The First Wife
A Tale of Polygamy
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
After twenty years of marriage, Rami discovers that her husband has been living a double--or rather, a quintuple--life. Tony, a senior police officer in Maputo, has apparently been supporting four other families for many years. Rami remains calm in the face of her husband's duplicity and plots to make an honest man out of him. After Tony is forced to marry the four other women--as well as an additional lover--according to polygamist custom, the rival lovers join together to declare their voices and demand their rights. In this brilliantly funny and feverishly scathing critique, a major work from Mozambique's first published female novelist, Paulina Chiziane explores her country's traditional culture, its values and hypocrisy, and the subjection of women the world over.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chiziane is widely considered one of Mozambique's most important authors. Largely unknown outside of Africa, this new translation of her 2003 Jos Craveirinha Prize winning novel will hopefully bring her name into larger recognition. Chiziane refers to herself as a storyteller instead of a writer; this seemingly minor distinction speaks volumes about the style of her work. The story of Rami and her journey toward something resembling freedom is told in lyrical, circular prose that heightens the universality of the situation in which she finds herself. Rami has been married to Tony for 20 years. They live in Maputo, where they have status and wealth, but have settled into an unhappy routine. He cheats on her with a progression of women. Eventually Rami's unhappiness leads her to confront one such woman, Ju, who reveals that there is another, Luisa, and another, Saly, and finally Maua. The extent of Tony's wanderings leaves Rami with few options. What follows is a careful examination of tradition clashing with modernity, most prevalently the place of women within Mozambique's society, and within the world in general. The focus on first wife Rami and the feeling of inevitability in Tony's continued pursuit of more "cattle" allows Chiziane the freedom to ask big questions: are women meant to suffer at the hands of men, and are they unable to find actualization and happiness for themselves? The style also allows her to make this tale of Mozambique universal and at times ambiguous. Slowly, painfully, as tradition looms in the background, Rami and the other women in Tony's life begin to discover a space for themselves and what it can mean to be more than a part of a "loving hexagon."
