Reshaping the Story: An Exclusive Guest Post from NoViolet Bulawayo, Author of Glory

Sometimes a writer is lucky to have a story fall on her lap without needing to do the miserable labor of inventing. On November 14, 2017, I woke to the improbable news of the ouster of Robert G. Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s then president, by the military. Dear reader, I simply lost my shit. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have, but when you’ve had the same leader rule and rule and keep ruling for nearly four decades, with every effort to be rid of him being thwarted because “only God, who appointed me, will remove me,” as Mugabe once gloated, a person gets to a point where they’re simply ready to see him go at whatever cost. I remember the tears – tears of relief, tears of pent-up anger, tears of the unspeakable – because to live under tyranny is complicated business. I remember too how hopeful many of us were; even as the situation was complicated, we believed we were somehow turning a corner, that we’d been to the bottom and whatever happened next couldn’t be any worse. How naïve, how misguided, how fatal, that hope! 

Glory is inspired by that story. It began as a work of nonfiction, but just a few months in, with countless pieces being written about Mugabe’s end (he’d become a hot genre) it seemed everything there was to say had already been said. At the same time the absurdity of Zimbabwe’s politics, which can look like the politics of the jungle, often felt wilder than fiction, sometimes leaving me baffled as to how best to write around it. If I were to create anything original and interesting, then I needed a fresh way of telling the story. Around this time, references to George Orwell’s Animal Farm cropped up on Zimbabwe’s social media spaces as people who’d studied the text during its years as a staple in our secondary school English Literature syllabi snarkily applied it to our context. This was a revelation that convinced me to channel the animal kingdom, while my grandmother’s riveting animal stories, told throughout my childhood, promised a working compliment. This way, I could gain control of a very public narrative and tell it on my own terms. Free from the constraints of nonfiction, I invented away, reshaped the story, and took it places that would not have otherwise been possible.  

To create Glory was to do so against tumultuous times, with tyranny baring its fangs not just in my Zimbabwean homeland, but my second home, the US, as well as numerous countries around the world. To create Glory was also to write alongside countless global resistance movements as people fought against myriad forms of injustice and oppression. Toni Morrison’s words best capture how I felt about this climate: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” Glory is my offering to these precarious times, my dissidence and my balm, tholukuthi my prayer for the just world I wish to see.