Harare Review of Books

485 pages. Published May 28, 2024 by Archipelago. Fiction/Mozambique.

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This ode traces Mozambique’s colonial history through the life of one family. It begins with the mysterious appearance of a woman, Maria des Dores, one day in a quiet settlement in the mountains. She’s naked and in the river, in the men’s area. Her appearance provokes outrage, but it becomes apparent that Maria has suffered a mental break of some kind; she meets kindness in the form of a doctor, a priest, and a wise old woman. The rest of the novel takes readers back through time to explain how Maria has found herself there.

The Joyful Song is very poetic stylistically, and reads like oral history or folktale would sound—not least because of the frequent cosmological interludes describing a mythological time when women were in power, and Zambézia and Mount Namuli were the centre of the world. It’s expansive in scope, covering themes like the cruelty of Portuguese colonialism, its effect on indigenous, black Mozambican families (women especially) and culture, the perils of becoming an assimilado or an indigenous person who renounces their identity to assimilate with the colonials, racial relations, and more. The characters are almost unrealistic, as they would be in oral history: larger than life, their good and bad traits exaggerated. But, like an oral history, this is the tale of a people, passed on to new generations, preserving history.

It took starting this novel, putting it down, and a book club to get me to come to grips with it, mainly because of its style and length. Once I got into the rhythm of the story, I began to enjoy it, and found the commonalities of culture between that described by Chiziane and mine really very moving. Maria des Dores, whom the story centres around, is a sympathetic character, the victim of time and terrible circumstance. I never did identify the partridge of the title, although it appears many times in the tale, and its call and song are described.

This is a rich and heady tale, full of sadness and defeat but also ending on a note of reconciliation. It foreshadows a future when Mozambique will fight for its freedom, and then fight again to free itself from the aftereffects of colonialism. It’s really beautifully done.

Many thanks to Archipelago and Edelweiss for early access.

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