On the menu of “writing paths” this Sunday, Shimmer ChinaDya, novelist, new practitioner from Zimbabwe. With a dozen titles to his credit, Chinodya has established himself as a major author of African letters. He is recipient of numerous literary prizes, and his collection of news ” Can we talk to each other and other stories Is his first work to be published in French.
The work of the Zimbabwean Shimmer Chinodya is a ” Hymn to life », Writes Annick Garache-Gouvernel, translator of her collection of news Can we talk to each other and other storieswhich has just appeared in the language of Voltaire. Fine connoisseur of Zimbabwean literary worldthe translator tells in her afterword to the collection, the exceptional art of its author.
With him, to his credit, a dozen titles, including Romans and Nouvelles, Shimmer Chinodya, writes his translator, ” Composed over his work a living poetic world where everything and correspondence, his writing is in turn violent and reluctant. Econome, she digs the laser of irony in the anxieties of the human soul and, while describing with precision the outside world as it is, raises another world, another possible, which seems to exist in parallel. It is a whole people who live in the books of Shimmer Chinodya ».
A storyteller born
Man is a storyteller born, as evidenced by his novels which he has published since the 1980s. His very first novel Dew in the morning (Morning dewin French) which he wrote at the age of 17, or his opus Magnum Harvest of Thorns (Spines harvest) relating to the war of independence in Zimbabwe, imposed it as a major voice of African letters. His novels tell with an emergency concern for everyday fragility, brilliantly mixing emotions and events, reality and surreal.
This insightful and sensitive voice of the novelist, we find it in the news that has just appeared, which are both psychological and social testimonies and analyzes of the lives evolving in the Post-independence zimbabwe. We must also read these news for the atmosphere heavy with meaning and premonitions that the author succeeds in creating in the first words of his stories as in the new Cascadeemblematic of the controlled and winding narration of this author.
« At first glance, he seemed to be only one of those unbearable thrills that we meet around a brai [le barbecue des Afrikaners NDLR]- Those who know all the stories and anecdotes that run. (…) They are paid for glasses, look at the partners of others, and brünt their fingers on the grilled pork of the others. This one, about twenty-five years old, small, thin, was rather friendly, daring, little concerned with his appearance, with, despite everything, his mobile phone hanging on his jeans. »
-Thus begins Cascade whose action is carried out with a lot of brilliance, through a very visual writing. The story that this news tells is representative of the atmosphere that reigns in these pages, between raw realism and tilting in surreal, even fantastic. Here, the action takes place in a Braai where a young man half-three, half fanfar, boasts of his female conquests. “The narrator, he is around a barbecueexplains the translator. He does not know what to do, he gets bored, he gets closer to a whole small group who listens to someone who tells stories. The story is that he takes girls in his car, he wants to have a good time with them. They drink beer, take drugs and all that. Then, they say to him: ‘Go, we’re going to go to this place we know’. They go there, they bathe there, and then, all of a sudden, one of the girls turns into a witch. There is something incredible, which scares, is the world of the strange or the fantastic at once. »»
A panorama of concerns
The eleven news that this collection includes offer a panorama of the author’s concerns which range from war to cruel childhood, including social injustices and inequalities, embodied by endearing characters who ” speak the simple language of earth and life ”as the translator writes in her afterword. Moreover, the themes addressed in these news are already present in the novels which have launched the career of the author, as Dew in the Morning or Harvest of Thornswhich have not yet been published in French.
Shimmer CHINODYA was born in 1957 in a modest environment, in the Gweru Township, a small town in central Zimbabwe, which was then called rhodesia. His father who worked for an Indian merchant bleed white to ensure his two sons a good education. According to legend, this father who was a lover of writing, used to recover books during his wanderings in town. It was in the paternal library, made up of three books of books, that the young Shimmer read his first classics. They instilled in him the taste for writing and this conviction he made since his, in the words of the author in person: ” The main mission of art is to raise and vivify the mind ».
Raising and invigorating the mind, this is superbly succeeding in the eleven news from the collection of news from Chinodya. The reader is growing up, informed about the shaping of a world so far away and yet so close.
► Can we talk to each other and other storiesby Shimmer Chinodya. Translated by Annick Garache-Governnel. Editons Project’îles, 185 pages, 16 euros.
