“This is not an animal farm,” announces the talking donkey at the start of Glory, an animal allegory of Zimbabwean politics. The donkey is the nasty, Gucci-wearing wife of the ageing leader of a land called Jidada, but instead of being called Grace Mugabe she is Dr Sweet Mother, with her PhD as fake as the smiles she gives on her YouTube videos. When her husband, the Old Horse, is finally ousted, we witness the birth of a new Jidada, an African nation once ruined by white colonists, then ruined again by unscrupulous black leaders. You needn’t be an expert in African politics (or George Orwell) to guess what happens when the new leader, another old horse called Tuvy, takes charge.
NoViolet Bulawayo left Zimbabwe for America as a teenager and won numerous international awards for her debut novel, We Need New Names, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2013 and is about a Zimbabwean girl who moves to Detroit. And if you are wondering about her names, which are not her given ones (she was born Elizabeth Zandile Tshele), she changed them to reflect the scars and roots of her family: no in her native Ndebele means “with”, and Violet was her late mother. Bulawayo is in honour of the city that raised her.
Playing with language — hacking it to make it fit for purpose — is the key to unlocking the literary metaverse of Glory, which is all about personalising a very public story. Human-sounding suffixes such as “-man” are replaced by the more bestial “mal”. Some words are not English, such as “tholokuthi”, which appears on nearly every page and is evidently a sort of street version of “verily, I say unto thee”. Compound and double words (“country-country”) stretch meaning in new directions and there are new ones such as “hinding” to denote quadrupeds walking on two legs.
Bulawayo drops 1990s hip-hop lyrics that only those who came of age with Lauryn Hill and Eminem will spot, and contemporary South African rap references such as “Tholukuthi Hey” (look it up if you need a new ear worm). Less interesting are the classic experimentalist’s tricks of filling entire pages with the same repeated word or the endlessly changing narrative voice, which skips from a chorus of all-knowing Jidadans to anonymous tweets to the second person. It becomes like a multiple choice English language paper.
Playfulness is Bulawayo’s stock-in-trade and it’s inescapably funny that the animals in Glory are contemporary human-style beings. Here are dogs, horses, cats and birds who text, watch Al Jazeera and get their nails done. They are all on social media, where they lampoon the “tweeting baboon of the United States”. They are down with Black Lives Matter (obviously) and the females secretly use fur-lightening cream. Yet, being animals, they sniff each other’s back ends and even hump each other in work meetings. Bulawayo is an author who does things her way, and asking how animals with hoofs can type on smartphones is missing the point of her absurdist allegory of modern politics.
Advertisement
Even while describing in devastating detail the torturous events of Jidada’s past uprisings, Bulawayo can’t resist making us smile with her witty metaphors. A politician operates with “the audacity of a scorpion on a testicle”; cocky, ambitious Dr Sweet Mother “went forth like a baboon that had found a whistle”, while her husband was now “a miserable cheap cell phone on the last 2 per cent of its power”.
The predictable miseries of Tuvy’s new regime are interwoven with the moving story of a young goat, Destiny, who comes home after years in America to rediscover her roots. As she delves into her family’s traumatic past, Jidada’s regime seems to be changing around her, this time finally for the better. Her home — its earth ripped up by greedy mining companies, its economy ruined by dodgy international trade and its bodies scarred by the injuries that it somehow let its own citizens inflict — is ready for healing.
Bulawayo’s dense, mischievous fable is ultimately optimistic. Funny ha ha and peculiar, it delivers, over the course of 400 pages of wordplay and animal magic, a surprisingly warm, intimate and, yes, human feeling.
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, Chatto & Windus, 403pp; £18.99
