ROTTEN ROW
A brief history of rotten row
In the 90s when I was a teenager Rotten Row was the pick up point for
boarding scholars from Harare to various parts of Zimbabwe. Our hired buses
would come there, and we would sadly part with our families for months
away from home. There were no toilets or ablution facilities nearby. We
inhaled the red dust and baked in the sun for hours until our departure. The
court building was always in the backdrop, I don'tthink any of us then, even
imagined we would find ourselves there except as lawyers, prosecutors and
magistrates. The Zimbabwean economy by the end of the 90s had gone on a
downwardspiral. Boarding school became a luxury. Gradually, Rotten Row,
stopped being a pick up point.
In the early 2000s, the space acquired a new function: as a
politicalbattleground. The Movement for Democratic Change called it the
Freedom Square - it was a rallying point for disaffected democratic and
political activists. For the ruling ZANU PF, the space was called Robert
Mugabe Square after their leader. In all of this the Rotten Row courts
remained in the background, there were no barricades around the structure.
It was just there.
In July 2016 a young pastor was arrested - the same year Petina Gappah's
book was published. Young people in sympathy stayed at the Rotten Row
courts in vigil demanding the release of this young pastor. They lit candles
and sang songs of hope and freedom. It was a performative indictment of the
Mugabe regime. This incident is not in the book, but it is significant
Rotten Row courts was no longer just a space of political contestation, but a
space of persecution. Activists, opposition political actors were paraded there
with so much frequency soon after arrest, or being ferried to the jail house. A
barricade was eventually put around the courts so that it was no longer easily
accessible but heavily policed and guarded. This is the political context of
Rotten Row that does not appear in the book.
Rotten row features
Petina Gappah's Rotten Row features 20 stories grouped into two sections:
Capitaland Criminal.Essentially, it is a book about the severe and the
mundane crimes. It is a book about human survival by any means. The stories
in this volume are not all set in or at Rotten Row but ‘are about the kinds of
strife, tensions and conflicts that sometimes end up finding their only
resolution at the courts.’
Is it a novel? Is it a collection of short stories?
Rotten Row is a collection of interlinked stories. This is important to remark
upon. A collection of linked stories goes by many names, including the short
story cycle, short story sequence, composite novel, and novel-in-stories.
These collections include stories that are complete in that each story can
, stand alone, but when put together they interrelate and create a larger
whole
In one of her interviews Petina Gappah says she is interested in her
characters interfering with each other's stories, or being able to walk into
each other's stories. So you will notice as you read that some characters
appear in different ways in multiple stories - in some they are main
protagonists, in others they are witnesses or have a supporting role. I guess
the questions here are: when does a story begin or end? Does a story ever
have an ending? Is death final?
Place vs people
What is significant about Rotten Row is this: it is not simply a book about
place, but rather a book about people. What Gappah manages to do that is
not present in a lot of Zimbabwean writing is that she presents us with an
expansive map of Zimbabwe, places and experiences that are not often
mainstreamed. We meet characters who make up the backbone of the
Zimbabwean society who are often ignored because they are poor, or
because the jobs they occupy or the places they live are not important to
notice. In a way Rotten Rowpresents an alternative archive of the
Zimbabwean crisis which relates subversively to the imaginings of the crisis
and its causes. What turns people to crime? Desperation? Hunger? Politics?
Religeon
So, while the book is mainly about law and order, or law and justice, religion
is ever present. Each story starts with a short bible verse that either speaks to
character, to virtue, to ethics. In what ways is the bible used to frame the
stories in Rotten Row? Is the use of the bible moralistic or didactic? Is there a
correlation between each bible verse and the story it precedes?
Time
As I read most of these stories they are about the immediate, the present,
the now. You are drawn into the moment - as a witness, or participant in
some kind of crime or violence. But history is never faraway. It is evoked in
the detail. Gappah's power of observation is truly the gift that makes this
book compelling. The book is about now, but it is also a book about
precedence, about history, about what has come before. Here Gappah is
using her skills as a lawyer - prove guilt or innocence, what are the
circumstances leading to the crime, how has society dealt with these crimes
before...How is time used in Rotten Row?
Voice and perspective
Who is narrating? Who is speaking? Whose point of view? Whose
perspective? In order to get the humour in the book, the reader has to be
able to appreciate the voice of each story. It seems most of these stories are
told from the male perspective? What is the significance of that? How are
women represented in Rotten Row? What do they do? How do they Speak?
How do they act or behave?
