Ericah Gwetai returns with intriguing stories about love and war

 

Title: is this Love?

Author: Ericah Gwetai

Published: 2022, (revised edition; 2023) in Mutare, Zimbabwe

Isbn: 978-1-77932-275-4

Ean: 9781779312754

103 pages

 

(Book review by Memory Chirere)

It is very easy to become absorbed in Ericah Gwetai’s collection of eleven short-short stories called is this Love? Gwetai creates effortless and memorable ‘situations’ for her new stories.

She uses a very simple language. As you read, you may forget that you are dealing with a book. It is as if you are listening to stories being told gradually by the fireside by a cunning old woman. The author becomes a familiar storyteller from next door. For me, Gwetai’s style comes very close to Barbra Kimenye’s, especially the stories in Kalasanda and Kalasanda Revisited.

Just picture this situation: A man is dancing gracefully with his wife, Nyasha, on the dance floor at a birthday party. It is a great day. Then his wife’s earring falls. Another man dancing nearby picks it and gives it back to her. As they are dancing like that, suddenly her husband bites her on the ear and red blood splashes all over her blouse and onto the floor! There is commotion. Part of her ear is gone! Just like that.

People want to know why the husband has done this and he claims that he had been sexually aroused and was whispering something romantic into Nyasha’s ear when he accidentally bit off part of her ear.

But when they eventually get back home, he confesses to her that it was not an accident. He says, “That man who picked up your earring has a perfect physique. I saw you staring at him, and you were winking at each other. You deserve the punishment.”

They are invited yet to another party and as they are leaving for the party, the husband tells his wife, “You are dressed to kill,” and she thanks him. After the party, on their way home, he says to her, “When we stopped at the shops to buy some drinks, I saw you waving at a man who was leaning against a pillar…He smiled, and you smiled back.” All of a sudden, the husband pushes his wife out of the moving car…and what she decides to do afterwards is the least expected thing...

Gwetai’s situations leave you stuck and wanting to pursue the story further. In one story, after a traffic accident, a baby clings to a traffic policewoman with all its strength and totally refuses to be handed over to its mother who has now recuperated. The crowd is shocked. Ironically, the mother is already busy toying with her cellular phone!

Gwetai’s women in these stories are usually very well dressed and daring too. In one of these stories, a young woman almost harms herself because her parents are prohibiting her from marrying a polygamous man and become wife number eleven! She vows never to get married to any other man. Eventually she marries the beloved polygamous man after staying single for three full years. Netsai just loves her polygamist! You rush through the story with a sense of trepidation. Why does she want to be wife number eleven? Why? The story opens wider and wider like a wildflower.

Ericah Gwetai, who is the late writer Yvonne Vera’s mother, is an intriguing story herself. The cover of this colourful book is from her personal photograph from way back in 1973. Ericah is standing in the sun near a shrub. She is holding her chin, smiling, gawking at a young Lambert Gwetai, the man who eventually marries her. Lambert is holding a straw hat, rather delicately, maybe turning it round and round, probably saying something romantic to Ericah. They are standing on what looks like a well-trodden village path. Ericah is dressed to kill. Presumably they are newly in love. Ericah said to me, “We were both teaching at the same school called Kapane. It is in Tsholotsho district. We were excited that we were getting married that year and we did.” Ericah also appears with Lambert on the cover of her other book, Where Were You?

Ericah Gwetai has written a very enlightening biography on Yvonne Vera. It is called ‘Petal thoughts: Yvonne Vera: A Biography.’ It was published in 2008.  Imagine that you are a world-renowned writer from Africa and after your death; your mother does not only publish her own creative books but goes on to write your biography! That could be a first in African literature! Four years later in 2012, Ericah Gwetai published her own novel called Embracing the Cactus.

However, readers must be warned that although Ericah Gwetai is mother to the late great writer, Yvonne Vera, she is her own woman. Here you do not find Yvonne’s intense prose poetry but a deeper and more amazing understanding of African cultural intricacies, rendered in a far simpler and unaffected prose. Her very unpredictable plots constitute the Ericah Gwetai signature. Her other books are More Than a woman and The Other Side.