Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

 

The Book of Memory

(2015)


Petina Gappah

(1971 – )

 

 

Notes

This novel was first published in 2015.


7  Chikurubi: Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison on the outskirts of Harare, Zimbabwe


Chikurubi Prison
  • Thelma Chikwanha, "Life in Chikurubi Female Prison," Daily News, Associated Newspapers of Zimbabwe, 5 Feb. 2013.
  • "Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison," Pindula.
    Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison (CMSP) is the largest prison and correctional facility in Zimbabwe which is located on the outskirts of Harare (about 15 kilometres from Harare). It houses about 17 000 prisoners (both men and women).

 


13  Mai: variant of amai meaning "mother"



36  Andy Dufresne: The lead character in Frank Darabont's Oscar-nominated film The Shawshank Redemption (1994) who escaped prison against incredible odds.
  • The Shawshank Redemption, directed by Frank Darabont, Castle Rock Entertainment, 1994.

 


43  kani: Shona exclamation for "please" (Shona Dictionary)


60  Bellerephon's Chimera:


140  troll:


troll doll
  • Allie Townsend, "Troll Doll," Time, 16 Feb. 2011.
    Invented in 1959 by a Danish woodworker, troll dolls became a North American toy craze in the early '60s and again in the '90s. Thomas Dam carved his first troll doll as a gift for his daughter; he then began selling the dolls locally after his daughter's friends started asking for them. They were originally called Dam Dolls and were made of wood, with woolen hair and glass eyes. Imitations made of plastic were released in North America and became popular. Dam fought this in court — to no avail until 2003, when the U.S. restored copyright privileges to the Dam family.
  • Erika Berlin, "12 Hair-Raising Facts about Troll Dolls," Mental Floss, 4 Nov. 2016.
    Troll dolls—like witches or choker necklaces—seem to make a comeback every decade or two. And while children of the '90s might remember collecting the wild-haired, naked dolls with gemstones for bellybuttons or topping their pencils with the miniature figures, children of the '60s were collecting their own versions. And now, with the new Trolls movie hitting theaters this weekend (and that Justin Timberlake song still rattling around in your head), it’s time for everyone’s favorite potbellied, grinning fuzz-tops to rule the toy aisle once again.
  • Kayleigh Dray, "This is how much your old Troll Dolls are worth on eBay," Stylist, 2017.
    Who among us doesn’t remember the iconic Troll Dolls of our childhoods? Wild-haired, charmingly unattractive and, much of the time, stark naked, these dolls – complete with ostentatious belly buttons – were literally everywhere. They were cluttering our windowsills, crowded onto our desks and bedside tables, and hanging from our Christmas trees. Some sadists even shoved miniature Troll Dolls on top of their pencils (ouch).

 

204  Sidney Sussex:


Sidney Sussex College
Sidney Sussex College Hall

Sidney Sussex College plan
Sidney Sussex College Plan
  • "Welcome to Sidney Sussex," Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge
    Sidney Sussex College was founded on St. Valentine's Day in 1596 by legacy of Lady Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex. The College is located in the historic heart of Cambridge, and its beautiful buildings and gardens are home to a dynamic and diverse academic community. Our students, Fellows and staff come from all backgrounds and all over the world, drawn by the University of Cambridge's world-class reputation and Sidney Sussex's commitment to excellence in teaching and research.
  • Richard Humphreys, "Secret Sidney: A Brief Historical Sketch," Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge
    Sidney Sussex is a very well-kept secret - whether it is our Nobel Prize-winners, Elizabethan brickwork, charming Cloister Court, the haunting Chapel, exquisite rococo Hall, medieval cellars or beautiful ancient gardens - they all lie behind a rather self-effacing wall of Roman cement. Sidney's history is an even better kept secret.

    There is, however, a truly fascinating and entirely unexpected history to be told about a small institution which has always punched way above its weight and which lies at the heart of British history. Sidney Fellows and students from 1596 have made a huge impact on all aspects of the nation's culture, religion, politics, business, legal and scientific achievements. It has also found time to produce soldiers, political cartoonists, alchemists, spies, murderers, ghosts and arsonists as well as media personalities, film and opera directors, a Premiership football club chairman, best-selling authors, the man who introduced soccer to Hungary, the 1928 Grand National winner and, so they say, Sherlock Holmes. And let's not forget the University Challenge Champions of Champions, 2002. If you wanted to study the history of Britain over the last four hundred years, you could do worse than study the history of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

 





 

 

Comprehension Check
Part One: 1468 Mharapara Street

1

  • What does "Memosyne" (3) mean?
  • What is "the 'well, you know'" (5)?
4
  • Explain this hyperbolic food description that is a jibe at the United States. Why does one "almost fear that America will invade" (16)?
  • Why are Verity and Monalisa in D even though "they are both C-class offenders" (22)?
5
  • What grades does Memory get in school (34)?
9
  • How differently from other prisoners does Memory feel about being alone in a cell (77)?
15
  • Why does Memory have three peaches in her hands and MaiNever accuses her of stealing them from her tree (122)?
  • How does Mobhi die (124)?
Part Two: Summer Madness
1
  • What is Summer Madness (138)?
3
  • How does Joyi get her scar (153)?
Part Three: Chikurubi
1
  • Why does Loveness show preferential treatment to Memory (237, 242)?
            


 

 

Study Questions

  • What beginnings to the story does Memory offer? Why are there so many beginnings? How does each beginning change the story?
  • In what ways is one setting different from the other? How is the place's character created?
  • What is Lloyd to Memory?
  • How does Zimbabwean oral tradition affect or inform Memory's written autobiography?
  • Though this is a novel ostensibly about Zimbabwe, what do you notice of other cultures, people and places that are in this book?
  • Are the three parts of the novel discrete? What determines the division?
  • Why does Joy survive?
  • Memory's narrative constantly revises itself, newer versions of people and stories replacing older ones. Consider what changes in the retelling and the implications of corrections in these and other instances.
    • I say my father and mother, but it was really my mother. (1)
    • This new Zenzo came into being much later, many years after Lloyd and I first met him. (179)
    • Almost as soon as I dropped that note in the police box, I regretted it. (199)
    • Immediately, I saw my mistake. (244)
    • All these questions, but they are all really one. (245)
    • My father was not my mother’s first husband. He was not even her husband, because she was not his wife but rather belonged to another man. She had been just thirteen years old when she was married, or, I should say, when her parents married her off to a man four times her age. (248)

            

 

 

Vocabulary

 

point of view; first person
narrator, speaker
character, characterization
reported speech
plot
complication
suspense
climax
diction
irony
sarcasm
contrast
imagery
present tense
ritual
rules
tradition
performance
drama, dramatic
family
kinship
relationships
dynamics
politics
government
history
agency
race
crime
city; country

 

Review Sheet

 

Characters

Memory – "my favorite dress, a while lacy dress with a purple sash, my Christmas dress from the year before" (1); "the second child in a family of three" (13); "I had not expected that I would enjoy this. I am enjoying these words, crafting sentences, seeing paragraphs form" (84); "writing this is not as simple as I had imagined. I had thought that when I sat down to write, it would be to tell a linear story with a proper beginning, an ending and a middle" (85); "Years later, when I had begun to think of Lloyd and Poppy as my family and Summer Madness as my home" (143); "The Chimera no longer pulls me down to the water; it speaks no more with my mother's voice. I understand now that the dreams were not dreams, but faint imprints of buried trauma fighting memories of my mother" (260); "Vernah is still campaigning hard to have my sentence commuted to life, but that has not happened yet. Mavis Munongwa has found her own amnesty, which means that I am the only person left in the whole prison" (260); "We will know next week whether or not I will get a new trial" (267)
Lloyd Hendricks – "the first words that Lloyd said to me. 'Speak, Mnemosyne'" (2); "Lloyd rarely talked openly about how I am to live with him. When he spoke of it at all, it was always in euphemisms" (5); "Lloyd reinvented himself as a professor of classical literature, specialising in filtering Greek tragedies through the African experience" (156); "I hope you [Memory] remember that when I go, I want my ashes there [in Matopos National Park] too" (181);"as I hugged him tightly, I realised that he knew already all that I wanted to say, and that it was unnecessary ever to say anything because he knew all that I wanted to say even without my saying it" (206); "Lloyd was dead when I [Memory] found him" (225); "He had indeed died accidentally, but I [Memory] would transform this accident into another type" (226); "He had left his car to be fixed up near Herbert Chitepo. It was not ready when they said it would be, and he had decided on impulse that he would walk to the park and look at the memorial" (261–62); "It is for Lloyd that I grieve the most" (269)
Mavis Munongwa – "I shared a cell with Mavis Munongwa, the only other woman who is here for murder. That was before I got my own cell" (6); "buried in an unmarked grave, like Mavis Munongwa" (265)
Melinda Carter – "a journalist who lives in Washington, in America" (7); "the first visitor that I [Memory] have had, outside my lawyer" (7); "Even if nothing comes of the magazine feature you were planning to write, I [Memory] am grateful to you for setting me on the path to the truth" (261)
Vernah Sithole – "my [Memory's] lawyer" (7); "It was Vernah's idea that I should tell my story to you. Before she sent you to interview me, she told me that I should write down every detail that I could remember" (8); "'that Advocate Sithole woman'" (9)
Verity Gutu – "that veritable fount of endless and often irrelevant information, told me that I was in good hands with Vernah Sithole" (9)
Jimmy Blue Butter – "has served four of her six years for attempted murder. Her real name is Rejoice Saruchera, but she is called Jimmy" (21); "Jimmy is going to move back to Manicaland, but not to her village. She plans to make her way to the diamond mines in Marange and on to Manica in Mozambique, where there are many white and Asian men with exotic tastes" (265)
Synodia – "the head guard" ()
Loveness – "It was Loveness who brought me the newspaper with the news about the hangman [...] She let me keep these notebooks and pens that you [Melinda Carter] brought me [...] has become considerate—chatty, even" (62)
Monalisa – "Monalisa has started her own business, consulting on aid projects" (265)
Memory's mother – "My mother and father were called MaiGivhi and Ba'Givhi" (13); "My mother’s Christianity did not preclude atavistic beliefs in the ancestors whose job it was to guard and protect her against misfortune, against barrenness, illness, financial woes and misery"; "She had been just thirteen years old when she was married" (248); "He [Lloyd] said to him [Memory's father] that my mother was not cursed, that she was ill, dangerously ill, and that their children were in great danger" (258); "'Baba says she chose all our names. She never regretted us'" (267)
Memory's father – "My mother and father were called MaiGivhi and Ba'Givhi" (13); "He put his hands in his arms and wept long and hard. He was not aware of the passing people, or of the man who came to sit beside him. It was Lloyd" (254)
Joyi – Memory's sister; "Joy, whom we called Joyi" (12); "the eldest was my sister Joyi [...] the oldest living child but not the first-born child" (13); "my sister Joyi, who was a year and a few months older than I was" (13); "Joyi has read them [notebooks] all" (267); "She is a female Jesuit" (267)
Moreblessings – "called Mobhi" (12); "the youngest, who was only four when she died" (13)
Givhi – "my brother, Gift, whom we called Givhi" (12); "the first-born child. That sainted place, of coming first, and thus bestowing the name by which my parents would forever be known, belonged to my dead brother, Gift" (13)
MaiNever – "our old neighbour MaiNever on Mharapara Street" (22)
Lameck – "The other [albino person in Mufakose Township] was Lameck, who had a squashed face and red, blotchy skin that broke over his arms and face. His hair was almost orange" (52); "sold tomatoes and maputi at the market" (52); "When he was not selling tomatoes, Lameck squinted at a James Hadley Chase novel" (53)
Poppy – "Lloyd and Alexandra’s grandmother, Poppy, was the oldest person I had ever seen" (160); "When she was young, Poppy had come to the colony as a flapper" (161); "Then Poppy had that last fateful stroke and died" (175); "Poppy died in the September just after I turned seventeen" (180); "She had wanted to have her ashes scattered at the same place her husband's ashes had been, in Matopos National Park" (181)
Liz Warrender – "Lloyd's friends [...] must have been in her fifties then, a weathered woman with leathery skin who wore jodhpurs every day I saw her, except on the day of Poppy's funeral" (171)
Sandy Knight-Bruce – "neighbour that I saw often [...] lived in a cottage on Hazlemere Lane. He could have been any age from thirty-five to sixty. [...] played three musical instruments, and had wanted to be a concert violinist, but he thought his face too ugly" (173)
Zenzo – "Around the time that Lloyd and I met Zenzo, I was in a Stephen King phase" (84); "Then Zenzo entered our lives, and everything wilted" (145); "Not even in those awful moments after I found him [Lloyd] with Zenzo did he ever raise his voice" (167); "Lloyd and I met Zenzo and everything changed between us" (175); "He is very successful now, Zenzo" (177); "Once, in a small gallery in Melbourne, I walked in and found myself face to face with his work" (177–78); "He mocked her often, imitating her accent, making sounds that he claimed she made when they were having sex" (178); "He has been commissioned to paint huge, expensive murals in cities like Berlin and Tokyo and Geneva. People who know these things, the in-people, know that distinctive slashed-Z signature" (178); "Zenzo had lost the dreadlocks. He was still very good-looking—better-looking" (179); "He had wiped out Sigrid from his biography. He had not fucked his way to Europe, no, not Zenzo" (179); "Lloyd saw Zenzo before I did" (183); "an artist from Bulawayo" (187); "was young [...] only twenty-four" (187)
Sigrid – Zenzo's German girlfriend (178, 179); "Sigrid was a necessity [for Zenzo]" (178)
Simon – "Nothing delighted Simon more than thrusting some countryman or other upon me [Memory]" (179); "wanted me; he loved me; he wanted to heal me; he plied his troth to me" (190); "I met Simon, I studied, I travelled, I was happy" (204)

Setting

Zimbabwe – "I came back to a country whose outlines I recognized, but which was different in the details. I had not been home in more than ten years. [...] All that had happened in my absence—the political paralysis, the economic collapse—had been nothing more to me than news headlines" (205)
Harare –
    Mufakose Township – "You will discover as you walk around the city that it was planned to keep the direct heat of the sun away from the faces of white people" (37)
    August – "a long-ago day in August when the sun seared my blistered face and I was nine years old and my father and mother sold me to a strange man" (1)
    Mharapara Street –

Summer Madness –

Chikurubi – "the two years, three months, seven days and thirteen hours that I [Memory] have been here" (7)
    the Condemn – "the condemned goods in the dirty storage room we call the Condemn" (11)





Sample Student Responses to Petina Gappah's The Book of Memory


Response 1:


 

 

 

 

 

Ticha Laohawirun

2202235 Reading and Analysis for to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

March 28, 2016

Reading Response 3

 

Title

Text.

 

 

 

 

 

            



Reference

 

Links
Zimbabwean Funerals
Shona Language

 

 

Media
  • "Petina Gappah Reads from The Book of Memory," Faber and Faber (2015; 3:45 min.)

  • "Petina Gappah - Le livre de Memory," Librarie Mollat (2016; 6:57 min.)

  • "Rentrée littéraire 2016: Petina Gappah présente Le Livre de Memory," Hachette France (2016; 4:09 min.)

  • "Petina Gappah with Bola Mosuro on Network Africa," BBC Africa (2009; 9:20 min.)

  • "Liberty in Zimbabwe discussed by Petina Gappah and Ben Wilson," Faber and Faber (2009)

  • "A Decent Send-Off: Zimbabwean Funeral Tradition," Tendai MCZ (2014; 2:33 min.)

  • "Zimbabwe Inflation Rate Hits 11.2 Million Per Cent," NTV Kenya (2008; 2:09 min.)

  • "Zimbabwe's Descent into Anarchy," Journeyman Pictures (2007; 25:01 min.)

 

 

Petina Gappah

Interviews

 

 


Reference

Gappah, Petina. The Book of Memory. Faber and Faber, 2015.



Further Reading


Gappah, Petina. An Elegy for Easterly. Faber and Faber, 2009.


Gappah, Petina. The Book of Memory. Faber and Faber, 2015.

Gappah, Petina. Rotten Row. Faber and Faber, 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Last updated March 29, 2018