The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (review)

Peter Orner is a writer who seems unable to get away from the extraordinary moment: a group of teachers reading the newspaper, relaxing; an old man looking in the mirror as he shaves; a teenage boy taking a silent jog through the African sand. In his first novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, Orner shows how we might see the extraordinary in even the most mundane actions and reminds us that sometimes it takes only a longer, more penetrating glance to see what the rest of the world has walked by unwittingly.

The novel is set in and around an all-boys primary school in the heart of Goas, Namibia, shortly after the country gained independence from South Africa. Larry Kaplanski arrives there from Cincinnati to volunteer as an English and history teacher. The novel focuses on the slightly naive Kaplansk's (as the natives call him, without the i ) time in Goas, especially after the mysterious and beautiful guerilla-revolutionary-turned-kindergarten teacher Mavala Shikongo arrives with her illegitimate baby boy, Tomo. As the relentless sun brings drought to the surrounding farm region, all five male teachers attempt to escape their daily routine in gossip and stories that only fail to satiate their lust for Mavala.

At heart, the story is remarkably simple: an outsider tries to find connection and community. But this simplicity is an elegant vehicle for thematic development and atmospheric exploration. Orner's writing takes on the rhythms of the listless Namibian desert—the cool expanses of night and the scorching, unbounded suffocation of day—as a way of showing the longing that each character suffers. The reader feels the sensation of actually living in Namibia, of the day-in-day-out struggle to survive in a land more hostile than any human being. This is a territory that Orner knows well because he was himself a former Namibian school teacher. But the novel feels more like discovery than recollection, and the insight that the book ultimately provides is neither simple nor easily won. Not once does the narrative take the easy way out or use a trite plot device. Each individual anecdote works toward a single truth that cannot be gotten any other way.

The biggest factor in creating this experience is Orner's language—direct, minimal, and clear as the harsh sun that falls on Goas each afternoon. He does not try to confuse the reader: rather than displaying bravura technical virtuosity, he makes the ideas shine through in assured and laconic prose. Mavala Shikongo is a sparse evocation of Namibia in the aftermath of war—after the fighting and gunshots have died down, and the citizens are left with only their thoughts. "I stand before this mirror an orphan," the head teacher realizes during a morning shave. He worries that he cannot recognize himself in the mirror now that age has loosened his skin and worsened his eyes. And yet this could also be the cry of Namibia: the language is that of a people trying to find the truth of their own experience in a country too young to define itself.

This honest, even piercing, approach to the story allows the author significant room to play with form. Rarely offering more than a few pages per chapter and often barely a paragraph, Orner is intent on providing only the essential, most poignant words in places where other writers might construct whole episodes. Though it is surely a novel, individual passages often have more in common with poetry: images have been distilled to the extreme limit of distillation; the page is often as barren as the Goas farms, surrounded by the white space of stories and thoughts left unsaid. One might be reminded of Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's acclaimed Madeleine Is Sleeping because in both works the content is so intense and controlled that the reader almost needs to rest between chapters to digest each word. The blank space becomes part of the structure, the long breath an accomplished storyteller takes at the height of...