Harare Review of Books

304 pages.

Expected publication date: Sept 26, 2023 (Cassava Republic Press)

Fiction.

In Farai Mudzingwa’s stunning new novel, Jedza moves through two worlds in parallel—the physical and the spiritual, and also the small world of Miner’s Drift and, later, the larger world of Harare. It’s a bildungsroman: we meet Jedza as a lovable and irrepressible boy in Miner’s Drift, up to small boy things with his little crew (and, very memorably, a little running away from home with his dog, Spider). When the unthinkable happens, Jedza is forever marked and haunted by forces far beyond his knowledge or ability to deal with.

These hauntings follow him to Harare, where he tries to piece together the life of a Zimbabwean adult—with some success, but feeling that true happiness and freedom evade him. He’s caught up in the twilight zone of Harare’s precarity—less so for him, in some ways, than for those his life is intertwined with. Mudzingwa portrays this beautifully: Harare’s shadow life in the Avenues—the sex workers, the guys high on drugs and selling airtime at the street corners, the maize sellers, the old woman selling cigarettes and sweets at the corner—and life south of Samora in Chenga Ose, with its malaise, broken sewers, and hand-to-mouth existence. In all of this, above everything, it’s community that holds lives together.

Underneath, though, that second world—the one of hauntings—never leaves Jedza. His sister, Natsai, also moved to Harare’s Avenues some years ago, before disappearing mysteriously—although she is not truly gone. In the novel, Shona cosmology (with touches of more generic “African” beliefs) is the brilliant, sparkling web of existence, that you can just see through the corner of your eye if you turn your head quickly. Jedza comes to believe he cannot find peace without confronting what haunts him, and gradually becomes aware of how he might find answers. In the climactic scene, he attends a bira on the edge of town where he comes face-to-face with the truth of his identity and with the long line connecting him to the ancient past, bringing him hope for freedom.

Mudzingwa proves himself a true svikiro (spirit medium), channelling the voice of a people, the Shona, through their son Jedza. This voice is plaintive, in mourning for all that has been lost through colonialism, in the loss of a connection to its children and the land. You’ve heard it: it haunts us in the music of Zimbabwe, and in the struggles of its people. That pain comes through in Mudzingwa’s exceptional novel, leaving the reader feeling haunted too.

Thank you to Cassava Republic Press and to NetGalley for access to an ARC of Avenues by Train.