Robert Mugabe was one of the liberators of Zimbabwe. His fight against the colonists led him to the presidency of the country. Once up there he remained in power. He ruled with an iron fist between 1980 and 2017. During his rule, Zimbabweans experienced ethnic cleansing, suffered the punishment of disproportionate unemployment and exorbitant inflation, fell into poverty and were victims of oppression, homophobia and sexism.
NoViolet Bulawayo was born in Zimbabwe in 1981 and his childhood was spent under the yoke of Mugabe’s iron and corrupt dictatorship. At 18, the young Bulawayo moved to the United States, where she embarked on a literary career that has given her international fame. Now she wanted to use her pen to dissect the dictator in Gloria (AdN / Empúries). But she hasn’t chosen the traditional path. Or rather, she has not chosen Western tradition to articulate her story.
The protagonist of Gloria is an old horse and his wife, a donkey. His guard is made up of dogs and the narrator’s voice belongs to a goat. Bulawayo has opted for anthropomorphism, not to pay homage to George Orwell, but to respect “the indigenous culture, where we live with animals, which are part of ourselves.” “My grandmother told me many stories and the protagonists were always, always animals,” explains the writer in an interview with La Vanguardia while she was passing through Barcelona.
Bulawayo tried to write the story with flesh-and-blood human characters, “but I immediately saw that it didn’t work and I resorted to anthropomorphism, which gave me more creative possibilities and also allowed me to distance myself from the story I wanted to tell.”
A story that is that of Zimbabwe and also that of the author, “because it is difficult to separate the personal from what surrounds you and because Gloria is the story of what happened to my country, to my people, although I have not focused in my own experience, since I left very young. But I have been nourished by the memories and experiences of my relatives and friends who stayed in Zimbabwe and with whom I spoke almost daily.”
They told him about “the violence, the massacres, which ended with 20,000 dead, the economic destabilization, the pain…”. Mugabe’s dictatorship caused so much pain that “many older Zimbabweans believe that with colonialism people lived better, because although we were aware of being colonized, the country functioned, the economy remained stable and children could go to school.” “It is very sad to hear our elders looking back and saying that those oppressors, the settlers, were better than our own oppressors.”
The writer, who considers herself a citizen of the world, explains that things are somewhat better after the death of the dictator, but only a little, because “Mugabe died, although he did not die and his spirit is still alive, but there is hope because people have “He resisted, he has found ways to survive and he will find a way to fight for freedom.”
As is the case in many other places: “We are not the first people to be forced to live under violent regimes.” So much so that Jidada, the imaginary country where Bulawayo sets the action of Gloria, could be any place in the world: “There are Jidadas everywhere.”
