“Memory is an albino woman, languishing in prison in Harare, Zimbabwe. At nine years old she was adopted by a wealthy man – a man whose murder she is now convicted of. Facing the death penalty, she tells the story of the chain of events that brought her here. But is everything exactly as she remembers it?”
I loved the structure of this novel. It’s set in prison, where Memory is sentenced to death for murder, and uses flashbacks to tell her pre-prison life story. Part One i strongly placed in prison with brief flashbacks, giving us tantalising and disjointed snippets of her early life. Part Two is more flashback and we are drawn more into Memory’s life so that at times we forget she’s in prison. Our empathy for her grows so that, by Part Three, when we are back primarily in the prison, we fell more about her as a character and her story. And here we are left. For the moment.
The form of the novel – a series of notebooks, written at the request of a journalist writing her story, that become a kind of informal memoir – is used effectively by Gappah as it gives her the opportunity to engage us with the Memory’s humour.
For instance, she talks of her neighbour MaiPrincess whose children are named Princess, Pretty, Progress, Promise, Providence and Privelege.
For all I know, she had more children after I left Mufakose. Perhaps she had a Prudence, a Praise or a Promotion. Perhaps she had a Prevarication or a Predestination.
Then there is her amusing mix of trashy novels and scientific terms to describe sex, due to her bookworm tendencies and religious school upbringing, when reflecting on her first meeting of a mis-matched couple.
I knew then, of course, about sex. Sister Gilberta in biology had told us all about it in clinical, dry-as-dust terms, the spermatozoa, and fallopian tubes, complete with line drawings. Jackie Collins, Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann had filled in the rest. That this beautiful young man, Zenzo, should be with old Sigrid, that he should be making her melt and tremble while thrusting his manhood at her and filling her uterus with spermatozoa, which was expelled if there was no conception to form a zygote, seemed unutterably grotesque.
The story is all about memory, about Memory and her memory, which she eventually understands is subjective.
Apart from the wonderfully told story, I was given brief glimpses into this other world of Zimbabwe that I am ignorant of.
My spoken Shona (the indigenous language) is still fluent, but my writing is frozen at the age of eight, which is when I last wrote it in school. This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as the whites do not value local languages, the best-educated among us have sacrificed our languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later.
It also gives me some insights into the deprivations of prison that you don’t realise like, for a reader, the absence of words.
This is what I have missed most in here, the simple, unremarkable wonder of having the printed word within my line of vision, on stop signs, adverts, newspapers, billboards, packaging on products.
She writes insightfully about what it means to write about your life. First she reminisces about a time in her life when she was reading Stephen King’s story about
… a writer who was forced to write a novel by the deranged fan who held him prisoner as her own modern-day Sheherezade. In the end, he wrote to keep himself alive. … That is the sense that these notebooks have given me. It is the best part of my day when I can go back to my cell and write. Scheherezade told stories to keep her head where it rightfully belonged. I am writing to keep myself alive. But I am also laying out the threads that have pulled my life together, to see just where this one connects with that one or crosses with the other, to see how they form the tapestry from which I will stand back to get a better view.