Continuing to exploration of the complexities around Africa's literature through the continent's variously accomplished women writers, here are. SUGGESTIONS FOR 'THE BOOK OF MEMORY by by Petina Gappah' that I would like you to answer as best a you can.
1. Exclusion, nation, precarious existence, degradation, marginalization and identity (like in July's People) are recurrent themes in the book. How do the book's characters and key narrative events highlight this?
2. Narrative form is, often, key to certain meanings in narratives. Are there exchanges between form and theme in the book, given its whiffs of autobiography, memoir, and coming-of-age narrative?
3. What do you make of Memory's relationships with her parents (especially mother), society and searches for self affirmation?
4. How do the background of political unrest and violence (in the 1970s-1980s Rhodesia/Zimbabwe), followed by seizures of white farmlands, and murders, for example, add to the book's social and political critiques?
5. How is memory problematized by the protagonist's unique circumstances, challenges and proverb (on page 52): 'Memories of bygone feasts will not feed a hungry child'?
6. What can you make of the various references to American popular culture, and the inter-textual references to other literary works, in the book?
7. How does the book engage indigenous belief systems (for instance, about the supernatural, ngozi, etc), and language (with respect to the untranslated songs, sentences, word or phrases, in Shona)?
8. What affinities do you see between the book's epigraph (from Vladimir Nabokov), narrative core, and meanings (particularly, memory and tensions around truth, interpretations, etc)?
9. What do you make of the book's constructions of family, community, identity and nation? Is the seeming fixation on skin tones different from or similar to the racialized 'white' and 'black' worlds she is sandwiched in?
10. What do you think about the book's anchorage in the relationship between the past and present, experiences and trauma, and the first-person narrative point-of-view?