They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But in the case of Farai Mudzingwa’s Avenues by Train (https://cassavarepublic.biz/product/avenues-by-train/), Jamie Keenan’s cover design is an effective and accurate herald of what you’ll find inside.
The marbled ground – one strand merging into another, transforming, fading, and returning – reflects the Zimbabwe of Mudzingwa’s prose, where today and yesterday intertwine and pull apart in a fluid rhythm, almost literally watery in the blue of the end-papers. Emerging from those waves is a black bull, who steps onstage late, but whose role is pivotal.
But what you get inside those covers, is far more than what you see.
Avenues by Train is in this column because it’s a book full of music. It has a playlist, led by Thomas Mapfumo and Ambuya Beuler Dyoko’s Nhemamusasa, and including all the greats of Zimbabwe’s mbira and popular music: you’ll find a small selection of those tracks linked at the end of this column. But, more than that, the prose is infused with music: the writer’s ear is as perceptive as his eye:
“…cooking sounds, clanging of pots, the sizzle of oil in frying pans, the opening and shutting doors, the hooting in the car park, the stomping up and down the stairwell, kids screaming at bath time, bath water running, moaning and grunting from the neighbouring flats…”
And it’s a book structured by music: in its echoes, recurrences, segues and choruses, the plot enacts the sonic overlaps and ebb and flow patterns of mbira performance
But Avenues by Train is no charming musical travelogue. Rather, this is the difficult, moving story of Jedza, haunted by memories of a childhood rail-line tragedy, who in adulthood travels to Harare’s Avenues by train in search of – what? Freedom from those memories? His sister Natsai, marked by water spirits, who disappeared during a journalism internship in the capital? Work and a new life? Answers?
Don’t expect univocality and a straight chronological timeline that starts “then”, wraps up the past with a neat ribbon bow, and ends “now”. In an illuminating interview at the end of the book, Mudzingwa discusses how unhelpful he finds those kinds of boundaries: “we are living the consequences of the past [and…] we who live now are simultaneously creating the present and the future…”
So the past remains present on the potholed concrete streets of Harare: both Jedza’s own past, in characters known in childhood who re-enter his life, those characters’ own pasts, and the past of the city: the Fort Salisbury wetland, razed and drained by the colonialists to make their modern capital. Its waters bubble up and pool at the feet of those struggling to survive on the margins of corrupt capitalism, speaking of other times and ways of existing.
The voices of the past invite us in to their own stories. The core of the book is its seventh chapter, set in 1892 when the city was founded. Mudzingwa juxtaposes high tragedy, as the spiritual significance of the site is literally bulldozed, with low comedy, as the representatives of the colonial regime (including “His Honour Stephanus Johannes Paulus Preposterous, State President of the South Anglican Republic”) lay out their imperial dreams and dirty deals: “We shall build/ Hear! Hear!/ And those who resist?/ Hang! Hang!” That Mudzingwa succeeds in maintaining the devastating impact of the former while letting us laugh bitterly at the latter demonstrates a skillful writer at work.
That’s not the only wit in the book. A series of drier-than-Savannah footnotes provides a running commentary on today’s politics and society: “Second only to picking noses in public, corruption is the most consistent national programme in the forty-year history of the Republic. From airplanes, currency, famine relief grain, fuel, motor vehicles, diamonds; if there is any possibility for corruption, it will happen.”
Finally, just as music enriches the narrative, so the narrative illuminates elements deep inside the music. Mbira music carries one weight as, alongside reggae and pop, it forms part of the soundscape of the city. There, it comforts and nudges.
It carries an entirely different weight as the book moves towards its close and Jedza steps away from his mission-Catholic upbringing to take part in a bira ceremony, where the drums, voices and mbira come into their full power as bridges to insight.
Opening with the injunction to “listen to the spirits when they bite your ears”, Avenues by Train helps us understand those teeth.
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