For author, freedom begins with imagination
Bulawayo tells story about a nation on cusp of revolution with animal voices
Like many of her compatriots, NoViolet Bulawayo once thought Robert Mugabe would rule Zimbabwe forever.
A national liberator turned autocrat, Mugabe presided over the southern African nation for almost four decades, infamously declaring that “only God, who appointed me, will remove me” from office. So when in November 2017, he was forced by the military to resign, Bulawayo knew she had to write about this transformative moment in her nation’s history.
And so was born “Glory,” her second novel, which centers on the rapid fall of a longtime ruler and was recently published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
“Writing it felt like responding to a call of duty,” Bulawayo, 40, said in a recent interview. “I felt like I needed to be part of the collective struggle that was going on. So the book is my participation; that’s my way of showing up.”
“Glory” is being published eight years after Bulawayo’s debut novel, “We Need New Names,” was released to critical acclaim, making her the first Black woman from Africa to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Bulawayo originally set out to write a work of nonfiction about Zimbabwe after the coup, but given the barrage of books, essays and opinion pieces dissecting the post-Mugabe era, she worried that she might not have anything new to say. So she pivoted to fiction, placing “Glory” in the mythical nation of Jidada, which is suffering under the yoke of a brutal dictator and the whims of his corrupt party.
But instead of people, Bulawayo’s novel is animated by a cast of animal characters — horses, dogs, donkeys, goats, chicken, a crocodile — with revealing names like Comrade Nevermiss, General Judas Goodness Reza and Dr. Sweet Mother.
Bulawayo said her decision to use animal voices was “my way of laying ownership to a very public story, a very public drama, and wanting to kind of tell it on my own terms.”
Born Elizabeth Zandile Tshele in the Tsholotsho district, in southwest Zimbabwe, Bulawayo left her home country when she was 18 to pursue degrees in the United States, including a master’s in creative writing at Cornell University.
She began writing using the pen name NoViolet Bulawayo as a student. In her Ndebele language, “no” means “with,” and Violet was the name of her mother, who died when she was 18 months old. Bulawayo is her hometown and Zimbabwe’s second largest city.
In 2017, when Mugabe was deposed, Bulawayo was teaching creative writing at Stanford University but decided to return home weeks later. There, she caught the heady post-Mugabe days, when many Zimbabweans hoped the soaring inflation, unemployment, food shortages and human rights violations that defined his rule would finally come to an end.
“People were excited. People were happy,” Bulawayo recalled. “People thought we had turned the corner.”
But the euphoric highs soon dissipated, as Zimbabweans, including herself, continued to line up for everything: fuel, groceries, cash.
Moyo, a journalist with
The New York Times, was prosecuted for spurious charges.
“Glory” follows Destiny, a goat who returns to Jidada to face the country she vowed to leave behind and the mother who plunged into “a deep, dense dark” place when she disappeared. Through her, Bulawayo explores the trauma of displacement, the central role women play in holding societies together and the failure of independent states to attain minimum levels of prosperity for their people.
The book also explores the legacy of the Gukurahundi, Zimbabwe’s name for the massacre of thousands of members of the Ndebele minority by Mugabe’s military between 1983 and 1987.
Bulawayo said she deliberately chooses to write about people on the
margins, who are likely to be overlooked.
“If there’s any measure of wealth in our democracy or the progress of our societies, it is through the status of the poor, of the people who are really at the bottom,” she said. “I have a sensitivity to that.”
But those decisions haven’t always been received with enthusiasm, particularly among academics and artists who have long criticized some Western depictions of Africa as a place of death, disease and dictators.
Bulawayo worked on “Glory” for more than three years, during which she closely followed the grassroots activism demanding change in countries, including Sudan, Algeria, Uganda, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and the United States, where the Black Lives Matter movement surged.
Social media became an important part of her research — two chapters in “Glory” are composed just of tweets — but she also kept a few novels about despots by her side, including “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Wizard of the Crow” by Ngugi wa Thiong’o and “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” by Junot Diaz.
The process of writing “Glory” affirmed for her, she said, how “the struggle against injustice is the same really across borders, across time.” No matter the difficulties citizens encounter, she said, the road to freedom begins in our own imaginations.
“We have to insist on imagining the worlds that we want to see,” she said.
“It matters to think that one day Zimbabwe will be free, one day all these countries that need to be free will be free.”