By Akumbu Uche
I don’t come across contemporary African YA novels that often. I can’t speak on whether it’s the supply or the demand that’s in deficit, but I’m sure that African literature would be all the richer if we had more of them. Fortunately, we have Zimbabwe’s Rutendo Tavengerwei representing both the genre and the continent, and while this is a book clearly targeted at teenagers, it is suitable for adult readers too.
At first glance, Tavengerwei’s debut novel, ‘Hope is Our Only Wing’ (Soho Press, 2018), is a fish-out-of-water story. Shamiso Muloy is a fifteen-year-old teenager who has just moved from Slough to Harare. At Oakwood High, her new boarding school, her British accent marks her out as an outsider, and her frequent faux pas stemming from social awkwardness are frequently misinterpreted as disrespect and rudeness. Zimbabwe may be her homeland but in Shamiso’s words, it is “a crime scene” that she struggles to love. Her father, an investigative journalist, has recently died in mysterious circumstances while in pursuit of a story exposing political corruption in the country. Unknown to her schoolmates, the new girl is in the throes of grief. Her classmate, Tanyaradzwa, is one of the few people who show her kindness but just as a reluctant friendship begins to blossom between both girls, Tanyaradzwa, a recovering cancer survivor relapses. The prospect of another loss and more pain proves too much for Shamiso and she retreats into emotional reticence.
The novel appears to get its title from the phrase, “hope is our only wing in a stormy gale,” a quote attributed to Shamiso’s father, but lovers of poetry will be reminded of Emily Dickinson’s Poem 314, better known by its first line: ‘“Hope” is the thing with feathers,’ which likens the emotion to a bird capable of enduring weather extremities. The stormy gale here is not just Shamiso’s depression and Tanyaradzwa’s life-threatening illness, but the aftermath of Hondo Yeminda in which 804 farms belonging to white and indigenous Zimbabwean farmers were seized and reallocated. Set in 2008, the novel captures the collapse of the country’s agricultural and economic sectors; consequences of Robert Mugabe’s controversial Land Reform Programme eight years prior. The middle and upper-middle class students at Oakwood High may be privileged, but even they are not immune to the hyperinflation of the local currency, food shortages, and incessant strikes.
Political Turmoil. Grief. Illness. Death. These are all heavy topics that threaten to weigh down a good story. Fortunately, Tavengerwei is adept at handling tough subjects without being melodramatic. One of the ways she does this is through the injection of humour. Her description of Shamiso’s confusion at being expected to board a bus with no sitting room and the inclusion of a scene where a student is caught stealing a live chicken added some much needed levity. A natural weaver of words, she is also proficient at providing historical and background details without overwhelming the reader with facts.
The healing power of music is referenced and as evidenced by a phrase like “Shamiso’s heart broke into a shudder of beats,” for example, that musical sensibility seeps into the language too. However, I shook my head over the novel’s description of an mbira as an African guitar. The mbira may be a plucked instrument, but it is an idiophone, or more accurately, a lamellophone not a chordophone which guitars are. Also, its colloquial and more layman friendly name is a ‘thumb piano.’ Tavengerwei is successful in moving the plot along such that there are no lagging moments, but I wish she could have spent more time exploring the friendship between Shamiso and Tanyaradzwa. As it is, the majority of their interactions happen off the page and the reader is robbed of the chance to mull over the intense ebbs and flows of teenage friendships and understand these protagonists better.
Africans are often accused of exclusively relying on hope, instead of actively countering political injustice, but with this tribute to the emotional resilience of Zimbabweans during a difficult period in their history, the author shows that hope can coexist with political action.
Overall, I found this to be a confident and purposeful debut, and I cannot wait to read more of Tavengerwei’s writing.
Akumbu Uche is a Nigerian writer. Her work has appeared in Bella Naija, Brittle Paper, and Engaging Borders Africa. She lives in Owerri.
