Andrea Mitchell NGOZI A novel by Andrea Mitchell A thesis submitted to the University of Canterbury in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. 1 Andrea Mitchell Andrea Mitchell Supervisor: Prof. Patrick Evans MFA in Creative Writing Vengeful Spirits: the writing of Ngozi In an interview with Salon Magazine, Booker Prize-winner Arundhati Roy said “I don't believe anyone should write unless they have a book to write. Otherwise they should just shut up” (Jara 2). I enrolled in the MFA programme because I had a particular book that I wanted to write. A large investment of time, money and passion requires that the resulting work be worthwhile, and I made a commitment to writing a book about Zimbabwe that would lay some of my personal ghosts to rest, as well as express the experience of other white Zimbabweans under Mugabe’s regime. In his seminal work on creative writing, The Art of Fiction, John Gardner stated: Each writer’s prejudices, tastes, background, and experience tend to limit the kinds of characters, actions and settings he can honestly care about, since by the nature of our mortality we care about what we know and might possibly lose (or have already lost), dislike that which threatens what we care about, and feel indifferent toward that which has no visible bearing on our safety or the safety of the people and things we love. (42) This was certainly true in my case, and meant that I needed to write this particular book before I could move onto any other project. It focused on my childhood in post- Independence Zimbabwe, the political troubles there, and my subsequent departure from that country. It is a topic about which I care very strongly, and the Master of Fine Arts programme was the perfect forum in which to explore it further. Living as a white Zimbabwean in the 1990s meant a near-perfect life: your clothes were always clean and ironed, there was always tea in the silver teapot, gins and tonics were served on the verandah, and, in theory at least, black and white lived in harmony. As 2 Andrea Mitchell Mugabe’s presidency turned sour, however, this idyllic and privileged world began to crumble into anarchy. My family and I left to escape the political violence in 2002, and moved to New Zealand. My novel Ngozi draws on these experiences to tell the story of one troubled white family who struggle to stay afloat in the collapsing economy and escalating horror of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The story is told through the eyes of a young white girl, who is partly based on myself. When the farm invasions begin, the violence threatens to destroy the family’s way of life forever. They eventually leave Zimbabwe, but escaping the vengeful ghosts (‘ngozi’) of their past still seems impossible. Ngozi evolved from a short story. As well as standing alone, a short story can be a “single element that, if brilliantly done, must naturally become the trigger of a larger work” (Gardner 35). I wrote a short story in 2003 that was set in the period just before we left Zimbabwe, focusing on the farm invasions in 2000 and their effects on white Zimbabweans. I submitted it for the Macmillan Brown Prize, and won. It was the first time I had written about Zimbabwe since leaving, and the strong feelings I had about the topic intensified. After I had examined that single incident, I found that I wanted to explore further and open up the story to its full potential. The themes I planned to explore in this book included: the blurring of the narrator’s black and white identities; black magic and superstition overcoming white reason and civilisation; and the fragility of so-called ‘normal’ life. Inevitably, since the novel follows the protagonist as she grows up, another theme emerged as I wrote: the crumbling of the narrator’s idyllic childhood world and innocence. Anais Nin said “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection,” (quoted in Koval viii) which is a particularly appropriate phrase when describing the experience of writing a semi-autobiographical novel. It requires that you sift through your experiences, remember them as vividly as possible, and then transform them from personal memories into something worth communicating as a piece of fiction. To me, there was never any question of whether this should be a novel or an autobiography. In an autobiography, personal events intrude to muddy the themes and imagery of the book; 3 Andrea Mitchell novelising the events enables an author to lift them out of the ordinary. I wanted to emphasise that this story belongs not only to me, but to every white Zimbabwean who lived under Mugabe’s regime. I believe that “through the specifics of your life, you arrive at universality,” (Davis 4) and make the story more powerful. It was difficult to revisit my memories of Zimbabwe. We left in 2002, when the violence against white farmers was at its height, and since then I had tried not to think about it for fear of feeling the grief again. As I started writing Ngozi I noticed strange blanks in my memory, usually around the more difficult times, and it took a lot of effort to override these blanks. The process of remembering was bittersweet. Occupying that lost world again had a familiarity and joy about it. I was home. I also realised afresh, however, what I had lost. I felt it was important for the book to be emotionally charged and written from the heart, but I did not want it to dissolve into a mess of tears and angst. I tried to keep a balance between the raw emotion and the considered, thoughtful construction of a well- crafted book. If I wrote the book purely as catharsis, no one would want to read it. To this end, Ngozi is a composite of my experiences, research and the experiences of others. My stepfather kept books of newspaper clippings from 1998 till 2002, which have been an invaluable resource for writing this book, and also has a significant collection of books on Zimbabwe and Rhodesia that were very helpful. It is difficult to find good resources on Zimbabwe here in New Zealand, which is understandable, and without my stepfather’s resources my job would have been much more difficult. I also set up small interviews with friends and family who had lived in Zimbabwe, and poached some of their experiences for the book; after significant changes, of course. Ngozi is written in first person and present tense. I decided to write in first person in order to place the reader directly inside the narrator’s experience. Norman Mailer said, “The strength of the first person is that it gives you great immediacy. The moment you pick up a book and someone is saying ‘I’, the reader jumps into the ‘I’ and feels at home” (Mailer 68). It is a short-cut to instant emotional involvement, and I wanted to create that involvement. I also wanted the narrator to be an observer, someone ordinary, who would allow the reader to have a clear-eyed view of the situation in Zimbabwe. The narrator’s 4 Andrea Mitchell childlike, innocent perspective acts as a lens through which an adult reader can see what is really happening, although it might escape the narrator herself. This is displayed in the narrator’s assumptions about her lifestyle: We are special, somehow. We do the important jobs; have nicer clothes and bigger houses. You never see a poor white person. We must have done something to earn all these nice things. It makes sense. (Mitchell 14) The reader will see these words as ironic, but the narrator is unaware of their implications. She herself disappears. That was my intention. I did not want her to be clearly separate from the reader, an imposing character who demanded attention. I wanted her to have a degree of translucency; the reader sees through her rather than seeing her. To this end, I decided not to name her. Writing in present tense was an instinctive rather than a conscious decision. I experimented with past tense as well, but it flattened out the text and made it less fresh and vivid. I have since come to the conclusion that the present tense worked for this book because it gave the impression that the events are still present in the narrator’s life. She does not see them as being in the past, because they still affect her so strongly. The sequence of events in the book follows the path of my life in Zimbabwe to some degree, but only as a rough guide. Eudora Welty asserted that “the events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order … the continuous thread of revelation” (quoted in Cameron 11). Novelising the events gave me the opportunity let me highlight the “thread of revelation” rather than the actual march of time. I moved from Chinhoyi to Harare when I was very young, and it was important to me that the narrator follow this particular path as well because it represents a widening of her viewpoint, and also a narrowing; when she moves to Harare, her world opens up socially and politically, but she loses her consciousness of the Shona spirit world that was so strong in Chinhoyi. This was important as a way of widening the story’s focus as the narrator grows up.