Verdict: carrot
The powerful stories in An Elegy for Easterly, Petina Gappah’s debut short story collection, reflect contemporary Zimbabwe in a variety of its aspects. Here is the squalor of those oppressed by Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF, as well as those who have been crushed by a rising middle class which visits suffering on its own and on those left floundering beneath it.
The stories, which mercifully make no gesture towards solving the problems of a country depicted in various stages of implosion, are peopled by the downtrodden and their oppressors. On show in Gappah’s tapestry of ills is a display of bigotry as well as the obvious demons of poverty, Aids and corruption.
Edna, in the story At the Sound of the Last Post, embarrasses herself at the funeral of her brother, who is hailed by the president as a fallen hero of the liberation movement. Twenty-one years ago when the narrator, who was the deceased’s wife, announced that she wanted to leave him, Edna said, Good riddance. She had considered the narrator “a mhanje, the lowest form of womanhood, mhanje being a barren woman, a woman without issue, unproductive, a fruitless husk”.
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