In my article, I talked about the Time of the Writer Festival which took place in Durban, South Africa from 9-14 March. The event was hosted by The Centre for Creative Arts, University of KwaZulu Natal. I was one of 20 writers who had been invited to attend.

Events included newspaper, radio and TV interviews as well as book launches, forums and discussions. These were held at various venues in Durban, including prisons, schools and youth centres. Like the festival itself, these events were organised and coordinated by a team from The University of KwaZulu Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts and all invited writers had scheduled participation.

I must say that I was very impressed by the amount of talent shown by school pupils in two Creative Writing Clubs that I visited during the festival.

The forum that I enjoyed most was: “African Women Writers: Where are we now?”. This was held at the historical Ike’s Books and Collectables bookshop. It was attended by female participants of the festival and was open to the public. We discussed our experiences as women writers. As part of my own contribution to the forum, I talked about some of the advantages and disadvantages I had experienced as a Zimbabwean writer writing from outside the country and compared those to the experiences of my fellow women writers who are writing from within Zimbabwe.

I also attended panel discussions and book launches that were held in the evenings at The Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre at the university campus.

My panel discussion was co-chaired by the Nigerian writer, Sade Adeniran who was also the 2008 winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book Africa Region. The panel facilitator was Karabo Kgoleng, a SAFM radio journalist who has special interest in literature and the arts. Our topic of was: “Writing Home’’.

We discussed a series of questions presented by the facilitator.

The discussion, which was open to the public, centred on the concept of home, one of the themes that are explored in my novel, The Uncertainty of Hope and Sade Adeniran’s Imagine This. Issues discussed included questions about what makes up that place which a person calls home, factors that give a person security within the home, identity and home, how “tribal identity” may factor into a sense of home, the type of security provided by a home for the characters in our novels and whether people who have been dispossessed can ever re-create a home. We also talked about the challenges of writing about “home” while living abroad.

An important question raised by another writer in the audience was why we wrote in English and not in our native tongues. My response to this was that I write in English to reach out to a wider audience. Writing in Shona, which is my native language would restrict the audience that I can reach. I suggested translation of English novels into vernacular where funds are available.

A highlight of the festival was the announcement of the 2009 winners of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book and Best First Book Africa Region. The prize for best book went to one of the festival participants, Mandla Langa of South Africa for his novel , The Lost Colours of The Chameleon.

All in all, it was a wonderful week. I came back to England feeling inspired to become a better writer.

I am told the discussion was well-attended and that it went very well.

The keynote speakers were Ruby Magosvongwe and Josephine Muganiwa, both from the University of Zimbabwe.

Amanda Atwood reveals that the discussion was dominated by the reality of the challenges Zimbabweans are currently experiencing and how these challenges are depicted in The Uncertainty of Hope (“Pragmatic morality in Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope: A Book Café discussion“, Kubatana.net, October 3).

Among other things, it explored how the struggles which form the core of the novel are represented in the relationship between the individual and the state; the individual and the community as well as relationships in family structures, and so on.

Atwood’s article is also worth visiting because it provides links through which you can listen to the presentations Magosvongwe and Muganiwa gave.

Elsewhere, Ruzvidzo Mupfudza, another Zimbabwean writer, gives a view of one of the discussions that took place in the shadow of the Book Cafe presentation (“Why we write still“, Zimbablog.com, September 25).

In his post, Mupfudza responds to the criticism that the ending in The Uncertainty of Hope is like that of a ‘fairytale’.

Mupfudza’s response is very close to the view I took when I was writing the novel. There were a number of other endings that I considered, the one that I chose felt right because the characters had gone through a tough time and I wanted to communicate this massage that no matter how bad things get, there is always the hope that things will get better.

When you take the action in The Uncertainty of Hope as a microcosm of the crisis that is currently being played out in Zimbabwe, only time will tell if this message of hope is appropriate, let alone accurate.

The event starts at 5.30 pm and will run til 7.00 pm. Admission is free and open to all.

I am told that guest speakers will include Mai Ruby Magosvongwe.

Penny Yon, one of the event’s coordinators, says the September 18 literary discussion will explore the central issues raised by The Uncertainty of Hope as well as the significance of these issues in contemporary Zimbabwe.

“The value of literature,” she says, “is that it reflects aspects of society and allows deeper scrutiny of lives that may otherwise be impenetrable to readers.”

The event is part of the Pamberi Trust literary discussions that have been taking place at The Book Café for a number of years now.

The discussions bring together readers and writers from across the city and are supported by Weaver Press, Pamberi Trust’s Communications project and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

One of my short stories, “Mainini Grace’s Promise” has been featured in Women Writing Zimbabwe, a new anthology which brings together short fiction from some of the finest contemporary Zimbabwean women writers.

The anthology is made up of 15 short stories and is published by Weaver Press.

Lawrence Hoba, in a review which appears in The Zimbabwean (August 26, 2008) says, “The 15 individual stories in Women Writing Zimbabwe are linked by the common attachment that each has with their country… which has seen many changes and upheavals from colonialism to independence, to the current crisis and the apparent death of democracy.”

Writers who appear in the anthology include Pat Brickhill, Diana Charsley, Petina Gappah, Rumbi Katedza, Wadzanai Mhute, Blessing Musariri, Chiedza Musengezi, Gugu Ndlovu, Mary Ndlovu, Bryony Rheam and Zvisinei Sandi.

On “Mainini Grace’s Promise”, Hoba says: “… please find it in your heart to forgive Sarai for acting the way she did… I know with all the frustrations of a failing economy, a defunct health delivery system and rampaging HIV/AIDS, we can all crack under the strain. What Tagwira achieves in her deeply felt story is to raise our level of awareness and compassion.”

In May, the novel was reviewed on SABC’s 3Talk alongside Wendy Salisbury’s The Toyboy Diaries and Xolela Mangcu’s To the Brink: The State of Democracy in South Africa. One of my cousins, who lives in South Africa and who follows the programme, says the review was positive and engaging.

The novel has also been reviewed on websites and in newspapers that include Citizen Journalism in Africa and The Witness.

Brett (“It’s all in the stories we tell,” Citizen Journalism in Africa, May 22) discusses the novel within the context of the role of the media in informing both the imagination and the “collective imagination.”

He suggests that the shocking wave of xenophobic attacks which gripped South Africa in May where based on a lack of understanding of “the other.” He proposes that similar incidents can be prevented if South Africans find out more about the strangers in their midst, not only through the stories they tell each other or through reading or viewing the news, but also through reading books like The Uncertainty of Hope.

Another reviewer, Sharon Dell (“Hope in a climate of fear,” The Witness, June 4) describes the novel as “a well-executed book…”

She quite rightly links Onai’s personal struggles with the “larger story of national deprivation and hardship” that a lot of Zimbabwean men, women and children are currently struggling with. And she suggests that she could have benefited even more if the novel had included a more detailed analysis of what caused the political, social and economic problems the country is facing.

We talked about The Uncertainty of Hope, the themes the novel explores; the significance of the novel’s setting; the novel’s relevance to readers in South Africa and why I wrote the novel.

The action in The Uncertainty of Hope starts in 2005, a few months before Operation Murambatsvina and, among other things, it explores the effect the exercise had on some of the most disadvantaged people in Zimbabwe, the unemployed, the poor and those who rely on the informal sector in order to survive.

I’d not thought about the relevance of the novel to readers in South Africa until Ravi asked the question. My response was that the novel is relevant because South Africa is witnessing an unprecedented influx of people who are trying to find ways to escape from the crisis that Zimbabwe is in. Some of the immigrants are refugees who are fleeing persecution because of their real or perceived political affiliations; others are ordinary men and women who are just trying to survive and who believe their chances of survival are better in South Africa than they are in Zimbabwe.

The Uncertainty of Hope is relevant to readers outside Zimbabwe not only because it gives an insight into some of the factors that are pushing people out of the country but also because of the other, more universal themes that it explores, themes like: the role of women in society; the lack of control they have over their sexuality when in the traditional marriage setting; domestic violence; relationships; the effect of HIV/Aids on families; poverty, its manifestations and effects; as well as the daily struggle to survive.

The first one is that The Uncertainty of Hope has just been released in South Africa where it is published by Jacana Media. The book has a new cover. I like and can understand the headless chicken and some of what it represents. I also like the colors, which are our (Zimbabwean) national colors. But I must say though that I don’t quite get the headless cow.

The second bit of news is that a few days ago, a friend forwarded me a link to a report on a workshop which took place in Harare on November 20-22, 2007. The workshop explored the theme “Cultural Construction(s) of Zimbabwe” and was organised by the “Cultural Images in and of Africa” research programme at the Nordic Africa Institute.

Among other things, the workshop discussed The Uncertainty of Hope as well as works by writers like Chirikure Chirikure, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera.

This is what the report said about The Uncertainty of Hope:

Anna Chitando’s paper on Valerie Tagwira’s novel The Uncertainty of Hope described the novel in terms of its wide-ranging protest, targeting both the victims of Murambatsvina and the corruption in the police and political and commercial elite. She emphasized the feminist aspect of the novel and its capacity for creating role models for strong, independent women.

I am hoping that I’ll be able to read Anna Chitando’s paper soon. It will be interesting to find out exactly what she said.

I thought it would make an interesting juxtaposition of African Library entries to follow the previous piece, on Akare’s account of Kenyan slum life in the seventies, with this discussion of a very recent novel engaging with (particularly) the survival struggles of two women friends who both live in the Jo’burg Lines area of Mbare township in Harare. Judging by Tagwira’s account, the Zimbabwean township circumstances bear many resemblances to the earlier Kenyan conditions evoked in Akare’s text, but the tone and tenor of her description are very different from the Kenyan author’s. This is so mainly because of the strong focus on female experience, insights and coping strategies in Tagwira’s writing and because, in contrast with Eddy the loner as focaliser in Akare’s text, Tagwira’s account centralises the strong and profoundly loyal friendship between Onai Moyo and Katy Nguni (near neighbours and fellow market traders).

The two women’s circumstances differ in significant ways simply because Katy has a gem of a husband (utterly faithful, hardworking and with real pride in and a sense of responsibility towards his wife and their law student daughter), whereas Onai’s is the proverbial bastard. Gari believes that he has fulfilled his responsibility towards his wife, their two teenage daughters and young son by doing nothing but allowing them to share the poorly furnished township house which he inherited from his father. He has a good job as a “section manager” in a large multinational firm, but spends all his income on booze and other women. So brutally selfish is he that he does not use condoms and has never signed on for his firm’s medical aid scheme. Onai struggles to maintain her trade as a vegetable and fruit vendor at her market stall; despite the illegality, Katy’s husband John (a long-distance truck driver between Zimbabwe and South Africa) buys foreign currency in the neighbouring country, which he and Katy trade in as the second, secret and highly risky (but much more lucrative) side of their business life in Zimbabwe. Their most important customer is, in fact, a crooked but very suave Assistant Police Commissioner, Mr Nzou.

Tagwira uses multiple first-person narration in this (her first) novel, but even when the account veers away from Onai it circles back to her at a later stage and eventually one sees that it is really mainly her story — a deeply poignant one, as the title indicates. This technique of shifting focalisers in the narrative allows the author to build up a convincing, densely textured account of contemporary Zimbabwean life, providing perspectives from many angles on what living there is like nowadays for its citizens.

The novel opens with Onai being woken up in the early hours to discover that burglars have picked on their house to steal their main “theft-worthy” possession, their treasured old black-and-white television set. Her husband still being out on his nightly wanderings, she can only gather her children in her bedroom, where they cower together while the theft is being perpetrated. When Gari returns, later, he has clearly been fornicating as well as drinking. She informs him reproachfully of the theft that happened when he was not there to protect his family, but Gari (as is his inebriated, abusive habit) accuses Onai of having “set up” the robbery with her (non-existent) “boyfriends”. When she looks back at him, unspeaking but calmly unafraid (assuming that he is too drunk to be dangerous), he attacks her and leaves her bleeding copiously from a head wound, on the floor, while he collapses into a drunken sleep on the bed. Ruva, her elder daughter, runs to Katy’s house for help; despite grumbling at the task, Katy’s husband John coaxes his old car on precious petrol along the potholed, dangerous road to the hospital, where Onai stays for a few days. Asked by the doctor, she gives the standard “I walked into a door” answer of the abused wife, for “the cocoon of pretence she had woven around herself had become her armour” (4). For all her misery, she is resigned to and trapped in the marriage for her children’s sake. Even Katy’s husband reminds her, as they return from the hospital, that there is no chance Onai could earn enough to obtain a house to which she and her children could go, for “’This is Zimbabwe. A poor woman will always be a poor woman. Hazvichinje!’” (18).

In glaring contrast with Onai and Gari’s relationship, Tagwira depicts the growing love and deepening commitment between Katy’s only child, her student daughter Faith, and a wealthy young businessman, brother to a former fellow student of Faith’s. The two things that bother Faith about the glamorous bachelor Tom Sibanda is that he has no real understanding of the struggles of the poor, because he has always lived in wealth and ease (without being callous), and that he owns a farm whose former (white) owner was murdered. The novel deals with the circumstances preceding, during and following the now notorious Operation Murambatsvina (“operation clear out the rubbish”), the police campaign ordered by the Zimbabwean government to close the informal markets of the city and to demolish all illegal township backyard shacks and home extensions. Tom, who has “connections”, warns Faith of what is coming, but the young woman is incredulous: “Half of Mbare’s population lives in shacks. Where would they all go? And if the markets are closed, these people would starve!” she exclaims (22). While, as Tagwira shows, the wealthy and the politically powerful easily flout the laws, restrictions and regulations of contemporary Zimbabwe, the poor cannot survive except by taking dangerous risks and incurring severe reprisals. As Faith’s father says, “the line between what’s legal and what is not, has never been as blurred as it is now” (27). Faith herself notes that “their lives had become one big obsession with obtaining food” (27).

Tagwira uses a technique of providing the reader with “witness voices” by weaving certain “summarising” remarks into the characters’ very natural and convincingly presented conversations. A small sequence of such comments includes the following remarks: “[Onai] was only thirty-six years old, but she felt like a tired old woman” (44) she says wryly (with reference to the Zimbabwean inflation rate): “I must be among the poorest millionaires in the world” (56). At another point we are told that Faith (who adores her mother’s bosom friend, Onai) “thought of all the many Zimbabwean women flouting socially and lawfully accepted norms to fend for their children … all the women who yearned for some kind of freedom” (82). Elsewhere, even the well-off Tom (Faith’s boyfriend, who obtained his farm in an entirely above-board way, it transpires) declares: “In Zimbabwe, it’s not only death and taxes which are certainties. You can add queues and riot police to the list!” (99). Ruva, Onai’s daughter, asks despairingly: “Are we always going to be queuing for food and never getting enough?” (113).

Pending the supposed slum clearance, when everyone has been warned of the coming police and riot police clampdown on the types of illegality by means of which the Zimbabwean urban poor survive, we are told that “the air was saturated with fear, anger and anxiety” (141). To Onai, the closing of the market leaves her (like so many others) without a means to obtain a livelihood. We hear about her kind war veteran neighbour, who commits suicide when his heroic liberation war record cannot protect him from the punitive actions of the township raid; of little children accidentally killed when a township shack is bulldozed; of people losing their meagre but treasured possessions; and of families with very young children having to huddle, homeless, in the winter air on a nearby open field. All this shock and deprivation is soberly described; such absence of sensationalism in the account of a social disaster and administratively sanctioned injustice has an all the more chilling effect because of Tagwira’s authorial restraint. Even the hastily assembled emergency shelters on the field, we learn, are subsequently demolished as constituting a “health hazard”! (155). As John, Katy’s husband, says: “The suffering will overwhelm whatever benefits are supposed to come out of this” (168).

Tagwira cites a radio broadcast: “The exercise to demolish markets as a means of flushing out criminals, and getting rid of trading places which had become a health hazard, was still continuing. As the reporter intoned, this would pave way for more orderly, more hygienic trading in crime-free zones” (222).

The middle section of the text depicts mainly the further harrowing development in Onai’s life of her discovery that Gari is having a full-blown affair with the township’s most notorious siren, Gloria, widely suspected to have AIDS. She cannot even manage to speak to him about this, so seldom is he home, and when he is, so drunken is his state! Onai for the first time begins to wish to escape all this squalid suffering by killing herself; of course the awareness that she could not so abandon her children holds her back.

With trade in the market now impossible, the family is on the brink of starvation when Onai’s younger, less ambitious and more vulnerable daughter Rita (who is fifteen) approaches her with the plan to go hawking at the bus queues in town with her small brother Fari serving as police lookout. So desperate is their situation that Onai, despite her other daughter Ruva’s horrified objections, allows it; in the meantime Onai, too, does illegal hawking in the city, at the filling station queues, under constant threat of arrest. The two vending children get arrested before long (Rita having had to suffer fondling by a male adult in the process) and Onai immediately stops the children’s “job”. Just then the next blow falls when Gari brings Gloria home and introduces her to the family as his next wife. Onai feels as if “she [is] in chains and her life [is] falling apart” (217). Utterly distraught, the mild Onai attacks the complacent, preening Gloria, only to be grievously assaulted in her turn by a nearly maniacally incensed Gari. This incident, at least and at last, extracts Onai from Gari’s home and she is taken to shelter at Katy’s home while the children are persuaded to stay home.

Later the same night, Gari’s health collapses completely; he is hospitalised (despite everything!) with Onai’s and Katy’s help, Gloria having fled. Gari dies soon after without regaining consciousness, but any thought that this death will bring Onai relief is soon quashed. At the funeral, where the extended family is present, Gari’s sister accuses Onai of having caused her brother’s death. I must mention at this point that the further twists of the knife in this later part of the narrative do not ever make one feel that they are piled on too thick; they are, unfortunately (one is made to feel) all too likely occurrences for a woman in Onai’s position. Briefly: after the lengthy funeral, Gari’s brother stays on in the house with his family on the grounds that it now belongs to him as the next heir; on the very occasion that he announces this, he orders Onai and her children out of the house, because she conveys her reluctance to share “her” home with him and thus (in his view) has dared to defy his authority. There is nothing they can do except take their clothes and go to Katy’s place for the time being. Ruva, it is decided, will remain with Katy in order to write her O-levels; Onai and the other two children will go to the country to appeal to Gari’s sister. Here, they are given a rude and cruelly unwelcoming reception; Onai’s mother’s place is now the only available refuge. Onai takes her children there and after some days she returns, alone, to Harare, to Katy’s place. She finds that “Mbare was much the same as it had been when she left. Small heaps of broken furniture, and bricks and mortar remained a constant symbol of the destruction of people’s lives. Increasingly, rubble and dirt seemed a permanent fixture, as the household rubbish collections had become few and far between, and the council seemed to have no sense of responsibility” (282).

So much for “operation clear out the rubbish”! On her way out, Onai had noticed an iconic scene of a “gaunt woman sitting next to a dying fire, together with a toddler and a small child of school-going age … with her shoulders hunched forward, head drooping from a slender neck” (251), recognising that some people are still worse off than herself, even though she was “almost overwhelmed with fear” and conscious of the apparently “unrelenting cycle of suffering” in her life (269). As she had (perforce) left her younger children with her mother, she had “forced herself to summon hope, because without it there was no point in even trying” (280) — a subtle allusion to the title of the novel.

Upon her return, the first possible glimmering sign of a possible turn in her prospects arrives when Faith (knowing Onai’s dressmaking skills) asks her mainini to make the dress that she (Faith) will be wearing to the luxurious engagement party that Tom is organising for her and himself and their families. There are other twists to the narrative that stem from Onai’s attempts to get a council house where she could stay with her children, but I will not go into overwhelming detail in this account of the novel. One particularly poignant detail is given in a small scene where Onai, believing that she might at last be getting a house of “her own”, allows herself the unheard-of luxury of buying and eating an ice cream from a street vendor. “Being in a position to earn money once again [upon getting a licence to trade] gave her … a sense of renewed optimism”; she even tells herself that being in a queue provided the opportunity “to pick up the latest information about anything” and “the greatest number of laughs” (317).

I omit also the details of the turn in the narrative caused by the arrest, first, of Katy’s husband John and subsequently of the crooked police officer Nzou; but now Onai, with all her own troubles, stands by Katy in her despair when John, whose release the women procure by blackmailing officer Nzou, flees to South Africa to escape reimprisonment. As Faith, now a law graduate, and about to become engaged to Tom, in indignation asks him: “But can’t you see that it’s the system, Tom? It’s the system that is turning good people into so-called criminals. My father is a good man” (326). They all know the dangers of border-crossing and how “the men tended not to come back for their wives and children. A few had even drowned in the Limpopo while border-jumping. Others had fallen prey to crocodiles. [Onai] thought of John and felt sorry for her friend. What would happen to them?” (330). But Onai has to “[try] to offer strength [to Katy], while simultaneously trying to draw strength from her friend” (328) — which perfectly summarises the deep friendship of these two afflicted women. To these two, “humour and resilience were their only weapons in a situation that would have otherwise crushed them” (332).

There are important and serious discussions throughout the text about women’s position in society (eg 336), but a vivid passage such as the following from a letter from Rita (still living in the country at this stage with Onai’s mother and an aunt, Wanai, as well as her young brother) to Onai (whom she respectfully addresses as Amai) eloquently conveys the main points: “I stopped going to school last week. … The boys have been chasing me. Last week a boy touched my breasts. … I want to stay home and help Ambuya [as she addresses her grandmother] and mainini Wanai in the fields. … When are you coming to get us?” (337).

A serious moment with a lighter conclusion occurs when, after Faith has reproached Tom (to whom she is about to become engaged) with thinking of the poor as “a sort of indistinguishable mass, much like the socialists did when they talked of the ‘masses’” and he counters by insisting that Faith and his sister Emily (good friends and activist allies) are “as alike as two peas in a pod” in wanting to “change the world for the better” while he, Tom, is expected to make money so that they “’an live in comfort” (349) while they pursue their activism. Of course Tagwira touches lightly here on one of the oldest dilemmas of the middle-class activist, in a world where even activism requires funding. But Faith and Tom bring Onai wonderful news: via another subplot I cannot go into here, a recently widowed, wealthy friend of Tom’s wants a suitable woman to take over his deceased wife’s bridal shop, and they have persuaded him that Onai is the ideal candidate. Though at first Onai cannot believe this, since “hers was a life of guaranteed misfortune” (352), the novel ends with a glimpse of Onai, installed in the home that “goes with” the job and reunited with all her children.

Not all the t’s are crossed or i’s dotted at the end of the novel, but it is a muted if unmistakably happy ending for Onai; perhaps just a little too pat, but forgivably so — and a relief after so much grief and suffering. Justice has come to the bent police officer, and John will be let off lightly for testifying against him. Nevertheless, the overwhelming, lingering and realistic impression left by this work is of lives lived under extreme difficulty, but faced with immense courage, dignity and the vital support of caring friendship among women. It is, indeed, a highly accomplished first novel and a valuable addition to the African literary archive, however painful it may be to read its many harrowing moments.

This is all brilliant and exciting news.

I like the way The Uncertainty of Hope book page is laid out. The page talks about the book and has some biographical details. It has also got sections that link to reviews of the book that have been published so far as well as links to interviews I’ve given that have appeared on Worldpress.org and on the BBC’s Africa Beyond site. There’s also a downloadable excerpt from the novel and the page gives Shimmer Chinodya’s novel, Strife, as an example of a related book.

Reviewed by Charles Mungoshi, The Herald, April 30, 2007.

The Uncertainty of Hope is a welcome addition to the cannon of Zimbabwean literature not only because an unknown young woman wrote it but also for its fine artistry in the execution of themes that many writers would find rather daunting.

Tagwira pays tribute to a wider spectrum of the not-so-fortunate people of Zimbabwe in a particular place at a particular time thus, her story makes a deep gut-slash gash across today’s Zimbabwe, at different levels of our lives.

On the surface, the story reads like today’s news in the daily papers or on television, but further down, it is the life of ordinary people caught up in the everyday hassle.

It is the story of life lived in detail, of the lives of these people all put together in one place (and what this means) that gives one a not very comfortable feeling that what we call life could be something else askew.

There is the looming shadow of the scourge called HIV and Aids that menaces every other page of the story like vultures hovering over a dying animal or like a refrain from the devil’s own orchestra.

To the above is added the unprecedented unpredictable changing of things, as seen in prices of commodities, human behaviour and lifestyles – all of which have managed to beat the weather at its own game.

As if this is not enough, somewhere in the offices where lonely desperate women can (find solace?) easily fall victim: “We really don’t need your money. Money is not the problem. There are other ways of negotiating.”

Sex. For services rendered, or, most of the times, not rendered or to be rendered.

And, of course, somewhere, someone has hit on a plan and eases his dollar blues.

He is a public transport operator, a businessman, who receives a kind of quota of fuel from Government to run his 10 (or so) kombis to ferry people. Now he has parked all of them – drained of juice, which is now packed in drums and, of course, the rest is our life.

This is simply to illustrate the kind of details of the situations dealt with in this book, situations which are as many-faceted as there are masks that each one of us has to put on to face the different times, moods and circumstances of each day.

The story: Onai is a vegetable vendor who is married to a not so good, hard-drinking womaniser named Gari Moyo.

Her story, therefore, the writer’s story, therefore, our story – opens right in the middle of things, in the middle of our problems.

The dogs have started this racket. Onai is between sleep and wakefulness. She is alone in a bed for two. She puts out her land. There is no one where her husband should be. The dogs are barking.

And she thinks of matsotsi who now roam freely on the streets of Jo’burg Lines, Mbare.

And, of course, this is the night the burglars have targeted her house. She is alone with her children. She does what she can do while the burglars work the dining room and the sitting room.

All she tells herself is not to scream. She is now with the children in their bedroom.

At last, the outside gate squeaks as the burglars leave.

They have taken only the family TV.

With this tense, uncertain atmosphere at the beginning of her story, with this helplessness of Onai at things as they seem to just happen to her, with this, the author sets the pace, the tone and theme of the rest of the book.

And, in the character of Onai, the details of the story are foretold. You can easily tell Gari is at one of his “small houses”.

Right from here and throughout the book, the character of Onai is so graphically drawn that one almost viscerally shares her anguish (or joy) with her.

Onai is to be understood with that guillotine – AIDS – caressing her neck. It is a credit to the author’s skill that even in her nightmarish existence, Onai doesn’t succumb to her husband’s demands for sex.

But one does get angry – together with Onai’s best friend Katy and others – that Onai keeps on staying with Gari. Is this love? Gari is just a born two- or three-timer and that is all he is all about. And Onai is too much of a faithful wife (one thinks; stupidly so) and too much of a devoted mother to leave Gari and the children.

The story revolves round Onai. It is to her that things happen. Or don’t happen. It is she who has to make it or break.

Her marriage is no marriage. Despite that, they are “still living together” and so much is loaded against Onai that, once again, it is the author’s skill we admire in providing Onai with the wherewithal necessary to fight fate and determine her destination.

Onai has a very, very close friend, Katy, who has a very loving and caring husband, John. Both Kath and John are “dealers” in the new Zimbabwean sense. John brings in much-sought-after foreign currency from his cross-border long-distance truck driving trips.

Katy stays at home, minds the vegetable stall at Mbare Musika, and not profitable, sells foreign currency to the willing, the needy and the greedy.

John and Katy give Onai much needed help, hope, and emotional, mental and physical sustenance.

The most beautiful part of the story is the supportive group: composed of those who understand Onai. Students at the university, people in the business world – very close young people fighting for their lives, walking the tight rope between corruption-for-survival and good-works-for-other-people. These are Onai’s people. They open the door at whatever time she knocks. There is Tom and Faith (Katy’s son-in-law and daughter).

Emily and Ben, and there is a very mysterious man who is in a kind of self-exile and goes begging from door to door. They call him Mawaya and he is a constant visitor at Onai’s door. And she always has something to eat, to give him. There are other negative forces — Maya is one of them.

She is a colleague at the vegetable market tables. Maya is blubbery, multi-chinned and a chatterbox who seems to revel and feed off the misfortunes of other people. A vividly drawn minor character.

This is their entire story. They all pitch in to help or harass Onai and through all their actions Onai changes a few corner stones in her life and proves the old saying to be exactly what it is: your destiny is in your own hands.

Mawaya later turns out to be not who he seems to be and provides us with and makes possible – the best part of the story: the neatly-tied up, but still intriguing and ambiguous, quite surprising and satisfying ending.