In the opening chapters of Zimbabwean author Brian Chikwava’s follow-up to his 2009 debut Harare North, the eponymous teen protagonist is given a pendant by an elder of the family, the irrepressible Babamukuru Jimson.
“A stone carving of Nyami Nyami, the River God, the spirit snake. My first instinct was fear that one day I would break it. It looked fragile, a needle of stone with Nyami Nyami’s serpentine body coiled up and gathered at the top, where instead of a snake’s head, a fierce fish’s head sprung out bearing sharp teeth. It was surprisingly heavy. I wore it straight away. A snake with a fish’s head. It was a strange form, as if all life forms were connected and fluid in their existence. No one had ever given me anything like this before.”
It’s telling that Chikwava’s usually peppy narration slows to scrutinise this keepsake. The pendant is an emblem of Shamiso’s twisty, mixed path from girlhood to womanhood, a path reminiscent in places of both NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. This curious talisman represents, too, her contrarian nature. “Why can’t you be like other girls?” Shamiso’s father shouts, after she’s been insubordinate at school. It’s a question the novel attempts to tackle throughout.
This vibrant, sometimes surreal picaresque begins in a post-independence Zimbabwe. The country is fissured by suspicion and social unrest. Disquiet marks Shamiso’s family life, too: she has been abandoned by her unstable mother, who “lives for the bar and carries a brick in her bag”. She lives instead with her remote father, a former soldier whose desire for orderliness is at odds with Shamiso’s dreamier sensibilities. There is a striking, phantasmagoric scene in which, dusty and disoriented, Shamiso doggedly climbs mountains outside Harare, illustrative of her pursuit of an ineffable promise of something beyond the strictures of her sterile home life. Jimson, her Falstaffian, spirited elderly relative, is a self-taught artisan who nurtures Shamiso’s creative yearnings. Her hopes to give freer rein to this more imaginative part of herself are seemingly realised when she gets the chance to study art at the University of Brighton in England.
The short novel bounds through Shamiso’s fish-out-of-water campus experiences and her attempts to settle herself into a bewildering new world with a host family. We also follow her post-graduation life as she scratches a living as a sculptor in London, producing works that she hopes possess the mystique and force of Nyami Nyami.
It is a commonplace of the Bildungsroman that the lead’s self‑discovery is accelerated by encounters with educative external characters. In the earlier part of the novel, this function is fulfilled by vivacious Jimson. With his hare-brained get-rich quick schemes and hot temper, he is a highlight of the novel. In the Brighton section, Chikwava seems to imply that non-binary George will take on this horizon-expanding role. Together they drift through Brighton’s bars and clubs; George has a penchant for drag that is “wild, colourful, fun, scary, bold and fearful”. The implication is that George is a kind of incarnation of Nyami Nyami’s brilliant, powerful strangeness.
I write with a general tentativeness here because George’s portrayal and, more broadly, the connection between the protagonist and George was one of a number of uncertainties I had about the novel. George is described as a “terrific human being”, but I wasn’t sure that the writing helped me believe in their charisma at all. Lost on me, too, were the stakes and status of a romantic relationship that blurs in and out of focus. When considering what exactly is going on between herself and George, Shamiso declares: “We understand each other, I think”. That equivocation was something I felt too and couldn’t get past when mulling over what held these characters together.
The disjointed shape of the novel also puzzled me. While flinty concision is much praised at the moment, this book could have done with being fleshed out more, not least to enrich the relationship between George and Shamiso. Halfway through, Shamiso exults that she “loves life and makes fast, flash friendships even though [she] cannot hold a thought in [her] head for longer than five seconds”; the odd pace and proportions of the novel attest to this. Jimson seems to be a central character, but is wrested from the narrative far too soon. The depiction of Shamiso’s schooldays, especially when she is exiled to boarding school by her father – the eventual springboard for her life-changing voyage abroad – is compressed and truncated. In the final third, a modelling scam arises that seems like an important plot twist; but this soon fizzles out. Shamiso also stages a risky, seemingly impactful protest in the midst of a gallery opening but this ultimately proves to be fairly inconsequential, too.
While there is often an admirable audacity in Chikwava’s original prose style – drily funny in its pinpointing of British racism; sensually imagistic in its capturing of juvenile scrapes in Harare – like the chimerical Nyami Nyami, this novel is a mixed bag.
• Shamiso by Brian Chikwava is published by Canongate (£12.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
