The tottering Old Horse is clearly out of it. The father of the nation, a horse, is clearly based on a late-era Mugabe in his ancient, decrepit state, “older now than the last time they’d seen him, where he’d in fact been older than the last time they’d seen him prior to that”. It is clearly some kind of animal farm, for everyone in this dictatorship is from the animal kingdom: horses, donkeys, cats, dogs and other animals. Glory begins at a rally set to be addressed by the “Father of the Nation” of a fictional country called Jidada. “It was a delight and a privilege to channel that oral tradition in Glory.”
In the preface, signalling a departure from the realist novel form she used in her debut, Bulawayo notes: Her introduction to stories was at the feet of her grandmother who used to recount “beguiling tales of talking animals and alternate worlds”.
NOVIOLET BULAWAYO CHANNELS ORWELL IN ‘GLORY’īulawayo notes in the preface that as she wrote Glory, she found herself “constantly coming back to George Orwell’s Animal Farm for its satire of a revolution that ends in betrayal and tyranny”.Īlthough it was to Animal Farm she kept going back, the form of the allegory Orwell used for his classic novel was one with which Bulawayo was already familiar.
0 kommentar(er)
