Christopher Mlalazi - A Cicada in the Shimmer

Christopher Mlalazi's short story, A Cicada in the Shimmer, is a nightmare masquerading as a dream, a magical, horrific tale of Zimbabwe the nation and Jemusi the man, two entities intertwined, their insides rotting, one from a mystical cicada-witch, the other from the pestilence of decades of struggle.

The story is framed around a sleepless night for Jemusi as a mosquito buzzes around his ear and a cicada burrows through his brain.

He stared in sleepy thought at the dark smudge of the ceiling. Had the cicada drilled into the soil of his mind and lodged there? He screwed his eyes shut and tried to see inside his mind. Nothing visible there, except for the indistinct and formless shimmers. Silver algae floating on a black pool? Black itches on a silver skin? Or was that the form life assumed inside itself? Could he identify the pestering cicada and banish it from in there with a single concentrated thought?

We can tell from the manner in which he describes this cicada that it is more than just an ordinary insect. And that it is in his mind – well. Mlalazi shifts the story suddenly, following Jemusi's thoughts as he remembers an event of hide-and-go-seek in his childhood. And then it shifts again, and again, and again. We slide effortlessly from memory, to present, to a dark, monstrous otherworld, and then they all start to merge. The effect is disorienting, but the transitions are so skilful that at first you don't even realise they've happened.

Mlalazi's nightmare is, we suspect, the nightmare of Zimbabwe. His character is a stand-in for the nation, gradually becoming polluted by forces beyond his control. MaDlodlo, a witch, is behind the poisoning, and there's nothing, it seems, that can be done about it.

MaDlodlo looked up and opened her mouth wide. A firestorm violently twisted out of it. It exploded into the void above them, roaring, whirling viciously. Jemusi and his father watched open mouthed, the now mushroom shaped firestorm reflected in their eyes. MaDlodlo's cheeks were smiling. The mushroom head suddenly convulsed into the words “NORTH KOREA,” and collapsed back into her mouth.

The pulse of blood, sex, and violence saturate Mlalazi's sentences, drawing the characters together in a cacophony of promised destruction. Jemusi's memories begin as comfortable recollections, but soon they shift, twisting into something more devious. His mother looms large and fierce, protective of her children but, one suspects, not entirely capable of loving them. The cicada takes on a more menacing tone as the author of its gestation is revealed as a witch, crazed and hungry for death. And even the mosquito, at first harmlessly buzzing, becomes something more:

The mosquito winked, and magically, the trill disappeared from his mind. He removed his palms from his ears. The mosquito was trilling, the same trill that had been bothering him inside his mind. He suddenly felt relaxed. He smiled. The world felt blissful. The mosquito dived. He swatted with his hand. There was a sting on his neck, and the mosquito was hovering over him again, its body shot through by a moon beam. Its stomach bulged with blood. He recognised the blood. It was his!

A Cicada in the Shimmer is a tale of malevolence, where pots burn and grin, and woman “scream in the womb of the night”. Everything, however ordinary, is impregnated with hostility, and it seems that the tongues of demons lick and wet the world with their fiery kisses. Mlalazi constructs his nightmare well, but this is a demanding story, rewarding concentration and punishing the casual reader. Nightmares are never pleasant, but they are often instructive, and can reveal in metaphor the problems plaguing our day-to-day lives. The potency of Mlalazi's writing comes through well, but at times the message is somewhat belaboured. There is a sense that all this is too metaphorical, too abstract, substituting too many concrete pieces of information for symbolism.

But perhaps not. The struggle of a nation and a person are struggles not easily told, and the metaphor of a nightmare works as well in the hands of a skilled writer as any other. And Mlalazi is skilled, of this there is no doubt. His sentences consistently surprise, writhing and turning on the page. A Cicada in the Shimmer isn't an easy piece, but it's strong and Mlalazi's capacity for malevolent evocation serves the story well.

A Cicada in the Shimmer by Christopher Mlalazi is a short story from StoryTime's publication, African Roar (edited by Emmanuel Sigauke and Ivor W. Hartmann). This review is part of a series intending to examine each story from the collection, in an effort to broaden awareness of both the project itself, and the excellent array of authors contained within.

Author	Christopher Mlalazi
Title	A Cicada in the Shimmer
Nationality	Zimbabwean
Publisher	StoryTime
Availability: ---Amazon US

See Also

Reviews of other short stories from the African Roar Series