Language in literary fiction debut masterfully mines love's complexities
Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Ngangura completed her post-secondary journalism education at Toronto Metropolitan University. She divides her time between Toronto and Manhattan and has worked in Brazil, the United States and Canada.
The Ones We Loved is Ngangura's literary fiction debut, a novel set in a rural landscape — a composite of towns in Zimbabwe and Brazil, according to the author — that depicts a love story between unnamed He and She who meet on a bus, each on the run from a devastating event from which there is no return.
Hanah + Vinnie photo
Tarisai Ngangura
Back stories emerge as the novel shifts from past to present, and readers come to know the town of Waterfall, She's mother, She's two best friends Joy and Kuda as well as Kuda's mercurial and mysterious grandmother.
Then there is the town of Spilling River and He's two best friends and chosen family, Kind Eyes and Blink and Miss. The long-ago loss of He's parents is an absence that permeates his psyche in shifting ways over time. 'As he got older, the memories grew dimmer and the stories larger, until they became what was told to him around a fire and before bed when the mind was open and accepting, and in times of quiet when memories fill the spaces where life has slowed,' Ngangura writes.
The fields of Waterfall and Spilling River grow sorghum, maize, pumpkins and water-hungry sugarcane. The farmers, writes Ngangura, 'moved heavy, like their bodies weighed more than skin and nails and tears and blood and sweat and hair.'
There are the landowners and their workers, and that sharp divide pierces the past, present and future of the novel's inhabitants. Colonial violence, survival, memory, fleeting joys and lasting grief inform every utterance and silence.
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This interplay between reported silence and speech is mesmerizing, instructive and often channelled through the elders: Mr. and Mrs. Clay, who lost their children but held onto love; Kuda's grandmother, who disappears repeatedly with no explanation upon return; and Gogo J., who refuses to marry because 'she needed honesty instead of smooth retellings.'
A great achievement of the novel is the conveyance of a sensibility and epistemology that differs from the confines of the English language in which it is written. Ngangura's mother tongue is Shona, a Zimbabwean language characterized by oral storytelling, and its rhythms, cadences and repetitions seep into the novel's written English to create space for intergenerational wisdom, memory and grief.
Another highlight, if one can call anything concerning a violent truth a highlight, is the skill with which Ngangura reveals the two shattering incidents from which She and He respectively are escaping. The novel is a true masterclass in trauma-informed storytelling and the art of literary fiction.
Ngangura has spoken with admiration of Noor Naga's debut, If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English, calling it innovative and revelatory. The Ones We Loved attains a similar feat, an assured first novel that breaks ground by enriching the English language with other ways of knowing in order to tell a love story in all of its necessary complexity.
Sara Harms is a Winnipeg editor.
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