Review: Dying to live, living to love

What happens when people change – or when they are changed?

Part of this elegant and accomplished collection is an inquiry into that diasporan sorrow: What happens when your parent or grandparent dies while you’re gone? It can be difficult to drop everything and come home. And if it’s to stand vigil as they die, harder yet.

The stories of Who Will Bury You? ask what happens when you find yourself after you’ve left – and that self isn’t acceptable back home? Several protagonists are lesbian, and from Zimbabwe, a profoundly homophobic country. What will your mother tell Mai Mfundisi, the reverend’s wife, when she comes to visit?

Chido Muchemwa’s stories preoccupy themselves with death, heartbreak and loss. Some are set in Kariba, and feature Nyami Nyami and the disruption to the traditional lifeways of BaTonga from the building of the dam wall. A favourite is Paradise, about Wickington, the only surviving one of a series of W-named brothers; he spends all of his time at the cemetery where his siblings are buried. It’s a poignant depiction of the fractures of African family systems brought about by immigration and yes, much death.

A tribute to African fatherhood, Chasing Elephants stands out. Not obviously about death, it’s a warm account of a father-daughter trip to Mana Pools, replete with the awkwardness of a father who’s never understood the modern compulsion to express affection – isn’t it clear in how he provides for his child?

Who Will Bury You? feels like a diasporan love letter to Zim life and culture, but also a eulogy for what’s inevitably lost as time and people move on.

If she isn’t already, Muchemwa is set to be a leading light of modern Zimbabwean and African literature. Because of her skill, readers will be completely absorbed from the first page to the last.

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House of Anansi Press provided The Continent with a review copy.