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language: English
country: Zimbabwe
year: 2018
form: novel
genre(s): literary
dates read: 3.1.23-5.1.23
starting the year off with Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s The Theory of Flight, and with the caveat that I am an academic and so I am more likely to appreciate books written by other academics, this is easily one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years, and possibly like…top 5 non-speculative. if you can get your hands on a copy, please do.
The Theory of Flight is a multilayered and nonlinear — or not strictly linear — meditation on Zimbabwean history and Zimbabweans’ lives (white, Black, Coloured, straight, bi, rich, poor, men, women, living in Zimbabwe and spread through the diaspora) from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first, tracing the interwoven stories of friends, family, acquaintances, and enemies surrounding Imogen Zula Nyoni — Genie — a woman who is both extraordinary (in ways that are difficult to put one’s finger on) and decidedly ordinary.
it’s a lot: it’s about violence and secrecy and trauma and all of the things that states conceal or suppress. but it’s also about hope and love and the fact that in the face of all of this violence, in spite of the secrets and the things that have never been and now probably never can be openly addressed (let alone resolved), people live their lives. it’s about the ways the project of decolonization failed and the violences of the postcolonial state, and it’s about the necessity of seeking truth — or, at least, of acknowledging that there is a truth to be sought (I’m thinking, incongruously(?) of McKillip: “I could not desire anything less for it, than that it yields always, unsparingly, the truth of itself”). it’s also, I think, seeking a kind of reconciliation (in line with South Africa’s TRC) — that is, it’s committed to the possibility of moving forward in spite of horrific violence — but it’s conscious that that’s not possible without truth first, and so it sets out, in its multifaceted way, in pursuit of truth.
I don’t know how to adequately put into words what it’s about, because that doesn’t convey it. it’s really, really good.
moods: emotional, hopeful, reflective