Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Drinking from Graveyard Wells: Stories
A recently deceased wife must choose whether to move onto the next life, or become an ancestral avenging spirit in this life. A civil engineer tasked with building a dam must first defeat the carnivorous spirits controlling the river. When houses begin vanishing from an impoverished slum, one gifted girl discovers the disappearances follow a logarithmic pattern. Refugees seeking asylum discover the immigration people aren’t bureaucrats, they’re a priesthood.
Zimbabwean author Yvette Lisa Ndlovu writes from a hybrid perspective: one foot in her homeland, one in the West. Ndlovu herself studied at Cornell and Amherst, and many of her mostly female protagonists are graduates of American (or Americanized) universities. Yet Zimbzbwe’s history, both its ancient past and its recent struggles for independence, remain near the surface. For Ndlovu, Western modernism is usually a thin and transparent veneer.
Many of Ndlovu’s stories fall broadly into the categories of “fantasy” or “horror,” but that’s a marketing contrivance. Though many of her stories involve a monster—a primordial horror dwelling under conflict diamond fields, for instance, or carnivorous ants raised to make boner pills—almost never does the monster drive the story. Usually, Ndlovu’s monsters point her protagonists toward a deeper, more disquieting truth underneath the protagonists’ lives.
Instead of outright horror, these stories mostly turn on the friction between expectation and experience. Our protagonists usually start the story believing something rational, or expecting something reasonable. Recurrent themes include meaningful work and graduating from high school, two of the most common aspirations. But life in post-colonial Zimbabwe, with ancient traditions, modern tools of repression, and widespread poverty, always intrudes on those hopes.
In one story, a Zimbabwean student receives a fluke gift from the ancestral gods: she keeps stumbling accidentally into money. But the more money she fumbles into, the more her family expects from her. Soon the escape she sought becomes the burden she resents—until the gods demand an eternal choice.
When a student suffers blackouts, Western medicine cannot help. She consults an oracle, who finds the cure hidden in the past. To escape her condition, the student must time-travel to early colonialism and recover a military queen whom the British historians erased from living memory.
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Yvette Lisa Ndlovu |
Ndlovu structures some stories more like fables than Western fiction: an island king discovers immortality, but slowly stops being human. A healer erases the burdens of grief, but secretly serves a master whom her patients never see. A handful of newspaper clippings hide the secret pattern governing city women’s lives.
Not every story is “horror” or “fantasy.” In one story, an American college student discovers a common tool of Zimbabwean folk practice, and finds a way to monetize it, at the people’s expense. In another, poverty forces a talented student to leave school and find work; she pays her bills, but watches opportunities flit past.
Concerns of faith and religion recur. Though many of Ndlovu’s characters are Christian, and quote the Bible generously, they do so in a nation where ancient gods might occupy neighborhood houses. She reads the rituals and habits of government as religious rites, which isn’t a stretch. Issues of daily life contain spiritual depth in a nation where nature, death, and hunger always linger on modern life’s margins.
Ndlovu’s stories range from three to sixteen pages. This means they all make for complete reading in one session, with time left over to contemplate her themes. And those themes do require some deeper thought, because she asks important questions about what it means to be modern in traditional communities, or to be poor in a world with more than enough money. She doesn’t let readers off easily.
Perhaps I can give Ndlovu no greater praise than saying her short stories are genuinely short. Too many short story writers today apparently had an idea for a novel, jotted some notes, and thought they had a story. Not so here. Out of fourteen stories, one feels truncated; the other thirteen read as self-contained and thematically complete. That isn’t feint praise, either. I appreciate that Ndlovu crafts fully realized experiences we can savvy in one sitting.
The title story, which is also the last, asks us whether it’s always bad to go unnoticed. The question comes with piercing directness. Characters find themselves disappearing from a society that doesn’t want to see them. But maybe, for those taken away, it’s a Biblical experience. We can’t know, Ndlovu tells us in the rousing final sentences, but maybe that uncertainty is what makes her characters’ lives worth living.