Essays Archives - Andrew Chatora

December 11, 2024 Andrew Chatora 0 Comments 8:25 am

Charles Mungoshi – Eulogy to GreatnessCharles Mungoshi – Eulogy to Greatness

Ode to a literary icon, pre-eminent Zimbabwean writer and poet Charles Mungoshi. In celebration of a life well lived. Highly {...}

November 15, 2024 Andrew Chatora 0 Comments 5:47 am

Who Needs a Writer? There is More to Writing than Dollars and CentsWho Needs a Writer? There is More to Writing than Dollars and Cents

Zimbabwean novelist Andrew Chatora is a chronicler of unofficial history and the migrant experience. His debut novella, Diaspora Dreams, was {...}

November 15, 2024 Andrew Chatora 0 Comments 5:41 am

Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: Fluid identities – life beyond virtual realityCharlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: Fluid identities – life beyond virtual reality

Virtual sex, techno-paranoia, the cyber city, second life, social media culture, sexual identity politics and debating the online self – {...}

June 26, 2023 Andrew Chatora 0 Comments 4:49 pm

Netflix’s Cook Off – An authentically Zimbabwean no-budget romcom which can reinvigorate the film industryNetflix’s Cook Off – An authentically Zimbabwean no-budget romcom which can reinvigorate the film industry

A pulsating, multi-layered, engaging narrative, endowed with that infectious Zimbabwean sensibility, with a mix of mbira music playing in the {...}

June 26, 2023 Andrew Chatora 0 Comments 7:14 am

Why The Black Lives Matter Movement needs star amplification and solidarityWhy The Black Lives Matter Movement needs star amplification and solidarity

Taking the knee: Why it matters in post George Floyd killing for public personalities such as Denzel Washington, Lewis Hamilton, {...}

June 26, 2023 Andrew Chatora 0 Comments 12:41 am

Brilliance of Hope offers a – ‘‘Where the rains began to beat us” momentBrilliance of Hope offers a – ‘‘Where the rains began to beat us” moment

Brilliance of Hope, a recent literary offering by a motley of Zimbabwean writers, joins a burgeoning body of scholarship on {...}

Andrew Chatora

Andrew Chatora is a Zimbabwean novelist, essayist and short-story writer based in Bicester, England. He grew up in Mutare, Zimbabwe, and moved to England in 2002. His debut novella, Diaspora Dreams (2021), was approvingly received and nominated for the National Arts Merit Awards (2022). His second book, Where the Heart Is, was published in the same year to considerable acclaim. Chatora’s forthcoming book, Born Here, But Not in My Name, is a brave, humorous and psychologically penetrating portrait of post-Brexit Britain. Chatora is noted for his acerbic and honest depiction of the migrant experience. Heavily influenced by his own experience as a black English teacher in the United Kingdom, Chatora probes multi-cultural relationships, identity politics, blackness, migration, citizenship and nationhood.

“Where The Heart Is offers a nuanced view of one family’s struggle to negotiate cold Britannia as they face dicey neighbourhoods, sketchy liaisons, and perennial ill-fate. Chatora’s diaspora is not the glorified El Dorado; it is an honest place of grit and survival. A stellar contribution.”

– Tariro Ndoro, Author Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner

For migrant Fari Mupawaenda, life cannot be complete without quitting the back breaking struggle for survival in the UK and returning to the laid-back streets of a warm Harare… but does it make sense for him to want to return to the periphery once more? The man who returns, why does he return? To what does he return?

His wife, a zealous cosmopolitan, the daughter, a conflicted bed-hopping undergraduate, and the son, a budding homosexual, will not follow Fari in his trip to what they see as the back of beyond. They have decided to invest fully where they are.
Fari’s reverse trip is a story about the human body, a tight memory test and a duel between geography and anticipation…

Masterful in style and form, the narratives in Andrew Chatora’s Where the Heart Is are intensely provocative.

– Memory Chirere, University of Zimbabwe

“Chatora gives us an honest account of the migrant’s experiences in a world that seeks to silence him. Diaspora Dreams is simultaneously suffocating and isolating. Battle after battle, the reader is constantly thrown into the unforgiving world of a black man in a white man’s world.”

– Tariro Ndoro, Author, Agringada: Like a Gringa, Like a Foreigner

Diaspora Dreams is Andrew Chatora’s debut novella. It details the life and struggles of Kundai Mafirakureva, a Zimbabwean immigrant living in the United Kingdom. When Kundai departs a failing Zimbabwe for the greener pastures of England, he is convinced that his luck will immediately change. Yet what he finds in the UK convinces him that all that glitters is not always gold.

Chatora takes us on a journey that acquaints us with Thames Valley, where Kundai must negotiate his place and his voice in a world where African men are not welcome, a world where racial prejudice is still rampant. Set against the backdrop of petty classroom squabbles that constantly remind Kundai of his lower status as an immigrant and as a black man, Diaspora Dreams exposes the tensions of working in the diaspora and the complicated dynamics between community and authority experienced by black men.

The pressures of Britain also bear down on Kundai’s family and relationships, threatening, in the words of du Bois, to “tear his soul asunder.” This is a novel with comedic elements gleaming with personal values and beliefs, sometimes an aching story to read, but never without excitement and hope as you watch this black man’s life unfold.

“Harare Voices and Beyond takes us on a journey through the dark recesses of the human psyche.”

– Sue Quainton, Bicester, United Kingdom

A drunken confession exposes a dark family secret. Rhys appears to have it all. A white Zimbabwean living in affluent Borrowdale Brooke area he gets involved in a freak traffic accident. Therein unfolds a confession which unleashes a cathartic chain of events in the family’s hitherto well-choreographed life, a family whose lived experience becomes microcosmic and an eye opener to Zimbabwe’s seemingly closed, forgotten, white minority community.

Through offering a rare insight into lives of the white community in post-independence Zimbabwe, Harare Voices and Beyond explores the dynamics of love, money, family feuds, identity politics, false philanthropy, and respectability inter-alia. Two families’ lives are inexorably linked in this fast-paced narrative which not only traverses multiple locations, but also juxtaposes the seedy underbelly of Harare with the leafy northern suburbs, and little-known Marina Thompson from UK Durham University all appear linked in a drama-infused finale that will shock and numb the reader.

Category: Essays

Charles Mungoshi – Eulogy to GreatnessCharles Mungoshi – Eulogy to Greatness

Who Needs a Writer? There is More to Writing than Dollars and CentsWho Needs a Writer? There is More to Writing than Dollars and Cents

Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: Fluid identities – life beyond virtual realityCharlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: Fluid identities – life beyond virtual reality

Netflix’s Cook Off – An authentically Zimbabwean no-budget romcom which can reinvigorate the film industryNetflix’s Cook Off – An authentically Zimbabwean no-budget romcom which can reinvigorate the film industry

Why The Black Lives Matter Movement needs star amplification and solidarityWhy The Black Lives Matter Movement needs star amplification and solidarity

Brilliance of Hope offers a – ‘‘Where the rains began to beat us” momentBrilliance of Hope offers a – ‘‘Where the rains began to beat us” moment

About the Author

Andrew Chatora