Postcard from Zimbabwe

Postcard from Zimbabwe, by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, is not as horrifying as his reports of genocide in Sudan or obstetric fistula in Ethiopia. But to anyone who has spent time in Zimbabwe, it is deeply discouraging.

“Zimbabwe is one of my favorite countries,” writes Kristof, “blessed with friendly people, extraordinary wildlife and little crime.” It is still safe enough (at least for tourists) that Kristof chose to bring his family, “and they found the scenery, people and wild animals quite magical.”

Kristof’s article is datelined Hwange, and it’s a safe bet that the Kristofs spent some time in Hwange National Park, a game preserve bigger than the state of Connecticut. On a visit there in 1990, I had the thrill of watching zebras, giraffes, wildebeest, and warthogs not from a jeep but in a small group on foot, accompanied by a ranger with an antiquated rifle in case anything more dangerous appeared.

Zimbabwe was doing a good job protecting its wildlife. Along the Zambesi near Victoria Falls you could see a particular kind of palm tree lining the Zimbabwean side of the river but not the Zambian side. The seeds of that palm would only germinate after passing through the bowels of an elephant, and the trees were the living symbol that Zimbabwe had prevented poachers from destroying its elephant herds.

Robert Mugabe’s government hasn’t done as good a job looking after its people.

Zimbabwe has come very far downhill over the last few decades (although it has risen a bit since its trough two years ago). An impressive health and education system is in tatters, and life expectancy has tumbled from about 60 years in 1990 to somewhere between 36 and 44, depending on which statistics you believe.

Western countries have made the mistake of focusing their denunciations on the seizures of white farms by Mr. Mugabe’s cronies. That’s tribalism by whites; by far the greatest suffering has been endured by Zimbabwe’s blacks.

“Over and over,” Kristof writes, “I cringed as I heard Africans wax nostalgic about a nasty, oppressive regime run by a tiny white elite.”

Even in 1990, some black Zimbabweans told me things were better in the days of Ian Smith and Rhodesia, and I cringed too. It wasn’t true then, I think, but unhappily it may be true now.

Reality Hunger

Reality Hunger by David Shields is subtitled “A Manifesto,” but it might be more accurate to call it a commonplace book—that is, a collection of quotations organized around a common theme.

The book consists of 617 numbered quotations, each a single paragraph (though some of the paragraphs are quite long). As befits a book of quotations, the jacket is thick with quotations itself, many of them suggesting that it has blown the reader’s mind. “I’ve just finished reading Reality Hunger,” writes Jonathan Lethem, “and I’m lit up by it—astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed.”

This seems an odd reaction to a commonplace book, since—by definition—what we are reading here are thoughts on a subject that many people have already written about. But although the hype may be a bit overheated, it’s true that the quotations are selected (and edited) with a sure hand, and have a certain power in combination. They are meant to serve an argument, and the argument is this: that modern fiction is in a bad way, and requires a major injection of raw reality to revitalize it. Shields and the other voices he collects here are bored with traditional storytelling and its creaky devices of plot and theme and characterization. Here is quotation 133:

I’ve always had a hard time writing fiction. It feels like driving a car in a clown suit. You’re going somewhere, but you’re in costume, and you’re not really fooling anybody. You’re the guy in costume, and everybody’s supposed to forget that and go along with you.

Shields quotes many sources on the fluid boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, and argues that memoir in particular has more in common with lyric poetry than it does with, say, history. Art is not made but collected, he says, and maintains that collage is the preeminent modern art form. A novel is often just a delivery system for a few perceptions about life—so why not cut directly to the chase?

There are a couple of problems with this, and they emerge from the way this very book is constructed. Shields’ clear preference, or so he says, was to leave the quotations he assembled (and his edits to those quotations) unidentified. “Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature.” But as I read I found myself constantly flipping to the back of the book where the quotations are identified (because the publisher’s lawyers made him, Shields says). And often, knowing the source of the quotation enriched the reading experience.

I thought, for instance, that Emerson bored me, but several times I flipped back to find the source of some sharp sentence and found it was Emerson once again. Quote 452: “He then learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the secrets of all minds.” Quote 453: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

It makes a difference to know that the clown-suit quotation is from Dave Eggers—and that he later disavowed it. It is one thing to have your neighbor say “All happy families are alike” and to have Tolstoy say it at the outset of a novel that shows a deep understanding of how people live. The story lends weight and authenticity to the perception. It is not simply a disposable delivery system.

Shields, it seems, must understand this on some level, because his listing of sources doesn’t seem to have been done out of obligation. It is rather charming in its own right, containing little jokes and anecdotes. And some of the best parts of Reality Hunger come in the chapter “ds,” in which Shields tells stories (very short ones, to be sure) about his own life. It may be true that contemporary fiction needs to purge itself of some dusty conventions—but to throw out narrative itself would be going a few steps too far.