With Peter Godwin having already written three memoirs, we can be forgiven for wondering how much more he can tell of his life and for scepticism as to whether his new work, Exit Wounds, will enthral as much as his previous books did.
Mukiwa (“white boy”) was about his childhood and formative years and the period in which Zimbabwe transitioned from colonialism and When A Crocodile Eats the Sun was a quest for belonging in a vortex of familial confusion and national chaos. The Fear wove in an account of the Gukurahundi, the 1983-87 genocidal campaign perpetrated by Robert Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland, the horrifying news of which Godwin had initially broken for Sunday Times (UK).
Understandably, there is crossover between his previous books, and some of the ground he covers in Exit Wounds is familiar. But Godwin’s experiences — raised during the civil war, shaped by the birth pangs of Zimbabwe’s democracy, working as a human rights lawyer as the country crumbled, then as a renowned reporter in conflict zones — have given him copious material.
Besides, Exit Wounds has a different thematic arc. He’s undergone further, fresh traumas, causing old ones to resurface. Mainly, the source of anguish is the looming inexorability of his mother’s death as she fades away in the London home of Godwin’s sister. It’s where the book starts, and anyone with an ageing parent will relate to the author’s confoundedness at the eccentricities of his 90-year-old mother, Grace. During her entire life she spoke with a posh English accent, but she suddenly elevates her speech into a regal, “haute Edwardian”. House is “hise”, yes is “ears’” and she says she’s “heppy” when she’s feeling OK — and she vehemently denies that she hasn’t always spoken like this. So Godwin and his younger sister start to call their mother Her Grace.
These bouts of childlike senility contrast with phases of astonishingly crisp memory, razor-sharp banter and recitals of lengthy literary extracts. Beautifully characterising his mother’s retreat from the world as similar to the curling-up defence mechanism of pangolins, hedgehogs and shongololos, Godwin asks why she insists on staying in bed in her room. Still quick-witted and a logophile, “I’m latibulating,” she responds; Godwin needs to look up the word to understand it means to hide in a safe corner until things improve.
And so the sadness Godwin captures is less that she is dying and more, he writes, in remembering that “the arrows unleashed at my mother during her half-century in Southern Africa have been many and sharp”. These become clear during the course of the book, the cruellest being the death of her first born, Godwin’s elder sister, in the civil war. The most ruinous was the hyperinflation of 2007-09, which left her penniless despite decades of selfless service as one of the country’s leading doctors.
The book’s title refers partly to the family’s forced, sorrowful departure from a failed nation. It’s also a reference to Godwin’s experience, as a war correspondent, when being briefed by a combat surgeon about what to expect on the front lines. Bullets kill in unexpected mechanics, the surgeon informs him: “It’s the exit wound that kills you.”
They haven’t killed him yet, of course, but, besides the loss of his parents and elder sister and the trauma of witnessing the horrors of war and humanitarian crises as a reporter, Godwin is wounded by the sudden disintegration of his nearly 20-year marriage. Like his mother’s dying, Godwin captures this realistically, making it more wrenching. After a leisurely Sunday game of tennis with his wife, Joanna, they drive home, and as he switches off the engine, she says “I don’t want to be married any more.”
His divorce reopens another deep wound: he is shorn of identity. He mourns the fleetingly fantastic post-democracy Zimbabwe and feels disconnected from the places he’s lived since leaving. But the seismic jolt occurred when his father, nearing the end of his life, revealed to his adult children that he was Jewish and that almost his entire family had been murdered in the Holocaust. “Reintroducing himself to me ... and then he was gone,” Godwin remembers, he conveys an aching sadness through one of many avian metaphors incorporated as a regular refrain.
Male songbirds need to sing the right calls to attract mates, to thrive; they learn these from their fathers. “But,” he asks, plaintively, “what if, like mine, your father is largely silent, secretive about his origins, refusing to sing? How then do you learn to sing yourself? What song, and to whom? Who will recognise it, recognise you?”
Many of the book’s chapters are similarly melancholic. It’s an emotion into which Godwin delves evocatively. Wondering why he feels this mild depression more acutely at sundown, he discovers this is fairly common. The poet Emily Dickinson described it beautifully, long before him: There’s a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons — / That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes.
This “dusk-triggered dolour”, he also learns, has a name: Hesperian melancholy, labelled by SA polymath Eugene Marais after the mythical Greek nymphs, the Hesperides, who guarded the tree of immortality when the sun dropped into the ocean at the western edge of the perceived world.
If there’s an irritation in Exit Wounds it is that the author stretches his melancholy and its association, for him, with identity — “Godwin, party of one, a man without a nation, without a tribe” — too far. Seeking counselling and therapies, resorting to alcohol, and having what psychologists call suicide ideation are especially understandable in relation to his war zone experiences and divorce, but blurring these traumas with having had to move often, and thus his identity, sometimes comes across as self-pity.
Overall, however, despite the often world-weary tone and even as he writes of upsetting episodes, Godwin manages, if not to uplift, then to make us ponder the bittersweet nature of a full, rewarding life.
The book’s merit lies in this form of invitation, as well as its snippets of fascinating and artfully connected information. For instance, grief-struck by his divorce, he informs us that there is a German word for the weight-gain a desolate spouse may experience: kummerspeck, “grief bacon”. The opposite is happening to him, but a dermatologist check-up leads to him getting some pre-cancerous growths lasered off. He’s given a red ball to hold during the procedure. At the end, “the doctor’s room smells like kummerspeck,” he writes, “and the nurse has to prise my lock-knuckled fingers from the ball.”
Similarly, Exit Wounds is not easy to put down. And, long after finishing it, readers won’t want to let go of its tenderness, gentle humour and wisdom.
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