In her richly observed debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly, Petina Gappah tells the story of contemporary Zimbabwe and its people: How, during almost 30 years of rule by Robert Mugabe, they've managed to live amid rampant inflation, AIDS, infidelity, black marketeers and a Kafka-esque bureaucracy. Zimbabweans are proud of leaving a colonial past behind, but they look enviously toward the U.K. and the United States, where spending money isn't counted in the millions.
Gappah's stories all touch on tragedy, but they aren't overwhelmed by it. One, about a local dancing competition, begins this way:
The author now lives in Geneva — where she's an international trade lawyer — but grew up in Zimbabwe, and she succeeds in capturing a world that tourists could otherwise never hope to see: People, rich and poor, going about living their lives in the surreal shadow of a post-colonial regime.
In "Something Nice From London" a family waits at the Harare airport for a flight that will bring them the remains of their dead son. A police investigation has delayed the release of his body, and the extended family has already begun to descend on their home.
The opening story, "At the Sound of the Last Post," sees a state funeral through the eyes of the widow of a "national hero" — a euphemism for those in Mugabe's inner circle who managed to remain in his good graces. As the eulogies continue, she remembers her husband's political corruption, the so-called small house he kept for his mistress, and the "long illness" that won't be mentioned in the state-run newspaper's obituary.
Perhaps the saddest of the stories is "Our Man In Geneva Wins a Million Euros," in which a Zimbabwean consular officer for the U.N. — new to both his duties and the Internet — is taken in by an online scam.
Gappah, as a Zimbabwean with a European education, is an ideal cultural translator. But she's an agile writer too: Her style, tone and perspective change dramatically from story to story — as does the socioeconomic status of her characters. But the book never loses coherence as a collection.
The characters in Gappah's stories accept the small and large tragedies of their daily lives as a given, and the author presents these constant indignities with the same inevitability. This backdrop of shadow makes the foreground action shine with an even richer, more rewarding and authentic hue.
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