Arts, Culture and Sport
The Unstoppable March Of The Human Condition: A Review of Inside Harare Alcatraz and Other Short Stories
‘Inside Harare Alcatraz and Other Short Stories’ is a collection of eleven neatly written stories that are pulsating with global urgency—the heat, anger, and frustration weaved within each sentence palpable and alive.
Published
2 weeks agoon
Title: Inside Harare Alcatraz and Other Short Stories
Author: Andrew Chatora
Publisher: Kharis Publishing
Pages:188
Published: 2024
Zimbabwe as a literary country isn’t particularly famed for its short stories, or its short story writers, its poets, yes, its novelists, yes, its essayists, of course—but rarely and far between are its short story writers. The short story as an art form and storytelling medium has been neglected and ignored, uncharacteristically, because of its capabilities. Short stories like poetry are a lot more demanding and personal, calling for refinement in both subject matter and style. The unhealthy obsession with either historical or nationalist literature has on one hand, left the short story as a medium to completely rot in isolation; on the other, it has starved artistic exploration. Chatora’s entry with ‘Inside Harare Alcatraz and Other Short Stories’ makes an attempt at something much grander, much more alive.
The collection takes its shape and pace from the first story, ‘Inside Harare Alcatraz’, which follows the narration and sometimes rumblings of Brezhnev and his subsequent imprisonment at Harare Alcatraz Maximum Security Prison. The story is narrated in five parts that are, at times, lacking in key details and developments; it feels as though the story is told from the perspective of a mad man. Brezhnev is in fact insane, criminally so. A psychosexual serial killer who admits that killing people gave him orgasms of unimaginable proportions. Which is startling, but what’s even more startling is he is paid for his insanity—handsomely so, unlike the criminally insane that were housed at Alcatraz, the real Alcatraz in America, with the hope of rehabilitation in isolation, Brezhnev is deliberately sent to Harare Alcatraz by his sponsors for a wet job, a code name for murder. We’d expect a sadist with just a reputation to succeed on his mission with relative ease; however, his interactions with his targets and the overwhelming humanity that they shower him with seem to have thawed his insatiable appetite for murder. The story ends with Brezhnev on his way to a cubicle to self-induce the very same poison he had meant for his targets.
‘Black Britain’ is a satirical attempt at dealing with the systemic and endemic racism that plagues African immigrants and the black diaspora at large in Britain, taking the form of racial profiling during Black interactions with law enforcement authorities. Just beneath the veil of satire, glimpses of a fictionalised ‘Black Lives Matter Movement’ can be seen. The story follows the narration of Anesu, who witnessed the racial profiling of his parents at the age of thirteen, only to face the same at a much later age. Through his account, the readers are taken to the eye of the storm as an attempt to vocalise such, and more cases of mistreatment are met with heavy handedness and flat-out denial. Something that Reni Eddo-Lodge captured in ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’. Here fact and fiction intermingle and take a life and form of their own.
Chatora’s short stories are gritty, unflinching, and unapologetic
Chatora’s short stories are gritty, unflinching, and unapologetic. But as with any collection, not every story flows with the same potency and energy or the same refinement of craft; just like seeds sown during the night, some seeds get stuck between rocks, others are thrown where they get very little sunlight to grow, and a handful find the ideal place for full growth and bloom. Stories such as ‘Black Britain’, ‘Smoke and Mirrors’, ‘Estelle the Shebeen Queen and other Dangamvura Vignettes’ stick out for their depth and stylistic complexity. Despite that, Chatora’s message is clear and direct: our struggles as Zimbabweans at home and in the Diaspora are not just institutional; they’re also human, the scary side of the human condition. From the greedy Shebeen Queen Estelle, who operates a brothel and employs her daughters within the same space to the bigamist in ‘Smoke and Mirrors’. Chatora takes the possibilities of the short story to greater heights; he sheds the straight jacket that has been historical and nationalistic literature preoccupied with polishing the proceeds of independence. He takes the short story to murkier grounds of the human conscience, of desperation and deprivation, highlighting where we have failed as society and as humanity at large.
‘Inside Harare Alcatraz and Other Short Stories’ is a collection of eleven neatly written stories that are pulsating with global urgency—the heat, anger, and frustration weaved within each sentence palpable and alive. As one character in ‘Inside Harare Alcatraz’, which is the titular story, remarks, ‘You see, Chipendani, we are prisoners of conscience here at Harare Alcatraz’, whether knowingly or unknowingly, he admits that the characters in the collection are prisoners; unlike Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, which housed some of America’s most notorious offenders, the characters here are prisoners of the open wide world. They’re captives of the ever-marching human condition, which at its heart festers gluttony, sadism, corruption, hatred, systemic, and epidemic. Chatora makes it known to the world that this septic wound isn’t just cultural or national; it’s global. It’s infecting everyone.
* This review first appeared in The Daily News on Sunday, a leading independent newspaper in Zimbabwe. The reviewer, Nyashadzashe Chikumbu is a journalist, editor and cultural critic. He is also the Associate Editor of Mukana Press. A recipient of the 2023 Ignite Youth Award in Creativity, he is widely published and a respected book critic.
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