The thirteen stories that comprise Petina Gappah’s debut collection, An Elegy for Easterly (2009), examine Zimbabwe under the regime of Robert Mugabe. While that experience may not be comparable to our own, the wide cast and their everyday concerns make it a recognisable world.

The opening story, At the Sound of the Last Post, sees its narrator attend her husband’s state funeral. For all the encomia he receives, his legacy is built on lies. It’s all in the aid of maintaining the regime’s grip. His wife sees through it all but allows her silence to be bought for her own slice of power.

But power is far from where many of the other characters are found. The Easterly in the title story is a shanty town displaced ahead of a state visit from the British monarch. In that slum the people make ends meet as best they can, and sometimes that means exploiting each other. Another case of exploitation comes in Our Man in Geneva Wins a Million Euros, which sees a naive diplomat duped by an obvious internet scam. As we watch it play out more and more, we can laugh and cringe, but ultimately see these crimes are not without their victims. 

Humour however is present in many of the stories, often breaking up the darker moments. The Mupawanda Dancing Champion sees an old man take to the dance floor with style and ends unexpectedly while the long list of nannies in The Maid from Lalapanzi and their reasons for rejection recalls many a fussy parent’s ideals.

Gappah’s Zimbabwe is a place with many problems. It’s rife with police corruption, prostitution, and HIV; economic woes persist, with ridiculously high inflation making a mockery of the term billionaire. It’s no wonder that people want to leave. In My Cousin-Sister Rambanai, a woman returns from America to find that her memory of the country, frozen in time in her head, has been devastated, so why stay?

Across these stories; which I mostly enjoyed, I did feel there was a whiff of the creative writing school about Gappah’s prose. Each was polished and without flab, perfectly able to communicate their ideas but fleeting in their power. But their fundamental aim, to poke at Zimbabwe and show its people, is unquestionably varied and interesting. And though they go to grim places, the closer, Midnight at the Hotel California, offers a glimpse of optimism.