The book opens with Colleen forgetting to take her quinine at boarding school and consequently contracting Malaria. She returns to her father’s farm in Nyadzi for her convalescence. Left motherless at the age of seven, it falls on her father and the houseboy Mapipi to care for her. The story continues with hallucinogenic detail as Colleen interacts with the local people and we participate in the intimate details of her search for an identity.
The political and social change of the country hangs in the background as her father attends security meetings and soldiers project propaganda films on the cracked walls of the mission hall. Colleen lives alongside the changes with indifference as she perfects her command of Shona and bathes in the Wiri River waterfall with Heresekwe, a local boy involved in the guerrilla uprising. Despite Colleen’s best attempts to live outside her skin colour and be a part of the community, Heresekwe reminds her, as he runs his finger along her veins, that “This is where you are truly white.”
As Colleen comes of age she is faced with having to cope with the mental illness of her younger sister, Sarah, who hears voices and is eventually moved to a special school in Bulawayo. Colleen moves to South Africa to train as a nurse and is further removed from her family and the life she lived in Nyadzi.
The later chapters of the novel deal with her experiences as a community nurse, a brief affair with a college drop-out, her marriage, and a moving depiction of motherhood as her son battles for life in hospital. Colleen’s story seems to drift off the end of the page, there is no great conclusion but more a gentle sense of peace as her father’s death coincides with the changes taking place in Zimbabwe at that time.
Nangle’s prose is fluid and addictive to read, she sketches the details of the character’s surroundings in a way that allows the reader to participate in the agony and helplessness of an individual’s and a nation’s history. It is both poetic and disturbing with the ability to linger in one’s mind long after the last word has been read.
Post published in: News