The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy, by Paulina Chiziane

I don't remember where I first heard about The First Wife, but I did note it down as a book to read from Mozambique. I believe I found this copy at a bookstore in Seattle when I was there in 2021. I seem to remember picking it up along with Our Lady of the Nile. It was reading The Word Tree that finally got me to read this. I wanted to stay in Mozambique. 

I don't quite know where to begin talking about this book. It was not at all what I was expecting. I had assumed it was about traditional polygamy (in some ways it was), but the starting point for The First Wife is a married woman who knows her husband has another lover and after some investigation, learns he actually has four of them. The women become allies, gain strength from each other, and eventually attain a sort of liberation. But in getting there, the story took so many unexpected turns. 

The writing in this book often has the feeling of folklore, full of magical imagery. Though the story itself is mostly grounded in earthly reality, it draws on what I assume are local folk tales. The presence and tensions among traditional religions and the Catholic church and the way they blend in modern life are also a theme. Every extended family has its priest and its witch doctor. The book is often hilarious, even as some of the events within are brutal. 

I found myself rebelling a bit against the gender essentialism at the heart of the book, even as I recognize it is a reflection of (and itself a rebellion against) the traditional gender roles in the culture. In fact, it highlights differences in the gender roles among different ethnic groups in Mozambique. And I kept wondering why these women -- and the first wife, in particular -- stayed loyal to this man, but the wives were asking the same question themselves. This book was written in 2002, and it was also interesting to read in the 2026 context of what I guess you could call mainstream polyamory. A passage in the book about the wives managing their calendars to set up the marital rota reminded me of polycules and their reliance on google calendar. 

The First Wife surprised me and I really liked it.

The Word Tree, by Teolinda Gersão

I have a certain affinity for Mozambique, having spent several months living in neighboring Zimbabwe 30 years ago now. While there, I traveled far to the east of the country, within a couple miles of the Mozambique border, though I never crossed it. I also ate regularly at a Mozambiquan restaurant -- a treat to myself on Fridays. Indeed, reading The Word Tree, Mozambique felt like a familiar place in some ways. Though, as I look at the map now, Maputo (or Lourenço Marques, as it was during the colonial era, and in the book) where the book takes place is far at the other end of the country -- practically in South Africa. 

The Word Tree is about a girl born in Mozambique to Portuguese parents. We don't quite learn the circumstances of her father's emigration, but her mother arrives at age 19 as a personal ad bride and is never happy in Mozambique. The book is divided into three sections, the first and third focused on the daughter, with the middle section showing the mother's perspective. There is a distance between mother and daughter that is is hard to get a grasp on in the book. The daughter is handed off to a Black wet nurse as a baby, whom she grows very attached to, while her mother seems uninterested -- or even repelled by her. The mother is presented very unsympathetically at first, and while I began to understand her and develop a certain feeling for her in the middle section, I never quite understood her distaste for her daughter. It's a complicated relationship. And yet, unexpectedly, it was the middle section with the mother's narrative that I found the most compelling. I found myself wondering if she found what she wanted, in the end. 

What I enjoyed most about this book were the descriptions of Mozambique. I could really picture the city and the baixa and the shanty town. The hotels and the department store. The beaches on the cost of the Indian Ocean. It was wonderfully evocative.

The Disappearing Act, by Maria Stepanova

I'm late in writing this post. I finished The Disappearing Act a week ago, on a miserable Sunday morning when I was both getting sick and off my allergy meds ahead of allergy testing. I almost can't believe I got through it under those conditions. Almost immediately upon finishing, I decided I needed to minimize my suffering and took an allergy pill. It helped, but the rest of the day was still pretty much a wash and then the entire work week happened. So here we are.

The Disappearing Act was another installment in the New Directions book subscription from my dad. I actually got it before Lithium, though I started it after. I was already somewhat familiar with Maria Stepanova because my women in translation book club read another book of hers, In Memory of Memory, but I didn't get to that one. I read the first couple pages and it was long and I just wasn't feeling up to it. But The Disappearing Act I loved from the moment I started it. Sometimes a book just speaks directly to me, and I can't quite say why, but that's what this book did. 

The Disappearing Act is a work of autofiction. (Is that a common thread in all 3 of the New Directions books I've read? At least 2 were.) The narrator is a novelist M from a country unnamed for most of the book, known rather as The Beast, who has left the country and is working through her complicated sense of semi-complicity with its actions. She's now living by a lake in another unnamed country, and in the book she's traveling to other unnamed places, but gets accidentally stuck along the way and decides, for a time, to disappear into this town and life that she fell into accidentally. M makes spontaneous decisions, far different from those she would make in her regular life. She (temporarily?) becomes a new person. 

I think that M in her travels reminds me of myself when I travel, where I sometimes do feel like an entirely different person. When I first started thinking this way, it led me to wonder if I could live permanently as the person I am when I travel. Would it even be possible. This seems to be an idea M is playing with as well.