Shahrazad - Stories for life

The youths are on the loose in Norway, campaigning. Young men and women, all over the place. The pavements are red, not with human blood, but with red roses. My most favourite party is the one distributing red roses. Young men and women giving you a rose at every street corner. They talk to you rather gently, persuasively, wondering if you would like the bunch of roses. I never refuse roses except those given by some god-forsaken dictator. I know even tyrants like roses.

As I return to my desk, I have more than twenty red roses in my hands, as if I have just come from a flower shop to buy flowers for for birthdays and other special occasions.

I cannot resist thinking of home, election time, Zanu(PF) against the rest of the world, a matter of life and death.

Former ICORN Guest Writer Chenjerai Hove from Zimbabwe has recently received a stipend from the The Norwegian Non-fiction Writers And Translators Association (NFF). He is working on a memoir where he interconnects his own personal journey with the political developments in Zimbabwe since 1980.

The prison officer stares at me. I fear to answer his persistent questions. He wears this horrid, wrinkled face of the man of law, solid, unfeeling. But sometimes I think he feels. He keeps asking me the same question every time he has a chance to talk to me, only when there is no other guard nearby, alone with me, as if for the sole purpose of torturing me.

'Did you really do it?' he wants to know.

'Yes, I did,' I answer.

Refugee Week is for everyone so come along and join us in celebrating it launch!

by Chenjerai Hove

Dear Mother,

It is a long time since I talked to you, now that your ageing ears can hardly hear the faint voice on this side of the telephone. But then, I sometimes wonder at the futility of writing this letter to you since you can't even read. Your eyes too are giving up, and you did not go to the mission school to learn the tricks of the written word.