FICTIONAL ZIMBABWE
After a pregnant lull, Zimbabwe has given painful birth yet again to international headlines. Post-natal blues have set in as commentators offer their gloomy assessments for the future now that the ruling regime has retained power in controversial elections.
Amongst all the analysis of the politics there are stories about people bravely taking on injustice and trying to keep civic society going. There are also stories of the dispossessed and disheartened. Zimbabwe is under the world’s gaze, its stories uncovered, broadcast and shared.
So what, you might ask, am I doing writing a fabricated story set in Zimbabwe? If a writer is hoping to introduce readers to a country and its history then the journalist’s piece must surely be more powerful and worthy than mere fiction. It also seems more respectful to those who are fighting for change to give them a voice rather than to waste time giving a voice to made-up characters.
In any case, who wants to read fiction set in a place where history is on the march, when the real-life story is so compelling and changing day by day? By all means write a book about Zimbabwe but don’t make it up: do the research, interview people, find the true-life stories. Follow the lead of books like The Last Resort, by Douglas Rogers or The Fear, by Peter Godwin.
And yet … and yet … fiction is more than make-believe. We turn to fiction for a different quality of understanding of true-life events and of history. It takes perhaps five minutes to read an article in a newspaper or on a webpage and, however poignant, however good the reporter is with words, our engagement is fleeting. Our empathy is pricked but not fully engaged. But a novel demands something more of us. If the writer has done their work well, it engages us at a much deeper level. When we’ve finished a good novel, we place the book down a little absently and sit there, thinking, perhaps even taking a deep breath. Our thoughts might be for the character we have followed through three hundred pages or it might be that we have, for the first time, understood what it is like, for example, to live in a place smothered by shadowy forces.
The novel’s art is to draw the reader in so that they invest emotionally in the characters and in the landscape of history and event in which those characters live. Whilst lost in the novel, we can become the characters, experience for ourselves their world, share their dilemmas. We come to know subtleties of motive that are harder to do justice to in non-fiction.
So although the characters in fiction are not a depiction of any real person, they can expose to us choices that real people, and ourselves, might face. They can also show us something about how things ought to be and what has gone wrong. Tolstoy went further when he wrote (to paraphrase him): literature should cause violence to be set aside.
Fortunate is fiction and is set in Zimbabwe just before the last elections in 2008. It can only tell the stories of a limited number of characters and those characters represent only themselves: fictional people. But I hope it shows, and the reader will experience, some portion of truth.
Amongst all the analysis of the politics there are stories about people bravely taking on injustice and trying to keep civic society going. There are also stories of the dispossessed and disheartened. Zimbabwe is under the world’s gaze, its stories uncovered, broadcast and shared.
So what, you might ask, am I doing writing a fabricated story set in Zimbabwe? If a writer is hoping to introduce readers to a country and its history then the journalist’s piece must surely be more powerful and worthy than mere fiction. It also seems more respectful to those who are fighting for change to give them a voice rather than to waste time giving a voice to made-up characters.
In any case, who wants to read fiction set in a place where history is on the march, when the real-life story is so compelling and changing day by day? By all means write a book about Zimbabwe but don’t make it up: do the research, interview people, find the true-life stories. Follow the lead of books like The Last Resort, by Douglas Rogers or The Fear, by Peter Godwin.
And yet … and yet … fiction is more than make-believe. We turn to fiction for a different quality of understanding of true-life events and of history. It takes perhaps five minutes to read an article in a newspaper or on a webpage and, however poignant, however good the reporter is with words, our engagement is fleeting. Our empathy is pricked but not fully engaged. But a novel demands something more of us. If the writer has done their work well, it engages us at a much deeper level. When we’ve finished a good novel, we place the book down a little absently and sit there, thinking, perhaps even taking a deep breath. Our thoughts might be for the character we have followed through three hundred pages or it might be that we have, for the first time, understood what it is like, for example, to live in a place smothered by shadowy forces.
The novel’s art is to draw the reader in so that they invest emotionally in the characters and in the landscape of history and event in which those characters live. Whilst lost in the novel, we can become the characters, experience for ourselves their world, share their dilemmas. We come to know subtleties of motive that are harder to do justice to in non-fiction.
So although the characters in fiction are not a depiction of any real person, they can expose to us choices that real people, and ourselves, might face. They can also show us something about how things ought to be and what has gone wrong. Tolstoy went further when he wrote (to paraphrase him): literature should cause violence to be set aside.
Fortunate is fiction and is set in Zimbabwe just before the last elections in 2008. It can only tell the stories of a limited number of characters and those characters represent only themselves: fictional people. But I hope it shows, and the reader will experience, some portion of truth.
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