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Narrating the Zimbabwean nation: A conversation with John
Eppel
Drew
Shaw
October 2012
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The full text
of this interview first appeared as "Narrating the Zimbabwean
Nation: a conversation with John Eppel" in Scrutiny2: Issues
in English Studies in Southern Africa, 17:1, 100-111 [published
October, 2012], available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2012.706082
In this interview,
John Eppel, a veteran of Zimbabwean writing, confirms his reputation
as an "angry jester", determined to expose what he describes
as "humbug", wherever he sees it. With his satires, Eppel
has stirred the national literature with subversive laughter, ridiculing
both Rhodesian society under Ian Smith and post-independence society
under Robert Mugabe. With his poetry he innovatively marries European
forms with southern African content. During the crisis of the 2000s
he refused exile and has been consistently critical of political
and social corruption and injustice from within Zimbabwe's
borders.
Explored here are Eppel's
relationship to the Zimbabwean nation, multiculturalism versus Mugabeism,
the political crisis of the past decade, the plight of the poor,
and the challenges facing a white writer in Zimbabwe. Eppel's
use of satire and sonnets, his literary mentors, the actual process
of writing, and his novel Absent: the English Teacher are addressed
in further detail. Also discussed are his views on the role of NGOs,
expatriates and academics, his opinions on poetry, and his belief
that craft, more than content, ought to be the measure of quality
in postcolonial writing.
John Eppel, born in 1947,
is one of the most prolific of Zimbabwean authors; and he has been
writing poetry and prose since the 1960s. He lives in Bulawayo where
he is an English teacher at the Christian Brothers College. His
poetry collection Spoils of War won the Ingrid Jonker Prize in 1989
and his novel DGG Berry's The Great North Road won the M-Net
Prize in 1992. His second novel Hatchings (1993) was selected by
Anthony Chennells, for the Times Literary Supplement (2001), as
the most significant book to have come out of Africa. Another novel
The Giraffe Man followed in 1994, then Sonata for Matabeleland in
1995 and Selected Poems 1965-1995 in 2001. Then came two more novels,
The Curse of the Ripe Tomato (2001) and The Holy Innocents (2002).
These were followed by The Caruso of Colleen Bawn and Other Short
Writings (2004), Songs My Country Taught Me (2005) and White Man
Crawling (2007), a miscellany of prose and poetry. His latest novel
is a tragi-comic satire titled Absent: the English Teacher (2009).
Most recently, he has published a collection of short stories and
poems with Julius Chingono, titled Together (2011).
Steeped in English literary
tradition yet also in touch with everyday Zimbabwean realities,
John Eppel writes from a post-colonial, cross-cultural nexus often
at the heart of regional concerns. Common critiques of other white
Zimbabwean writers (of imposing "whiteness" as normative,
of appropriating African realities and landscapes) fail to account
for Eppel, one begins to appreciate, because he writes self-critically
and takes another approach. That said, it is impossible, one quickly
discovers, to deter Eppel from speaking his mind, from courting
controversy. There were several disagreements during the course
of this interview but it was an illuminating discussion, which I
hope sheds light on Eppel's significance to literary and cultural
issues of the region. The following conversation is the result of
a telephone call and several email exchanges in 2010, all done before
the publication of Together, his recent collaboration with fellow
author and friend, Julius Chingono.
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