“I am a man on a mission. A vocation, call it, to remake the past, and a wish to fashion all that has been into being and becoming.”
So begins Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s debut novel House of Stone, and with it, the reader’s disturbing journey alongside a narrator who slowly unleashes the trauma of his birth upon his unsuspecting landlords. Zamani, we learn, is a product of genocide, the son of a woman who was raped and ultimately killed during the Gukurahundi violence of the mid-1980s. Newly independent, Zimbabwe’s Mugabe government sought to tighten its grip on power by exterminating those suspected dissenters — this suspicion, justified on the basis of nothing more than identity, led to a series of massacres targeting the country’s minority Ndebele population, leaving as many as 30,000 dead.
And 30 years later, the scars of Gukurahundi remain deep and untreated. Perence Shiri, who serves today as the country’s Minister of Lands, Agriculture, and Rural Resettlement, is fictionalized and represented in House of Stone by the character “Black Jesus” — Zamani’s biological father, who reads as the very embodiment of cruelty. Meanwhile, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who was Zimbabwe’s Minister of State Security during the violence, faces accusations of masterminding the massacres — and in 2017 became the country’s president.
Disconnected from his own lineage and with no family to speak of, Zamani searches for belonging in his host family — his landlords, from who he craves the parental love history denied him, are also survivors of Gukurahundi. In his desperation to learn about the past and thus gain a sense of identity, he pushes his “surrogate parents,” Abednego and Mama Agnes, to share stories they appear determined to leave untouched. House of Stone traces their memories of Gukurahundi through painful flashbacks, but scenes of huts burning with children inside and soldiers slicing the stomachs of pregnant women are not the novel’s only unsettling ones. Perhaps the most disturbing scene of the novel occurs when Zamani force-feeds his “surrogate father,” a recovering alcoholic, a bottle of scotch before taking a selfie with his passed-out body, in the hopes of hearing the stories Abednego hesitates to tell when sober and experiencing the familial love he craves.
House of Stone condemns not just the initial violence of Gukurahundi — for what could be more obviously inexcusable? — but also the subsequent denial of this history, which has been swept under the rug and met with impunity. The novel throws its readers into the cycle of violence produced by injustice, unaccountability, and avoidance, demonstrating the danger of historical amnesia. Maya Angelou once reflected that “history, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” Criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations, and memorials play an important role in communicating regret and apology to victims of mass atrocities; their absence, meanwhile, sends the opposite message. In House of Stone, and in the real Zimbabwe, it is the collective failure to face history that perpetuates this wrenching pain, which lives on and even mutates, thriving in silence and giving rise to new forms of cruelty.
It is not simply the difficulty of losing his mother that unwinds Zamani, but the torture of lacking a history in which to ground himself. And in his search for family and identity, Zamani consumes sensitive histories and, with them, his “parents” themselves, ultimately unraveling the family he so desperately desires. Indeed, Zamani’s cruelty — sneaking Abednego drugs that leave him with a crippling addiction, orchestrating scenarios in which Abednego will beat Mama Agnes, and, we ultimately discover, playing a crucial and horrifying role in their son’s disappearance — is mirrored only by the historical cruelty of his biological father, Black Jesus.
By placing readers inside Zamani’s traumatized brain, exposing them not only to his abuses but also his justifications and desperations, Tshuma has crafted a novel that stands out as particularly disturbing and painful to read even among other narratives of violence and conflict. House of Stone does not tell the story of Gukurahundi from the perspective of a detached third person or sympathetic victim, and while readers may grow to despise their narrator, they cannot escape him or the troubling inner workings of his mind. Spending 372 pages with Zamani provides a visceral understanding of the generational nature of trauma and the danger of unresolved, unspoken histories. And in highlighting this particular history, House of Stone not only tells a universal narrative of the significance of remembrance, but also takes a step towards providing the sort of acknowledgment and accountability that victims of Gukurahundi deserve. For Zimbabweans who have been forced to accept the architect of their suffering as their head of state, this contribution cannot be overstated.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/CDC/Dr. J Lyle Conrad