NoViolet Bulawayo on her glorious new novel
"I think part of what every artist deals with is recognizing a story when it comes to you."
NoViolet Bulawayo is the Booker Prize shortlisted author of We Need New Names and the new novel Glory, a fable-like retelling of the two years between the overthrow of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe and his death. It's moving, provocative, and surprisingly funny.
Glory
Glory centres around the unexpected fall of Old Horse, a long-serving, tyrannical leader of the fictional country of Jidada, and the drama that follows for a rumbustious nation of animals on the precarious path to freedom. Inspired by the unexpected fall by coup, in November 2017, of Robert Mugabe—Zimbabwe’s president of nearly four decades—Bulawayo’s bold, vividly imagined novel shows a country imploding, narrated by a chorus of animal voices who unveil the ruthlessness and cold strategy required to uphold the illusion of absolute power, and the imagination and bullet-proof fortitude to overthrow it completely.
Books played an important role in NoViolet Bulawayo's childhood. The Brothers Grimm's Hansel & Gretel was relatable as a story about children living under a step-parent: "Here was my miserable little life represented in this book written in a country which I didn't know if I would ever see."
As for the books on her shelves now, she names Customs by poet Solmaz Sharif, Even the Dogs by Jon Macgregor—"I'm really in love with his stylistic inventiveness", and The Sex Lives of African Women—"It's one of the books I keep going back to."
Writing Glory required inspiration from other masters of political and magical fiction. She re-read Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude: "I needed a book that was license-giving in a way, that said it's okay to write a book where anything happens." And she re-read novels where dictators factor significantly, including The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz, and Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's comical Wizard of the Crow.
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