating with global urgency—the heat, anger, and frustration weaved
within each sentence palpable and alive. As one character in ‘Inside Harare Alcatraz’, which is the
titular story, remarks, ‘You see, Chipendani, we are prisoners of conscience
here at Harare Alcatraz’, whether knowingly or unknowingly, he admits that the
characters in the collection are prisoners; unlike Alcatraz in San Francisco
Bay, which housed some of America’s most notorious offenders, the characters
here are prisoners of the open wide world. They’re captives of the
ever-marching human condition, which at its heart festers gluttony, sadism,
corruption, hatred, systemic, and epidemic. Chatora makes it known to the world
that this septic wound isn’t just cultural or national; it's global. It's
infecting everyone.
* This review first appeared in The Daily News on Sunday, a leading independent newspaper in Zimbabwe. The reviewer, Nyashadzashe Chikumbu is a journalist, editor and cultural critic. He is also the Associate Editor of Mukana Press. A recipient of the 2023 Ignite Youth Award in Creativity, he is widely published and a respected book critic.
