In My Head: My Harvest of Thorns

 A critical review of Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns.

Reviewers note: This review is entirely my personal opinion of ‘Harvest of Thorns.’ Do not take it as cast-in-stone. Our appreciation of art is based on several factors, and the factors that influence your appreciation of an artistic piece might be different from mine, so if you have any contrary views you are free to post them in the comments and we can start a healthy academic debate, or you can post your own review as well.

The storyline of Harvest of Thorns is very interesting, and had it not been for the literary gimmicks of the writer, the book would have been an ‘unputdownable’. The story deals with the challenges blacks encountered in pre-independence Zimbabwe, and the fight for independence with hopes of better lives for them. However, after blacks take over the reins, the ‘promise land’ is still far beyond the horizon.  Harvest of Thorns tells of the paradox of post-colonial Zimbabwe, which happens to be the same with almost all African countries. This paradox thus raises the big questions; “are we better off in independence or we should have just remained colonized enjoying the cramps off the colonial master’s table?” I think the words of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah provide a thought-provoking answer – “it is far better to be free to govern or misgovern yourself, than to be governed by someone else.”

Harvest of Thorns by Shimmer Chinodya for me is a very disappointing book, having read it in the wake of more interesting and page-turning ones such as The Firm by John Grisham, and The Roar of the Thunder God by Larry Kumasah, a Ghanaian author. I say it is disappointing not because it is badly written or full of grammatical errors, but it is academically written. In other words, it is written as if it is a textbook for a literature course. For an avid reader like me who takes reading as a hobby, reading Harvest of Thorns became a chore instead of being a pleasurable experience.

 

Having read the blurb on the back of the book before I flipped the first page, I was carried away by the high praise by Doris Lessing and I looked forward to another page-turning experience. However a few pages into the book I started to lose steam. I realized that the writer devoted a lot of time to making his work an academic masterpiece than a-cannot-put-down-until-completed reading voyage. Some of the sentences were very very long. One particular sentence which caught my attention was a page and a half long. In a literature class, that sentence would have been singled out for the “Grand Medal of Literary Masterpiece” award and would have definitely earned an enviable place in a literature review exam. But for a fan-reader like me, that sentence was a literary plague that robbed me of having a pleasurable reading time. It slowed my paced drastically and extinguished my longing to continue reading, as I had to go over it word by word, over and over before understanding it.

 

Many of the sentences in Harvest of Thorns were also written poetically, with emphasis placed on rhyming. Thus if the reader is not a lover of poetry, those sentences will damn sure be put-offs.

 

I also feel that the abruptness with which Chinodya leapt from one idea to the other was very distracting. Just when you are warming up into a particular subplot, he just jumps onto another subplot thus extinguishing the momentum you have built from a previous action. You now have to start another painfully slow build-up into a new subplot. I think there were just too many subplots.

 

However, characterisation was top-notch. The characters in Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns are very real and believable, and easily establish an emotional attachment with the reader. The characters experience everyday anxieties, happiness and mixed feeling just like all human beings do. I especially identified with Benjamin aka Pasi NemaSellout, the main character. He was just so real that the reader actually experiences all the conflicting emotions he goes through with him.

 

And please remember that these are merely the "thoughts of a Village Boy". If you have personal thoughts, counter thoughts or additional thoughts, please post them and let's have a healthy intercourse.  I rest my case!