Harare Review of Books

256 pages.

First published on November 30, 2020.

Genre: Fiction.

It’s always wonderful to read a book that’s set in my home town, Bulawayo!

Emma, the protagonist, has gone back home to Bulawayo from Seattle, USA, after a crisis in her marriage leads to a decision with serious consequences. She left home in 1978, thirty years ago, when she was ten, following a catastrophic personal event. This is her first time back, and she is looking for answers and closure.

What she finds initially is Elizabeth, the current owner of her childhood home, and Calvin, a Coloured** (“mixed race*”) man who works for Elizabeth, and who is tied to Emma’s own traumatic history. What follows is an unravelling of time and memory for both Emma and Calvin, and a journey towards resolution.

This book is well-written, with great character development, plot, and pacing. Emma’s backstory is shared very effectively through a series of flashbacks. Emma does not feel fleshed out until we learn about her time in America, and some of her odd naivety about Zimbabwe could be explained by the fact that she left as a young child, and by her prolonged absence, rather than by weakness of development of the character in the book. I’m happy to give the author the benefit of the doubt on this.

I was taken aback at first by Calvin’s use of dialect— the “slang” used by Coloured people in Zimbabwe: in some places it felt quite jarring, and although I consider myself to be familiar with it, there were some uses of it that felt strange. That disconnect works on some level, though, as Calvin is (and is meant to be) a very unsettling character.

I would read this alongside Irene Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door, which deals with some of the same themes: race* relations and the experiences of the Coloured community in Bulawayo, interracial* relationships, and the impact of these experiences on personal histories.

This is a very welcome addition to fiction books set in Bulawayo (Sabatini, Vera, Bulawayo, Rheam, etc), and a much-needed one in light of the paucity of books on the lives of Coloured people in Zimbabwe.

Rated: 7/10 because the characters have stayed with me since I closed the book. What an excellent climax.

Violette Kee-Tui was born in Bulawayo, and worked as a journalist. She wrote much of this book for NANOWRIMO. She currently lives in Bulawayo, and runs and art and gift shop as well as historical tours with her partner.

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* I generally find the use of the term “race” objectionable, but have not found an alternative to describe relations between people groups in Rhodesia 💔 The world is the way it is, and I can’t change it: but I can protest.

** Coloured is the term used in southern Africa for people of “mixed race”. Usage here is as in the book, with capitalisation.