Dew in the Morning (review)

Of all the issues confronting Zimbabwe today—a corrupt oligarchy, famine, AIDS, political repression, violence, torture, sexual abuse and rampant inflation—land and its ownership is surely the most contentious. In this context, Chinodya's fictionalized account of growing up in a rural area of colonial Rhodesia in the 1960s and early '70s has striking contemporary resonances. First published in 1982, two years after Independence, the Heinemann preface tells us it was in fact written in 1976, when Chinodya was nineteen—the same year that Wilson Katiyo published the celebrated novel A Son of the Soil. These two facts are startling in relation to the ways in which Chinodya's work is unlike Katiyo's, which is also partly a narrative of a rural childhood and ends with a principled decision on the part of Alexio, protagonist of A Son of the Soil, to join the liberation war. Chinodya's ability at such an early stage in his career to establish an ironic distance from his autobiographical material contributes greatly in his work as the absence of romanticization of the land or the apotheosis of the nationalist cause characteristic of an earlier generation of writers, and differentiates his work from the political certainty of Katiyo's. In this respect, Chinodya is very much one of the second generation of Zimbabwean writers, such as Dambudzo Marechera, Tsitsi Dangerembga, Chenjerai Hove, Charles Mungoshi and Stanley Nyamfukudza, whose perspective on nationalism tends to be questioning, cynical, ambivalent, satirical and located in predominantly urban settings. According to Flora Veit-Wild, this perspective contrasts with that of first generation writers (born before World War II), who mostly "spent their childhoods in a traditional African setting" of which they write with nostalgia (Veit-Wild 35). Further, Veit-Wild claims, "the preservation of their culture is one of the foremost goals of many early writers"—this tendency is most evident in the Shona writing of Lawrence Vambe, who "trains the eyes of an anthropologist on his childhood to describe and analyze old customs such as rain-making ceremonies, ritual dances (etc) . . . as part of his account of the history of his tribe" (38). Chinodya, in writing without romance or ethnography about a rural childhood, differs markedly from both first generation nostalgia writings and from second generation writings focused on urbanized alienation from the land.

Another context in which Dew in the Morning can be seen is that of the flourishing sub-genre of memoirs of childhood in Africa, with a genealogy stretching from Elspeth Huxley's Kenyan memoir, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood (1959) to Alexandra Fuller's recently published Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (2002) and Carolyn Slaughter's Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood (2002). Nadine Gordimer's and Doris Lessing's short stories and Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa (1937) also come to mind as points of reference for fictional representations of personal attachment to the land. All of the above writers are white; their work, deservedly or not, has inevitably attracted readers in search of the exotic. For autobiographical or semi-fictionalized narratives of childhood by black African writers we turn to Camara Laye's Black Child (1955; L'enfant noir, 1954), Nafissatou Diallo's Dakar Childhood (1982; De Tilene au Plateau, 1975), and to Wole Soyinka's Aké:The Years of Childhood (1981). Among these, Chinodya's novel is distinguished by its youthful author's capacity for reflexivity. Where Soyinka's Aké employs the dual perspective of older writer/young persona, Chinodya, removed by only a few years from his material, nonetheless contrives to counterpoise an external and ironic point of view with the innocence and the developing awareness of the classic bildungsroman.

From the outset, the narrative positions itself as not a return to "home" or origin, but as a point of arrival: "We arrived just before sunset" (1). This arrival signals a double displacement—from the homelands of the south where the narrator's parents grew up, and from the township where they...