Andrew Chatora reads Samantha Vazhure's Weeping Tomato

                                                           (Pic: Andrew Chatora)

Vazhure’s Weeping Tomato: An Intrepid Tale of Interconnected Binary Opposites - A Review by Andrew Chatora

Below, Andrew Chatora offers a minutiae examination of Samantha Vazhure’s recently published book: Weeping Tomato. Chatora lauds this book as potentially groundbreaking as it asserts its presence in the realm of African Literature. Chatora posits that Vazhure has flirted with Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern feel here and has just about thrown the cats among the pigeons, taking Zimbabwean writing to greater heights.

Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure’s latest offering, Weeping Tomato, is a composite four part novella, beginning with the Prologue, then the Weeping Tomato proper, through to the Mudavose’s Return section and the blistering epilogue. Weeping Tomato offers a blend of magical realism tinged with contemporary AI parlance lexicon and the science fiction genre.

The prologue uses an elaborate language that estimates painting. I know that Rumbidzai Vazhure is a painter of renown, and the prologue takes you to her depths as a painter. Readers experience the world through the sense of sight and sounds erupt from the images on the canvas. Vazhure’s prologue is delicately set in the future 2090, which is over 60 years from now!

The universe comes in speckled colours. The environment is fused with sparkling diamonds and other minerals. Everywhere there are “wildflowers in perpetual propagation.”  Down and below is the mighty Mutirikwi valley as a special passenger from a western capital arrives to pay her last respects to one Mudavose, who had lived to the ripe age of 118. The magic is evident as they soon travel in a solar powered self flying car. In the houses built in the fashion of the Great Zimbabwe monument, readers find world leading scientists, mathematicians, physicists and biologists, who returned home to Zimbabwe from the diaspora to be part of the Dzimbagwe rebuild.

In this Zimbabwe of 2090, spirit possession has long become a science and no longer a myth or a dark thing. As people wait for Mudavose to become a mhondoro, the CCTV monitors are set in motion. We are all advised, that “your purpose on earth is to change narratives and create new systems that are aligned with the code of cosmic powers.”

The collective consciousness of Vazhure’s futuristic society is constantly reinforced and captured in her refrain: ‘‘This wealth belongs to the people of Dzimbabgwe. All of them! No one here goes without’’ A far cry from the contemporary kakistocracy, kleptocracy world currently obtaining punctuated by unashamed, unbridled, rampant plunder of national wealth and coffers. Perhaps, Vazhure is teasing out her boundless optimism here in projecting a fully functioning and reconstituted Zimbabwe in future years.

The main story, Weeping Tomato, is about Zorodzai, a fifty year old Shona woman based in the UK who desperately falls in love with a 35 year old Zimbabwean man resident in South Africa, Adam. Their trail blazing love affair begins and is played out online through Whatsapp, Twitter and video chatting. Zorodzai is fast quitting her husband James  because he is no longer interested in her. The thrill is gone. Their home, an imposing six bedroom house on a five acre estate in England’s rural Herefordshire is becoming more of a prison. Zorodzai’s questing spirit seeks to break the boundaries of marriage, age, place and distance.  This immensely beautiful segment is built in realism and is rendered in very simple language.

The love between Zorodzai and her toyboy lover Adam is sensational and escapist. Sometimes they chat on the net for six hours with no break. One day Adam asks Zorodzai to call her as she relieves herself in the bathroom saying, “I want to hear the precious trickle of your divine feminine waters flowing into the toilet chamber…just call (me) and wee, ok”

Zorodzai agrees and Adam cries out, “That was beautiful, my love. In the absence of physical contact, that is the closest I can get to making love to you.”

In a somewhat epiphany moment in an Italian hotel after experiencing a surreal sexual reawakening of great magnitude, Zorodzai reflects; 

‘‘I pause to ponder how we failed our relationship, or how it failed us. Could it be that our voices vanished with the arrival of our children? Not only did they silence our sounds of pleasure during lovemaking, forcing artificial silence where it did not fit, but they also made us stop arguing and disagreeing, forcing us to maintain an illusion of perfection and bliss.’’

Bizarrely, Zorodzai’s incessant squabbling and bickering relationship with her online toyboy lover Adam, evokes Marechera’s equally recurrent motif of erratic couples/ heroes and villains constantly fighting in their troubled relationships. The joys of Fuzzy Goo’s eccentric world is reincarnated here.

Adam contrasts sharply with James who pays Zorodzai very little attention. Zorodzai starts to write a series of love poems for Adam, and they may as well fill up an anthology. As she gets sucked up in this world, she loses her balance. She feels like a teenager. She starts to plan to escape to South Africa so that she meets Adam. When she travels, disaster strikes and that is the climax of this story. When Zorodzai comes back almost empty handed, she gradually disintegrates like a weeping and overripe tomato. She is damaged and oozing out the juices of life. She realizes that she is part of a conveyor belt made up of great matriarchs and that she has capacity to transcend into other states of being. Zorodzai gets ready to morph into Mudavose, a woman who once lived before her. Mudavose splinters into a high order of existence all the way up to the epilogue.

Through the perennial mundane exchanges between the amorous lovers, Zorodzai and Adam, Vazhure vividly paints brilliant, poignant ideas on perception of happiness, money and class. In the background underscoring the place and scope of black immigrants in a largely racist and classist Britain. But the beauty of Vazhure’s prowess is that all this is done with utmost finesse, nuance and dexterity, moving along with the reader onboard throughout.

In Weeping Tomato, Vazhure has scaled greater heights here. This is a stellar contribution to the field of Afro Diaspora Literature whose lasting impact will be felt by future generations.

Bravo Samantha! 

Long may her literary prowess continue.

Reviewer Biography

Andrew Chatora is an award-winning Zimbabwean author and noted exponent of the African diaspora novel. Candid, relentlessly engaging and vulnerable, his novels are a polarising affair among social critics and literary aficionados. Chatora’s forthcoming book, Crabs in a Barrel is characterful, topical and compelling, with a narrative which is sharp, relatable and deeply evocative. His debut novella, Diaspora Dreams (2021), was the well-received nominee of the National Arts Merit Awards in Zimbabwe, while his subsequent works, Where the Heart Is, Harare Voices and Beyond and Inside Harare Alcatraz and Other Short Stories, have cemented his contribution as a voice of the excluded. Harare Voices and Beyond was awarded the Silver (2024) Anthem Awards for championing diversity, equity and inclusion. 

 

 

 

KwaChirere reads Zagamo by Ray Mawerera

 

Title: Zagamo: The war within

Author: Ray Mawerera

Published in Harare by Royalty Books, 2023,109 pages

Isbn: 987-11779330819

 

A book review by Memory Chirere

 

Ray Mawerera will surely be in deep trouble for his pacey debut novella, Zagamo: The War Within. Some stunned readers may constantly turn over the book to look at the picture of the author himself with excitement and return to the story. Yet, some other readers may really want to take out the sjambok and ask why this writer plays hide and seek with them as if he pays them money!

 

About three full times, you appear to control this story, as a reader, but it springs up and races in all unusual directions. Yes, there is something weirdly called reader control. It is a state in which a reader of a novel is aware of what may definitely come next, and the reader feels like he also wrote the story himself. Ray Mawerera does not allow you that.

 

In the Creative Writing class, it is often said; suspense is a valuable tool for keeping a reader’s attention and interest. Suspense involves withholding information and raising key questions that pique readers’ curiosity. With suspense, you’re playing with your readers’ expectations of time. They know information is coming, but they just don’t know when.  Mawerera does that. He dribbles you and you fall then he asks you to stand up and come get the ball. He dribbles you with yet more suspense and an unpredictable plot.

 

That boy, Zagamo, just appears from nowhere.

 

From the beginning, the narrator does not know that Zagamo is not the real name of his new school mate. He does not know that soon, he will discover that he is related to Zagamo. He will always be crying for Zagamo. It is the late 1970’s in the Salisbury township of Highfield and out there, a bush war is raging between the Rhodesians and the guerrillas.

 

Unkwon to his new city classmates, Zagamo is coming from the back of beyond, where he has seen his family slaughtered by the Rhodesian military. He only survived because he had been sent to fetch sugar, or is it salt, from the next hut.

 

A war is raging within Zagamo.

 

Although Zagamo is the fastest runner on the school track, he is already dead. His nights are full of ghosts. He is not a boy. He is not yet a man. Deep within he is searching for what he does not know to be revenge. The arrest of his one and only surviving relative, an uncle, becomes the straw that breaks the back of the camel…and that of big Zagamo.

 

One Friday after dinner when Zagamo and Uncle Dobola had visited, Zagamo asked Father: “Baba, where were the African leaders when the Europeans sat down to share African countries amongst themselves?”

 

The two elderly men looked at each other. Father said, slowly, thoughtfully: “They were not invited. It was a meeting of Europeans only. Why do you ask?”

 

“I thought maybe they did not know about this meeting, or they did not have ships to go where the meeting was?” Zagamo says, more to himself than the shocked audience. Why is this child speaking like an oracle?

 

And one day… Zagamo disappears from home and country!

 

You want him to return alive. But when he returns, he tests your notion of justice to the limits. Ray Mawerera’s novel is a testament that the literature about the Zimbabwe war of liberation continues to grow in many clear directions and modes. There is the story written about contact by combatants like Alexander Kanengoni and Thomas Bvuma. There is the story about real contact told by non-combatants like Shimmer Chinodya. There is the story written about this war by former Rhodesian fighters like Angus Shaw and Jeremy Ford. Then there is the story written about the activities in mobilising townships like Highfield, by non-combatants like Stanley Nyamfukudza, Olley Maruma and now, Ray Mawerera.

 

The strands keep growing, showing that war is a complex thing even for those who are not at the front.

 

Edited by prolific novelist, Philliph Chidavaenzi, Zagamo is an easy read. It will not harm you because you can read through it during a road trip from Harare to Beitbridge.

 

However, get ready for the brutally twisting plot which Mawerera has prepared for you. It appears to me that for Mawerera, the golden rule of crafting a story is that; no one and nothing is quite as it seems.

 

I predict that you will read this story and either hug Mawerera or seek his throat or both! It is thrilling to be thrilled.

 

Ray Mawerera is a veteran Zimbabwean journalist and public relations expert based in Harare where he stays with his wife Caroline. The couple has three adult children.