This week on the NYR Daily: Panashe Chigumadzi on the pleasures of political satire

On the NYR Daily this week Panashe Chigumadzi’s short story “[You Can’t Eat Beauty](” is not the first piece of fiction the Daily has done recently (there was a [whimsical tale]( by the Armenian writer Viken Berberian that caught our fancy)—and, of course, the Review has its own tradition of occasionally publishing short stories—but it is a departure from our normal fare. Aside from our prior relationship with this young Zimbabwean–South African writer, what impelled us to publish her story was its vividly realized, satirical, insider’s view of an intensely political drama. “You Can’t Eat Beauty” narrates a scheming hairdresser’s effort to hang onto status and position by manipulating a monstrous First Lady who is herself intent on hanging onto status and position by manipulation. If she reminded you of Grace Mugabe, that would be excusable. If she made you think of other First Ladies, well, so be it. Besides writing essays for [the Daily](, Chigumadzi has contributed opinion pieces to [The New York Times](, [The Washington Post](, and [The Guardian](. But she has also had a career as an editor in her own right, founding a digital magazine in South Africa named Vanguard. “Having previously worked in media,” she told me this week, “I wanted a place where young black women like myself or young black women coming of age in post-Apartheid South Africa could have a space of their own. For us, by us, really. The response was phenomenal.” The magazine archive is [still online](, but economic necessity forced Chigumadzi and her partner to move on in 2016, though she looks back on the experience fondly: “For me, it’s also the space where I learned to own my voice and my thoughts in a highly contested public space.” Panashe Chigumadzi was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, but her parents moved to South Africa in the 1990s—most likely, she now realizes, because the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs were putting the squeeze on Zimbabwe’s health spending, and many doctors were forced to emigrate to work in South Africa. She went to mainly white schools “where we had the kind of teachers who would tell us not to speak ‘that language,’” meaning, in her case, Shona. Today, she works on her Shona whenever she visits Zimbabwe. “Writing in my ‘mother tongue’ is a dream, frustrated by colonial baggage, but I might just fulfill it—I am taking Shona as a subject at university right now”—her university now being Harvard. Chigumadzi moved to Boston last September to begin doctoral studies. Photo by Tarryn Hatchett She has written in the past about belonging to the “born-free” generation that grew up post-Apartheid: she understands the optimistic impulse contained in the phrase, but it’s not a label she much likes—“even so-called ‘born-frees’ can never be ‘free’ of history’s baggage,” she said. “The mere passage of time doesn’t erase history’s injustices.” In her analysis, the post-Apartheid settlement failed to address South Africa’s vast inequality that left most of the economy still in white hands—and it was this failure to tackle economic redistribution, especially land reform, she argues, that marred Robert Mugabe’s long, authoritarian rule in Zimbabwe. “I feel much of our understanding of what happens in South Africa and Zimbabwe is too presentist and often ahistorical,” she said, so when she came to write her account of Mugabe’s 2017 ouster, published last year as [These Bones Will Rise Again](, she aimed to provide “a panoramic view of Zimbabwe’s history, stretching right back to the precolonial era. In both countries, and especially in Zimbabwe, where the ‘old man has now finally gone’ and yet we remain in the same situation, we’re being forced to learn that the future won’t be delivered by the old dying and the new being born.” Just as there has been a no-change change of leadership in Zimbabwe, South Africa has seen a transition from the corrupt presidency of Jacob Zuma. Is Chigumadzi more optimistic that the new president, Cyril Ramaphosa, will be the broom that makes a clean sweep? “Ramaphosa was part of those who put Jacob Zuma in power,” she said. “He [Zuma] didn’t act alone, and South Africans are waking up to that disturbing fact—thanks to a wide-ranging commission of inquiry that’s revealing that all of our politicians have, as one minister infamously put it years ago, ‘smallanyana [small] skeletons.’” I wondered what determines her choice of when to use fiction, rather than journalism, to tackle what interests her—or rather, what troubles her. At one level, she said, “fiction often allows me to be less bound to topicality and the news cycle.” But there’s another side to it—when current affairs has become grim farce and tragicomedy, nonfiction can feel inadequate to the task. “Much of what goes down is just beyond parody,” Chigumadzi said. “Fiction, particularly satire, helps me to capture some of that… “Now that you in the US also live under a Big Man,” she added, “you’d understand some of the absurdities of dictatorial rule.” Touché. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](. And let us know what you think: send your comments to Lucy McKeon and me at daily@nybooks.com; we do write back. Matt Seaton Editor, NYR Daily You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. [Update preferences]( The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Unsubscribe](