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Beaven Tapureta Reviews 'The Polygamist' by Sue Nyathi

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Title : The Polygamist
Author : Sukoluhle  Nyathi
Publisher :  Logogog  Press, South Africa
Year:  2012
ISBN :  978-0-620-52260-1
Reviewer : Beaven  Tapureta
  
Sukoluhle  Nyathi may be  new on the list of known, published Zimbabwean writers but her  gripping style of  writing, complemented by a sharp awareness of issues  pertaining to relationships  (marriage), sexuality, and power could enlist her in
the pioneering group of  writers such as Virginia Phiri, who have candidly  tackled sensitive subjects  commonly known as taboos. What  makes The Polygamist such an  irresistible read  is no doubt its unique blend of skill and  subject. While  polygamy, in its  traditional times before the advent of HIV/AIDS, was at one  point a cultural  type of marriage principled in some societies, it nonetheless  has become a  delusional institution almost inapplicable to these modern  days. Men  and women have now  carved out a new type of polygamy in a desperate bid to  justify their different  situations, most of them selfish  situations.
 
The  Polygamist exposes the secrets which  most married and unmarried men and women, with the nouveau riche in particular,  would rather want dealt with silently or “indoors”. In  the novel there is  an interplay of dreams and reality, sensuality and sensibility  and the conflict of  these elements is tactfully presented through the  characters, who are mainly  four women (Joyce, Matipa, Essie and Lindani) and a  man named Jonasi  Gomora. All  the four women have a  stake in Jonasi’s life whose transition from poverty to  riches (and back to  poverty) they witness each from a different  perspective.
The  Polygamist, written from the  dramatic  monologue point of view, with each chapter devoted to any one of the  four women,  progresses with captivating action and dialogue. Each chapter is a  dramatic  monologue of Joyce, Matipa, Essie or Lindani. The reader learns who  the speaker  is and her circumstances only from references within the monologue  itself.

 In  this story which is set  in Zimbabwe, Jonasi Gomora rises from poverty to become  the founder of ‘the most  successful black-run business in the city’, but his  rise is not without its own  complications. Women, money, power soon catch up
with him and what follows is an  exciting, adventurous, yet touching unveiling  of the characters’ hidden  desires.
Jonasi’s  first marriage is  with Joyce, a woman who stands the hard times with Jonasi but  whose harvest of  joy is soon taken away from her marriage. Joyce and  Jonasi make the transit from driving  nothing to  driving a Mazda 323, to driving a Mercedes C-Class, from living in a  one-roomed  cottage in Queensdale to living in the avenues and finally in a
mansion in the  posh suburbs of Glen Lorne. Together  in love they ditch  poverty as Jonasi’s company J & J Holdings gets more and  more successful. 

However, things fall apart when enter Matipa, a woman who  bulldozes into Jonasi’s  16- year- old marriage at all costs.
Matipa  falls in love with  Jonasi, the CEO of J & J Holdings, having found a job at  his company. The  trio of Joyce, Jonasi and Matipa play their parts in the drama  of love and  betrayal, each trying to assert his/her position.  Then  enter Essie, Jonasi’s  first lover from his youth with whom he had a child named  Sarah. As if that’s  not enough for the reader, next enter Lindani, a girl  Jonasi meets in a  nightclub. Enchanted  by Matipa, Jonasi  thinks of divorcing Joyce who refuses his bid. He abandons
Joyce and starts  living with Matipa whom he has promoted to Assistant Director  in one of the J & J Holdings departments. Yet Jonasi soon becomes a  ‘bed-hopper’, living with  each of the women at different times. As the story  unfolds through the women’s  subjective accounts, one notices that each of the  women wants to assert her  position as Jonasi’s wife. 

In  the maze of the story,  children are not left out. Although the effect of  Jonasi’s polygamous life upon  his children is covered by his ability to at  least cater for them, a reader may  fear they will grow up to pay for the  mistakes of their parents. Although  Freedom is not Jonasi’s child but Essie’s,  whom she sired with a departed  soldier earlier in the story, his life of a thug  and disrespectful nature  heralds an unspoken contagious storm in the future of  the whole Gomora family  but that's for the reader to imagine.
 
There’s  an unsatisfied ego  in Jonasi but it is the question why he behaves the way he  does that stands out  most. Psychoanalysis may convince us who Jonasi is by  looking at his early and  present actions. First, as a youth he raped Essie when  he found out she had been  impregnated by another man (the soldier with whom she  bore Freedom). He next  beats her up when he finds her having sex in a car with  yet another man.  Remember, Essie had grown up with Jonasi. When Jonasi’s mother  died, four-year  old Jonasi found refuge (from his abusive father) in Essie’s family and they  became childhood lovers. Could  this early bitter  disappointment in the first relationship have awakened his  insatiable desire for  women to the point that he views them as mere  objects?

When somewhere along the  line Matipa tells him that she has been to a doctor and been diagnosed of a   sexually transmitted disease, he beats her up with a metal belt and rapes  her. "...I  can see through  you, but I own you Matipa. I own you. You were bought and paid  for, my  dear,..." (page 127).

 Jonasi’s  early background  of neglect somehow tallies with Lindani’s. Lindani, a  night-clubber who refers  to the men she sleeps with as ‘fossils’, is the fourth  and youngest of all  Jonasi’s women. Lindani has lived through a rape trauma,
drinks alcohol and goes  into night clubs to prostitute. What would Jonasi, as  highly positioned in  society now as he was, have seen in Lindani?  Later,  disease and the  economic climb-down change the course of things. Although  Jonasi tries to live  in denial, AIDS and death soon catch up with  him.
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The  Polygamist was launched in Durban  (South  Africa) and then in Bulawayo before being launched at the Book Café,
Harare, on  August 16.  At  the Harare launch,  Sukoluhle Nyathi, the author, spoke of her ups and downs as  a writer before  reading an excerpt from her book.  The  Polygamist is now available in   Zimbabwe at the Blackstone Bookshops.

More  about the author on  this blog:   EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH  SUE NYATHI