In Conversation with Jeanne-Marie Jackson
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- In Conversation with Jeanne-Marie Jackson
April 14, 2022
Thank you so much for taking the time to come down to Baltimore from Boston at the end of what I'm sure has been an exhausting semester.
It's such a pleasure. It's a pleasure and an honor. Thank you.
I hope it is not the last time you come down and see us here.
As you know, we're reading House of Stone in the context of a class called "Introduction to Literary Study." This is not a class on any particular literary tradition. Instead, it is sort of a wide-open aperture for thinking about what makes literature "literature," in the most fundamental sense.
I personally was very excited to teach a novel that a lot of students, if they encountered it, would encounter only in a class on African literature. In this class you're being read alongside E. M. Forster, Sarah Rule, and James Baldwin, to take a few examples from the syllabus—your work is positioned among a whole range of authors that give us a broad set of formal terms to work with. And so I thought I would start by saying that if House of Stone is a part of any literary tradition beyond the obvious one of Zimbabwe's, it is the tradition of the unreliable narrator. I want to ask you, then, whether there are particular examples of that trope or device that made an especially strong impression on you as a reader.
Fantastic. A novel that immediately comes to mind is The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, which features this first-person narrator called Oskar Matzerath, who is a dwarf. When the novel opens, he's in a psychiatric ward and he's recounting the chronicles of his life. That book was so fascinating because it really innovated at the level of language. This is the English translation, but I'm told even in German it innovated the language. And [End Page 107] why was that innovation necessary? Because he was trying to go back and explore what the Holocaust had meant in German society. And not just the facts of it, but the experience of living through a historical moment that in retrospect becomes a surreal, nightmarish experience. Just to give one small example of this, there is a scene where there's an inn with these nightly get-togethers, where patrons from the upper classes, in general, come and peel onions so that they can cry. That's the only way they can deal with this history, by not discussing the history, but crying and dancing on the tables. It feels very honest.
That's a great example. For me, it's often the Nabokovian unreliable narrators that have stuck with me for similar reasons of perversion and surrealism. And maybe thinking about the unreliable narrator tradition going from Günter Grass in the Holocaust to House of Stone and Gukurahundi is one way to build that bridge. But I'm also curious, on a broader scale, what makes Zimbabwe so ripe for the reinvigoration of the unreliable narrator, through your character Zamani? What does Zimbabwe specifically contribute to the history of that trope?
That is fascinating. I think, as a postcolonial nation, our experiences have felt surreal. We gained independence in 1980, but the colonial and post-colonial periods continue to overlap and inform one another in Zimbabwe. I can give my mother as an example. She lived through the Liberation War, Gukurahundi, and the Third Chimurenga, which included the famous invasions of white-owned farms. This is what precipitated the food shortages—we had a 100 trillion-dollar bill at one point, just to give you a sense of this surreal existence. I think that's staggering. And then there is this idea of history as a contested space in Zimbabwe. History becomes a hall of mirrors: Whose history? Who said what? What is history? What happened? This is what we say happened. Who can say what happened, right? So many contested versions. I think the unreliable narrator comes in...
