Guest of the ilb 2001
Chenjerai Hove was born in Mazvihwa, a village in
Zimbabwe, in 1956 (some sources state 1954). He attended Catholic
grammar schools in Kutama and Dete. Contrary to his wish to
become a veterinarian, he trained as a teacher and studied Literature
and Education in South Africa and Zimbabwe. In 1981 Hove started
working as an editor for Mambo Press and in 1985 became chief
editor of the Zimbabwe Publishing House. He was chairman of
the Zimbabwe Writer’s Association from 1984 to 1992 and today lives in
Harare and works as a freelance journalist and writer. Being a critic
of Mugabe, he was forced to leave Zimbabwe in 2002 and went into exile
in France and finally in Norway.
Hove writes in English and in Shona, his father’s language. He
published his first poems in Shona in 1978. Hove contributed 14
poems in English to the anthology 'And Now the Poets Speak', which was
published in 1980 on the occasion of Zimbabwe’s
independence. 'Up in Arms' (1982) was his first lyric poetry
volume. This and the following poetry volume, 'Red Hills of
Home', had already been commended by the Noma Prize commission before
Hove received the coveted award for African literature for his first
novel in English, 'Bones', in 1989. This work was translated into
seven languages, in-cluding Japanese, German and French, giving the
writer wide international recognition. In 2001, he was awarded the
Prize of the German Africa Foundation.
All of Hove’s novels to date revolve around a female central
character. 'Bones' tells of a mother’s search for her son, who
has disappeared in the confusion of a war of independence. In
'Shadows' (1991) the lovesick protagonist Johana commits suicide, and
the novel 'Ancestors' is the story of a deaf and dumb girl.
However, the originality of Hove’s narrative perspective cannot be
explained by his focus on female figures alone. A better
description is 'narrative discontinuity', where all boundaries between
past, present and future are crossed just as seamlessly as those
between living and dead reporters. Read as a trilogy, Hove’s
novels offer a fresh look at his country, a chronicle which consciously
defies the traditional genre characteristics, chronology and
monoperspective. Hove not only experiments with European
narrative standards but also with the predominantly oral narrative
tradition of his country. His simple vocabulary, the repetition
and interjections lend his work lyrical character. Hove’s ability
to fuse the different literary traditions he shares is reflected in the
incorporation of Shona sayings, maxims and expressions into the speech
of his protagonists.
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