The Joyful Song of the Partridge

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

Archipelago Press publish some of the most interesting titles in translation, and The Joyful Song of the Partridge by Mozambican author Paulina Chiziane is no exception. Translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw, this book is a family saga filled with tragedy and magic. We see the brutal effects of colonialism and the internalised racism/colourism that it fostered among the people it subjugated. Chiziane draws on a large cast of characters, from a wide range of backgrounds (class, race, age, gender) to provide a snapshot of life in Mozambique under Portuguese colonial rule. It’s as violent as you might expect, with characters perpetuating cycles of harm first inflicted on them, hatred and envy simmering and spilling over, feuds spanning decades. It is devastating to see how the colonists’ racism seeped into the minds of the country’s native people, poisoning their outlook on life and turning them against one another. Men are reduced to pawns and tools, betraying fellow Black people for the chance to be seen as an ‘honorary white’, not realising that such a thing was never in their grasp to begin with. Women have little agency and are often reduced to their bodies. Racial hierarchy is everything to the people in this book, and it’s undoubtedly heavy reading. But there’s something about Chiziane’s style, seamlessly translated, that makes it read almost like a fairytale. This book is nigh-on 500 pages and I flew through it in 4 days.

My one main issue is that, much like a fairy tale or a morality tale, everything ties up far too neatly at the end. Characters who do despicable things are forgiven too easily in my opinion.

But this is an exciting translation, and I hope we see more from Chiziane in English translation in the future!

My thanks go to NetGalley and Archipelago for a review copy of this book in exchange for my honest feedback.

Nothing ever happens in this small town where a naked woman has appeared in the river. Where has she come from and how did she arrived? What could she possibly want from a town that has nothing to give? She’s lost and searching. Searching for her family. They have been taken away. By who? And why? Questions to be answered.

And that’s where The Joyful Song of a Partridge begins. Questions are stacked up for the reader, with a gentle inclination towards the information that will be revealed at a later point in the book. This immediately hooks the reader. Coupled with luscious prose, you cannot help but fall into the story at record speed. And despite the book’s length, I don’t think it ever lulls or becomes uninteresting. Having revealed nothing but described for those first 30 or so pages, we as the reader are left with so many questions, that the book naturally needs the time and space to answer each of them. It’s a wonderfully crafted book, with some meticulous pacing throughout.

The characters of this book have a way of looking back, a particular element to their characters, that provides information and says so much without saying very much at all. Everything important that’s being said hangs in the background of the characters’ choices and actions. They will drop in a one liner or two on every 50 or so pages that leaves the reader thinking, quaking even, at the tippling effect they give to your mind.

This is a novel that centres around an uncovering of the past. It is a collective of people coming to realise their own story and tell it in real time, in their own words. They have been silent and suppressed for so long, with attitudes being forced into their collective consciousness for centuries, due to the occupation of their home and their land. This story opens the gates that have been rusted over for so long, whilst creating new myths and fables that add to their own culture for centuries to come. It is an uncovering and a building of a people, with a story that is pillared by characters that stick and shine.

A beautiful book, with some gloriously slick prose, and translated with the heart and care that such a delicate story deserves.

Huge thanks to Netgalley and Archipelago press for the digital ARC of Paulina Chiziane's 'The Joyful Song of the Partridge'.

'The Joyful Song of the Partridge' is an ambitious novel about the history of Mozambique.
It was beautifully translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw.

A strange woman appears in a town where nothing ever happens.
She is sitting naked in the river.
The townspeople say she must be crazy or possessed because she seems too comfortable with her nakedness, and she has no idea where she came from.
What led her to that state of mind?

"She said her name was Maria," one of the women explains.
"Can that really be her name?" The headman's wife asks.
"Every Maria has another name, because Maria isn't a name, it's a synonym
of woman. But tell me: what was she like?"
"She has the shape of a person but isn't a person. She looked like the angel of darkness. A messenger of disaster. She looked like a ghost, a creature from another world," one of the women says."

The townspeople interpret her arrival as a bad omen, and some take it as a sign that women will soon take over the position of power from the greedy hands of men.

At its core, 'The Joyful Song of the Partridge', is a novel about Mozambique under the Portuguese colonial rule. It's about the effects of colonialism on the colonised populations.
It's a family saga full of diverse characters from various backgrounds. It has a nice balance of Mozambican history, fairytales and the author's humorous frankness.
I truly enjoyed the storytelling and imagery in this novel.

There's a quote in this novel that describes how I feel about Paulina Chiziane's writing:

"Telling a story means carrying minds on a flight of the imagination and then bringing them back to the world of reflection."

With 'The Joyful Song of the Partridge' she achieved just that.