Junctions is Daniel Mandishonaís second collection of short stories, following White Gods Black Demons (Weaver Press, 2009). Again, he quarries the richness and variety of Zimbabwean lives to deliver characters and narratives spanning the social spectrum: political ambition and violence; beggars on city streets; family disputes at funerals; rural journeys peppered with mishaps; corrupt policemen and born-again prophets; bus accidents, and township tailors. But if his subjects reect grim realities, Mandishonaís treatment of his characters is achieved with a wonderful sardonic irony, capacious enough to give even the worst offenders a large humanity. The book concludes with Edmore Chidzonga, an unemployed graduate, reflecting on the new dispensation promised by the 2017 change of national leadership: He remembered how his late grandfather often told him that tsuro haipone rutsva kaviri; a hare can only escape a bush re once. He had spent six years protesting. Ö For the first time, he felt he had no future.

Junctions

Irony and humour have always been used to counter frustration, despair and to expose double standards. In these ten sharply polished stories, Mandishona explores the dark comedy that lies just beneath the surface of tragedy in Zimbabwean society in the last decade. His perceptions leave few untouched: politicians, new farmers, exiles, stranded queues and inflation that renders the currency worthless... Truth and morality are dispensable in a society where wealth is rewarded with respect, integrity marred by untruth, rumour displaces fact, and power is only interested in its own survival. Mandishona holds a mirror up to reality and without equivocation asks us to look at what is real: the likeness or the distortion and what it is we want to see.

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White Gods Black Demons

2018

African Books Collectives

Synopsis

Read on the Bambooks mobile app

Books by Mandishona Daniel

Junctions

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White Gods Black Demons

2018

African Books Collectives

Synopsis

Read on the Bambooks mobile app

Books by Mandishona Daniel

Junctions

Related titles

The Thing Around Your Neck

Memoirs of a Lagos Wedding Planner

The Wedding And Other Short Stories

Naija Love Stories

Dark Lagos

Nights of the Creaking Bed

Memory and Other Shards

Traffic Jam And Other Short Stories

Stitches and Seduction

No Rice on Sunday

ABIKU

One Faithful Day

ADUNNI

Fertile Imagination

Silent Tears

Reviews

0.0

0 Rating(s) / 0 review(s)

All reviews