The Joyful Song of the Partridge

The sinewy and striking latest from Chiziane (The First Wife) begins with the unexplained appearance of a Black woman on the banks of a river in Mozambique. Her name is Maria, and she’s described by the gossipy townspeople as “sculptured by the gods.... Her thick lips like a medulla, full of blood, full of flesh.” As they struggle to understand Maria’s presence, the omniscient narrator gradually reveals her origin story. She was born in 1953 into a poor family. Her father, Jose, felt he had no choice but to side with the country’s Portuguese colonists, while his wife, Maria’s mother, Delfina, who wished she were white, treated Maria like a slave. Chiziane artfully portrays the intricacies of Mozambican life and the country’s racial tensions (when Jose finds out Delfina has given birth to a white child, he assumes the father is Portuguese and views the child as a “white larva at the very core of life, announcing the death of a family”). Chiziane’s winding narrative eventually emerges as a scathing indictment of colonialism’s impact on the lives of women. This provokes. Agent: Nicole Witt, Mertin Witt Literary. (May)