‘The Book of Memory’

For the palest among us, it’s a dark thing to be white.

Not the white of privilege, of tennis shoes and cucumber sandwiches but the white that dares to be born to black parents and tends to blister in the sun.

In Petina Gappah’s ‘The Book of Memory’, we meet Memory on death row.

Born with albinism in a poor township in Zimbabwe only to be sold to a rich white man in the suburbs, Memory stands convicted of his murder and is urged to write down everything she can remember by a lawyer lobbying for an appeal.

Perhaps Memory’s love of literature explains why she doesn’t just write down the facts. Why she doesn’t dispense with the simple where, when and why she is locked up in Chikurubi Maximum Prison and set to be the first woman executed in Zimbabwe in over 20 years.

Instead her account cuts across time.

It hurtles back to a little house in Mufakose township where her mother and father wade determinedly through never-ending tragedy and pushes forward to a short-lived and relatively idyllic time with her adoptive white father while flitting in out of the present where a clamour of characters flesh out scenes in the women’s prison. A place of rations, censored news and temperamental guards.

Or maybe it is early memory itself that has things all awry. That hazy childhood remembrance that shapes us but which can’t quite be trusted. No matter how vivid the recollection. No matter how much it needlessly ruins our lives.

This and more is explored in Gappah’s striking debut novel. A sage and beautifully written confrontation of what was, what is and what may never have been despite all memory to the contrary.

Not heavily historical but situating its action within almost 30 years of Zimbab­wean history, Gappah touches on the race relations and political turmoil of the time through a protagonist whose outcast nature allows her to observe carefully and comment wittily when not despairing from the bowels of death row.

Vivid and often funny despite chronicling a life in which the protagonist is met with relentless prejudice, superstition and suffering, ‘The Book of Memory’ is a laudable long form debut by an author already esteemed after the success of ‘An Elegy for Easterly’ (2009), a collection of short stories.

Though twisty, treacherous and told by a narrator dancing deftly around the truth, ‘The Book of Memory’ engages from the first and refuses to rush towards the answer to a question posed at the very beginning of the book, sometimes to the detriment of pace and consistency.

Told determinedly piecemeal and with a low level of suspense until it speeds up considerably near the end après snatches of Memory’s early life, her purchase at just nine years old, her life in the suburbs and her first fit of love, ‘The Book of Memory’ ends with what feels like too little exploration of the adult Memory.

A woman whose bloom is cut short and locked away presumably before being executed outright.

This yet another tragedy to add to a list that will harrow and linger long after you have closed Gappah’s stirring book knowing what Memory knows and eventually seems to accept:

When you have no future, there is only the past.

Look out for ‘Rotten Row’ (2016), Petina Gappah’s latest novel; out in leading book stores this November.

– martha@namibian.com.na; Martha Mukaiwa on Twitter and Instagram