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The
dispossessed
Mark
Gevisser, New York Times
June 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/books/review/Gevissert.html?n=Top%2fFeatures%2fBooks%2fBook%20Reviews
If Peter Godwin's
new book about Zimbabwe, When
a Crocodile Eats the Sun, is part family memoir and part bulletin
from the barricades, then these two streams converge at a portent
so ominous it takes your breath away: "A white in Africa is
like a Jew everywhere — on sufferance, watching warily, waiting
for the next great tidal swell of hostility."
The book is hinged on
this notion, which presents itself through the revelation of a family
secret. As Godwin's aging parents find themselves dispossessed
by the deranged kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe, the author discovers
that his father, the upright Anglo-colonial George Godwin, is actually
Kazimierz Goldfarb, a Polish Jew whose family was exterminated at
Treblinka. When asked by his son why he reinvented himself, the
father explains that he did it "for you," because anti-Semitism
"will never really go away. ... It goes underground for a
generation or two but always re-emerges."
Like race hate in Africa.
This is Godwin's message, and what is so troubling about it
is that the author is no apartheid-era supremacist. Far from it:
he is a worldly and respected journalist who believed fervently
in the post-independence Zimbabwe — a place where race seemed
finally to be "losing its headlock on our identities."
Since the emergence of a viable political opposition in 2000, however,
Mugabe's jackboot has stomped the life out of such possibility.
As many as four million Zimbabweans — out of a total of only
13 million — have fled the county as it has descended into
darkness. But Godwin's own parents, liberals who dedicated
their lives to public service, will not countenance it, not least
because they have fled "mayhem and genocide" once before.
Now, in the ember-time
of their own lives, they find themselves the victims of a brutal
car hijacking and barricade themselves into their suburban bungalow,
turning their swimming pool into a fish farm because they can no
longer afford the chemicals, making occassional forays out armed
with bricks of useless Zim dollars to shop like poor folk, and growing
old miserably: a condition only exacerbated by their country's
collapse.
The emotional heart of
this book is Godwin's description of his relationship with
his taciturn father and doughty mother, a renowned doctor who worked
in a public hospital well into her 70s. He draws them with love
and wit, but does not shy away from complexity. His description
of the damaged paternal relationship is particularly acute, as is
his understanding of the effects of his father's concealment.
He also captures, with terrible poignancy, that inevitable moment
when the child becomes the parent. I have read this book twice,
and wept twice, through the final chapters documenting George Godwin's
decline and death.
Weeping, himself, at
his father's funeral, the author surveys the church and observes
how "we've all been battered by our history, by eight
years of war followed by 23 years in thrall to a violent and vengeful
ruler." Contained in this sum is the book's power —
and its problem. Why does Godwin's timeline begin only in
the early 1970s? What about the prior decades of colonial depredation?
The very thing that makes Godwin so powerful as a memoirist compromises
his authority as a reporter: his proximity to the pain.
And so the dispossessed
farmers he meets are decent folk who provided work for the locals
and made Zimbabwe boom. In many cases this is true. But they were
also racial overlords, beneficiaries of the brutal dispossession
of a sophisticated rural peasant civilization who went to war to
keep their Rhodesia and whose very recalcitrance about land reform
helped precipitate the reaction against them.
This is not to suggest
that Mugabe's land restitution policy is justified, or that
dispossessed white farmers deserve their fate. But Godwin does the
story of his country — not to mention the legacy of his murdered
Polish family — a disservice by succumbing to a victimology
that renders white Zimbabweans "the Jews of Africa"
and by failing to see the part they played in their country's
bloody history. Obviously deeply affected by his parents'
decline and his father's revelation, Godwin accepts too easily
his father's assertion that "being a white here is starting
to feel like being a Jew in Poland ... the target of ethnic cleansing."
An estimated 15 white farmers have been killed in the land invasions.
This is 15 too many, but it is not a genocide. Far worse off are
poor black people, who had nothing to begin with, less now, and
no way out of the nightmare either.
The very nature of Godwin's
project means that his empathy with whites cannot be matched by
an empathy with blacks, who become increasingly unknowable and threatening.
Certainly, he has an easy familiarity with black professionals;
certainly, too, he understands that blacks are the victims of the
Mugabe regime. But he cannot get close to them.
It begins with the thugs
who invade white farms, and who claim to be "war vets."
The way they say it sounds like "wovits," so this is
what some white Zimbabweans disparagingly call them, and how Godwin
chooses to identify them. The effect is to render them beastly,
and given the inebriated thuggery Godwin observes, this is not inappropriate.
Abuse, unquestionably, dehumanizes its perpetrators.
But slowly, inexorably,
Godwin's empathy with his parents' encroaching sense
of doom means that the book crackles with Mau Mau anxiety: the overlord's
fear that the servants are going to slit his throat. One by one,
faithful servants betray their masters, including the Godwins'
own trusty retainers. "This is what this vile president has
done to us," Godwin writes, "reduced us all to desperadoes
and thieves, made us small and bleak and old and tired." Well
yes, of course: not least by wrecking the country's economy.
But even the most faithful servant carries, somewhere, the pain
of servitude, and Godwin has no access to this, and to what it must
feel like to be, still, a servant two decades after liberation.
And so when he visits
his sister's grave — she was a casualty of the independence
war — and finds it covered in the fresh feces of shack-dwellers
who have comandeered the cemetery to grow their corn, he cannot
but find the perpetrators to be callously inhuman. These women are
not "wovits" at all, and one wants him to go over and
talk to them, to hear their stories, rather than shout obscenities.
But how could he do otherwise? How could you possibly empathize
with someone who has just desecrated your sister's grave?
Likewise, he is quite
understandably disturbed by the advent of hawkers just on the other
side of the bougainvillea hedge at the end of his parents'
garden. One day, the hawkers' fire burns the hedge down, tearing
away the Godwins' last screen of dignity and exposing their
impoverished humiliation to the "huddled masses." A
few evenings later, Godwin returns to his parents' home after
hearing about how the practice of witchcraft turns peasants on their
own grandmothers, whom they cut with razors and force to jump around
like baboons. In a fitful night, his unconscious finishes the job
of othering begun centuries ago by the narratives of colonialism:
he dreams that the hawkers are actually baboons, "whooping
and barking and waiting."
Just like the workers
who "try to keep Africa at bay" by trimming the roadside,
Zimbabwe's white farmers are redoubts of civilization and
order. Godwin writes habitually about "Africa" rather
than "Zimbabwe" or "Harare" and the effect
is to blur specificity. "Africa" becomes, indeed, a
place of the mind, of possibility or of fear, rather than the real
set of coordinates the expatriated author once knew.
In "Africa,"
"the illusion of control ... is almost impossible to maintain";
in "Africa," one lives "more vividly" because
of the proximity of death; "people love harder." When
Godwin and his parents realize that a mob of supposed hijackers
is actually a neighborhood patrol saluting them, "I feel like
weeping ... at the way Africa does this to you." One minute,
you're scared to death, "the next you're choked
with affection." Of course, Africa has done nothing at all.
It is an inanimate landmass. The work is the author's, and
he has done it beautifully, even if not always with a full enough
awareness of his own people's agency.
Mark Gevisser's
biography of Thabo Mbeki, "The Dream Deferred," will
be published in South Africa this fall.
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