When Hoopoes Go to Heaven by Gaile Parkin
When Hoopoes go to Heaven is Gaile Parkin’s second novel for adults, although she has written numerous textbooks and children’s books. This novel centres around the Tungazara family, whose Mama, Angel, was the heroine of Baking Cakes in Kigali. This time however, Parkin writes about the baking business and its interactions with Swazi life through the eyes of Benedict, Angel’s orphaned grandson.
Benedict has just arrived in Swaziland, with his Mama, Baba, two older sisters and two younger brothers. The ten-year-old boy is caught between siblings who prefer each other’s company and settling into a school where he doesn’t quite belong because he is a kwerekwere who cannot speak siSwati.
If slightly ostracised by his human surroundings, Benedict is truly at home in his new garden and when reading, because ‘words could cross a border without any papers and without being called names or told to go home’. In her young protagonist, Parkin conjures a charming innocence and the heart-warming voice of a not-yet-big boy who struggles to be good and to make his family proud.
Benedict is burgeoning with love and respect for humans and animals alike and his mission to honour the dead begins when a Hoopoe bird crashes into a windscreen of the Ubuntu funeral van. Benedict ensures that the undertakers live up to the promise of their slogan –‘We bury the best!’ – and eventually comes up with a business proposal to simultaneously help his Mama’s waning business and offer a unique means of celebrating the lives of late relations.
The novel opens with some childlike wisdom for the reader: ‘Things that seemed real could sometimes be just pretend, and things that seemed just pretend could sometimes be real.’ Throughout the story, Benedict is struggling to read King Solomon’s Mines, a canonical South African text by H. Rider Haggard. This Victorian adventure tale follows three white men in their quest for gold, guided by a map which plots the treasure trove at the yonic shape below ‘Sheba’s breasts’ and constitutes the most stark literary representation of the colonised female body as a conquered land mass. Parkin adapts this trope of the British Empire, softens it with Benedict’s innocence and makes it a mixture of ‘just pretend’ and ‘real’ as her hero joins Petros, the cow-herder ‘with dementia in his chest’, to track the gold within themselves.
Parkin also uses her experience as a freelance consultant on education, gender and HIV/AIDS to describe the real impact of an AIDS-stricken society. At intermittent chapters, Benedict’s narrative is interrupted by Mavis, the Mazibukos’ cleaner, who is haunted by the loss of her own unmourned son. Both narrators belong to families of orphans, widows and bereaved parents, and both know people who resemble the ‘skinny, skinny person in the white robe in the picture on the United Nations wall’.
Parkin harnesses Mavis’ insomniac musings to explore Swazi debates surrounding virginity, female abstinence and the two kinds of pregnancy – being ‘in trouble’ and being ‘blessed’ – while offering the reader glimpses of the social and sexual scars left by sickness and death through the lens of a boy who only half understands.
When Hoopoes go to Heaven will published in hardback on 1st February 2012 and is available to pre-order for £9.14 or you can get the e-book edition now for £5.73.
Rating: 4/5
Recommended for: Anyone interested in HIV/AIDS, gender politics and Ubuntu philosophy in Southern Africa.
Other recommended reading: Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, Kalahari Passage by Candi Miller and Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin.
Eve Lacey
