Petina Gappah is a Zimbabwean lawyer and writer. She is the author of one novel – The Book of Memory (2015), which was shortlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction – and her debut short story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian First Book Award in 2009.
Her new book, Rotten Row, showcases aspects of both genres. To call it a collection of interconnected short stories, although technically correct, doesn't convey its layers of novel-like complexity.
The same characters make appearances in multiple stories, their personalities, identities, back stories and future ambitions sculpted into sharper focus on each and every occasion, seemingly innocuous revelations in one tale sending you back to an earlier one with fresh insight.
In addition to which, the 20 stories are also connected by a common theme: the often-slippery relationship between the law and justice (Rotten Row is the name of the street in Zimbabwe’s capital city Harare, on which the country’s criminal courts stand).
As such, plot and purpose combine to create a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts: a living, breathing portrait of modern Zimbabwe and its people. Not, however, that the courthouse makes a regular appearance in the book. Indeed, if Rotten Row tells us anything, it's that justice (and injustice) happen as much outside the sanctioned realm of law and order as within it.
Two notable early stories speak strongly to this. In Copacabana, Copacabana, Copacabana, a hwindi (tout/conductor) on one of the city's kombi buses is beaten to death by a vicious mob after being falsely accused of stealing a mobile phone. Meanwhile, in The Death of Wonder, the restless ghost of a murdered man takes revenge on those who stood in the way of justice for the crime committed against him. As a rule, the police don't pay much attention to accusations of witchcraft – "we ignored all the mumbo jumbo and the superstitions. We concentrated on what the law could actually touch". Easier said than done though when the system is corrupt.
As perhaps is to be expected, the tension between traditional culture and the structures imposed by western colonialism runs through the collection. In In The Matter Between Goto and Goto, a story ingeniously told in the form of a court judgement, a husband seeks divorce from his wife on the grounds that the marriage has produced no children.
Despite the vows they took, vows his wife is petitioning to be upheld, he’s already taken a second wife, as he feels is his customary right. Unfortunately for him, as the judge reminds him, although he has the “privilege” of choosing to be married under customary law and/or civil law, having opted for the latter he’s now bound by the “legal consequences” thereof: thus, customary polygamy becomes civil bigamy.
Historically, Rotten Row was the “busy thoroughfare” that linked the Rhodesian industries of Salisbury (the then capital of the Crown Colony of Southern Rhodesia) to the Harari Township (the city’s first black township) that provided the cheap labour to power them, and aptly these stories traverse the territory of the country’s often-ugly colonial history.
In one, Gappah’s able to portray the crawling horror of a white headmistress who casts her school’s only five black pupils as dancing and stomping “natives” in a play about David Livingstone; while another evokes sympathy for an orphaned white boy desperate to return to a homeland he’s never known.
Sometimes, however, we find ourselves in distinctly greyer areas. In From a Town Called Enkeldoorn, told in the form of an Internet forum, through which Will, a white Canadian, is attempting to trace his family tree, the irate Tobaiwa Nehasha might have a point – "I refuse to accept that there was ever a place called [author's asterisks] ****ing Enkeldoorn because it was named that by a renegade racist regime of ****ing plundering thieves. It is our land and we took it back, and you have no ****ing right to call any of OUR places anything else" – but in the face of such aggression it's the hapless Will we find ourselves sympathising with.
Reading Rotten Row is to move effortlessly between the bigger political panorama and the smaller canvas of the intricacies of the day-to-day interactions between characters. One of the best stories, The News of Her Death relates a morning in a hair salon, the employees gossiping about their late colleague while they braid their customer's hair. Frequently moving, surprisingly funny and always beautifully written, Gappah is a thoughtful and talented writer.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance reviewer based in London.
