Online Reporter
Elliot Ziwira
At the Bookstore
Zimbabwe’s literary giants, Charles Mungoshi and Dambudzo Marechera, adeptly employ metaphors to capture the nation’s spiritual, cultural, intellectual, and creative crises.
Their works, “Waiting for the Rain” (1975), “Coming of the Dry Season” (1972), and “House of Hunger” (1978), offer deep insights into the drought motif.
In “Waiting for the Rain”, it is imperative to distinguish the locutionary from the illocutionary, as nothing is explicit in Mungoshi’s art.
In exploring the literary maestro’s works, one has to pay attention to metaphorical meanings.
Mungoshi utilises drought, waiting, and rain as potent symbols.
Drought represents psychological, moral, and intellectual barrenness, while waiting implies existence in limbo, expectation, and anxiety—that kind of feeling explored in Samuel Becket’s “Waiting for Godot” (1953), and “Enigma of Arrival” (1987) by V.S. Naipaul.
Waiting is predominant in the metaphorical representation of the individual and his location in the national psyche. On the other hand, rain embodies life-giving energies, freedom, and regeneration, absent in colonial Rhodesia. Therefore, it signifies abundance.
Key themes include colonialism’s impact on family and nation, identity struggles, and cultural alienation.
In the novel, characters, themes and plot gain meaning when read against the metaphors of waiting and rain. The Mandengu family’s struggles mirror Zimbabwe’s colonial-era malaise. Lucifer’s western education fails to deliver promised change, highlighting identity crises.
The plot and realistic details find their metonymic dimension transformed by the metaphorical titling of the book. Chronologically, the plot is superimposed into the gathering of the Mandengu family at the rural home to resolve pressing issues, recharge cultural batteries, and seek bearings into the future.
Anxiously, the family waits for Lucifer’s arrival with “glad tidings” from the city. However, he fails to deliver his family from the limitations of colonialism, and its oppressive and violent inclinations.
Waiting, put side-by-side with the waiting for the rain by the entire community and nation, seems to be in vain.
The supposedly voice of the people fails to grasp his roots and identity.
Deplorably, he is unable to locate himself, either in the colonial discourse, as epitomised by the transistor radio, or the national discourse, embodied in the “drum”.
Therefore, the malaise and paralysis of the Mandengu family, and its failure to find a lasting solution, stem from Lucifer’s identity struggles.
Thus, the family unit is used as metonymic to the bane of colonialism.
Kuruku captures it all: “A few more years of waiting won’t make the slightest difference from what we have seen of them”.
Mungoshi also explores the futility of waiting through nomenclature. Names like Tongoona, Matandangoma, Mandisa, Japi and Kuruku, carry meanings that transform characters into symbols of different aspects of the national psyche waiting for regeneration.
The general air of expectation in the novel is captured by Tongoona’s wait-and-see attitude. As both an individual and father, he has been incapacitated by the belief that some external force will bring change in the family’s fortunes.
Tragically, this passivity alienates Lucifer, who feels that a society incapable of change irredeemably destroys itself.
This is evidenced in the way passengers in the bus look through the window at the barren, sandy, and overworked land to which they feel a spiritual connectedness.
Mungoshi drives the point home: “This is our country, the people say with sad familiarity, the way an undertaker would talk of death, Lucifer thinks”.
Matandangoma sceptically stands for charlatanism. As she presides over the family ceremony, the efficacy of her classical discourse and spiritualism become doubtful. Muchemwa (2001), notes that charlatanism is presented at the political and intellectual levels promising false solutions to the malady at the heart of the fictional experience in “Waiting for the Rain”.
An urbane demagogue, Kuruku is as untrustworthy as his name suggests. Driven by self-interest, it will be folly for a family or nation to pin its hopes on such an individual.
Lucifer, the fallen angel, distances himself from the family and nation as he always wishes “he had a different father”. His rejection of home and its environs, norm less-ness, and ideological conflict, depict the universal neurosis and alienation in the novel.
In “Coming of the Dry Season”, Mungoshi explores the nature of ideological and cultural conflict, as the individual struggles to locate himself in the national discourse. Using the metaphors of drought, the setting sun, and the rolling world, he examines conflict at the personal, familial, communal, and national platforms.
The setting sun, symbolic of the old order, whose fortunes are waning, is juxtaposed with the new world, which is on a roller coaster.
However, as these two conflicting worlds try to merge, they encounter a void, metaphorically apt in the dry season of their toils owing to ideological differences.
The conflict goes beyond the generational gap between parents and their children to capture colonial deprivation through western forms of education.
As widely explored in African literature, colonial education creates individuals, who, because of lack of belonging, are alienated from their families and communities.
In contrast, Marechera’s “House of Hunger” employs the house metaphor to represent family decay and dearth of national ethos.
His denial of the family structure’s coherence, its link with the community, and nation at large, as well as his subsequent alienation from the concept of home can be examined through symbolism.
Symbolic elements, inspired by modernism, convey frustration, hopelessness, and disillusionment. Images of disease, dirt, and poverty reveal societal abnormalities.
Mungoshi and Marechera’s works conform to Frantz Fanon’s “literature of combat,” seeking liberation from internal and external forces.
Marechera suggests that combat from within calls for inner strength, determination and resilience, for a lasting solution to be found in consolidating the family, community and nation. Hence, the individual biography is merged with the national one.
However, in “House of Hunger”, the family portrayed is devoid of such metonymic attributes of the Mandengu clan in “Waiting for the Rain”. It is fractured into several relics and traumatised by explosions of violence, which inhibits the artist-narrator from locating himself in its boundaries.
He rejects the claustrophobic nature of the urban family, intensely deprived of opportunities. As his identity and well-being are problematic because of deprivation, disease and scorn, the narrator dwells at the fringes of the sites of the house.
Ironically, his quest to escape from ‘home’ is unsuccessful.
The escape motif fails physically; hence the only vent becomes psychological.
Due to frustration and want of personal grandiose, the artist-hero fractures the chronological sequence of time and its limitations.
Subsequently, he finds the elixir in reverie, stream of consciousness, and whimsicality, which permits him to find order in the disorder of the house of hunger. Since the house metaphor is inseparable from genre and form, he deliberately fractures it for dramatic effect and escape.
Both the literal and metaphorical houses are symbolically diseased, dirt, and impoverished: “In the House of Hunger diseases were the strange irruptions of a disturbed universe. Measles or mumps were the symptoms of a malign order. Even a common cold could become a causus belli between neighbours”.
Overall, Mungoshi and Marechera’s storytelling dexterity weaves metaphors into powerful critiques of colonialism, identity, and cultural heritage. The drought and hunger motifs, which they effectively use, are essentially captured by Musaemura Zimunya in “Those Years of Drought and Hunger” (1982).
Their contributions accentuate Zimbabwean literature’s significance in shaping national discourse.
Through nuanced explorations of identity and culture, the writers inspire reflection and growth.
