16 S UNDAY, MARCH 13, 2022
opt for the latter it is termed “hinding.”
This is an allegory that operates entirely
on its own terms, with its own ingenious
lexicon. By taking humans out of the equa-
tion, Bulawayo eliminates the hierarchies
that their presence would impose. She has
succeeded in creating the anti-“Babar.”
And while there are certainly parallels
between the creatures of Jidada and Or-
well’s chronicles of Snowball, Napoleon,
Boxer and company, in the very first chap-
ter “Glory” cautions against interpreting
the book solely through compar-
isons to “Animal Farm.” During a
speech delivered to the crowd
gathered for Independence Day
celebrations, Dr. Sweet Mother, a
donkey in Gucci heels and the
equine equivalent of the ousted
leader’s wife, Grace Mugabe, an-
nounces:
“I’m standing here to address
this nonsense right here right now,
with Jidada itself and this sun over
there as my witnesses, and I’m
saying: This is not an animal farm
but Jidada with a -da and another
-da! So my advice to you is, Stop it,
and Stop it right now!”
Though part of a litany aimed at
Tuvy, her political rival, Dr. Sweet
Mother’s words are too explicit
not to be a warning for the reader.
Here and again, when Dr. Sweet
Mother gleefully watches the
YouTube video of her own speech,
we hear it straight from the don-
key’s mouth: This is not “Animal
Farm.” Not its remix, nor its trans-
lation. “Glory” is its own vivid
world, drawn from its own folk-
lore.
Regardless, by aiming the long,
piercing gaze of this metaphor at
the aftereffects of European impe-
rialism in Africa, Bulawayo is re-
ally out-Orwelling Orwell. This is
a satire with sharper teeth, an-
grier, and also very, very funny.
Narrating from the perspective of
a chorus of unseen Jidadans, Bulawayo
displays a mordant wit with a delightful,
off-kilter edge. She has a gift for coming up
with wildly specific and marvelously irrev-
erent turns of phrase, as when the chorus
describes the way election officials at a
polling station “handle us like something
precious; we feel like some Fabergé eggs,
like the testicles of great kings.” Her most
righteous and potent barbs are reserved
for the corrupt mals plundering their own
country. “The Savior of the Nation went
begging in style,” she writes of Tuvy. “And
nothing said style like an expensive pri-
vate jet and a humongous entourage of ani-
mals who could have, through their num-
bers, made up two opposing football
teams.”
This is also a satire in which female char-
acters are not pushed to the margins, but
hold the story together. When a goat
named Destiny and her mother, Simiso, en-
ter the story almost a third of the way in,
there is a palpable sense of relief, of every-
thing clicking into place around them. Both
bear physical and psychological scars,
their bodies reflections of their trauma-
tized land, offering a shattering lesson
about the power in speaking the name of
wounds, and what the cost of breaking this
silence is. They are the human heart in a
parable of greed and corruption, not revo-
lution, making beasts of men.
The book somehow never feels dis-
jointed, even though it encompasses a
wide spectrum of emotional terrain and ex-
perimental narrative devices. In its depic-
tion of transgenerational trauma, of the lin-
eages haunted if not extinguished by the
Gukurahundi genocide of the 1980s, the
novel bears close literary resemblance to
Art Spiegelman’s “Maus.” Sometimes it
feels more Aesop, sometimes more “Bo-
Jack Horseman.” And sometimes the
sweeping, polyphonic nature of the story-
telling evokes Fela Kuti’s 28-minute-long
soundscape of transnational African soli-
darity and protest, “Beasts of No Nation”
(the title track of Kuti’s 1989 album was
written in reaction to a speech by Botha).
The collective narration intermittently
narrows its lens to follow particular char-
acters, presenting the candid thoughts of
individual animals as if conducting street
interviews. There are social media feeds
and transcriptions of conversations “over-
heard in the queues.” Words and phrases
(“take-take-take-take,” “I can’t breathe I
can’t breathe I can’t breathe”) repeat for
paragraphs or whole pages, as if the sheer
force of the emotion beneath them is caus-
ing a glitch in the story mechan-
ics.
Some of these stylistic risks pay
off more than others. The tweets
feel slightly contrived compared
to the audacious voice of the Ji-
dadans. (Though Twitter does en-
able an exquisitely absurd scene
where Tuvy rages about his dwin-
dling account followers while si-
multaneously attempting to hit on
Apple’s A.I. voice, Siri, whose sub-
servience he finds alluring.) Bula-
wayo’s writing is acrobatic
enough on its own — the format-
ting tricks feel unnecessary.
The scope and complexity of
the historical material Bulawayo
takes on in her tale are ambitious,
and she pulls it off. Readers of her
2013 debut novel, “We Need New
Names,” might see Destiny’s jour-
ney as a kind of through-the-look-
ing-glass continuation of the story
of the author’s earlier young pro-
tagonist, Darling, who leaves
Zimbabwe for America as a child.
We first meet Destiny at the Ji-
dada airport, arriving in her
motherland after spending years
abroad. “A service worker recog-
nized in the goat’s tragic posture,
in the sound of her harrowing
weeping, the specific lament of a
returnee broken in specific ways
by her country of broken things.”
Where “We Need New Names”
was a tale of exile and displace-
ment and unbelonging, “Glory” is one of
roots, reclamation, homecoming. Together
Darling’s and Destiny’s stories form a kind
of horseshoe — the path of the diaspora
bent back on itself in an arc.
In “Glory,” a subchapter titled “We Need
New Names” is actually followed by one
called “Tholukuthi We Need a New World
Order.” It feels like the book’s response to
its predecessor, and perhaps a summation
of the whole novel. If “We Need New
Names” was a call, then “Glory” is its an-
swer. They paint a country’s past and its
present. The future is left for the final chap-
ter of the book, where Bulawayo dares us,
and the citizens of all Jidadas everywhere,
to reimagine what our nations could some-
day become. 0
Animal Kingdom
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
PHOTOGRAPH BY NYE' LYN THO
NoViolet Bulawayo
VIOLET KUPERSMITHis the author of “Build
Your House Around My Body.”
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