The Book of Memory

The Book of Memory (2015), a novel by lawyer and author Petina Gappah, is composed of the recollections, in a nonlinear sequence, of Memory, a Zimbabwean woman awaiting her execution on death row. After her swift trial and murder conviction, she lives out her days in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in the city of Harare. At its onset, the fate of Memory’s case seems inevitably dire due to public perception of her as a remorseless criminal. To form her appeal to the court, her lawyer tells her to write down her version of what happened from memory, a project that composes the book’s narrative. Memory’s narrative unfolds new revelations about the chain of events leading up to and following the death of her adopted father.

The novel begins as Memory explicates how she is doubly alienated from society: she is an albino woman and therefore, has been subject to the brutalities of superstition that operate in her township, Mufakose, where she lived from birth to age nine. Now imprisoned, her conspicuous identity is due both to her easily identifiable skin, which burns in the sun, and her elite education at Cambridge, which has rendered her literate in many subjects her fellow prisoners have no exposure to.

Memory begins to unravel the story about her life’s transformation from the humble township to a highly cultured professor’s house replete with of libraries of books, servants, and horses. It begins in the highly impoverished, chaotic township of Mufakose. She recalls the feeling of being a child there only obliquely, through emotional characterizations of her surroundings and its soundscapes. Music’s objective correlative is weaved throughout her life since an early age: the scratch of a record player evokes memories of her mother and her love for the narrative texture produced by sound and lyrics. She recalls falling in love with music and praying to one day own a tambourine.



The transition from Mozambique to Cambridge life also registers in Memory’s recollection of music. She remembers Lloyd, her adoptive father, listening to his grandmother’s jazz records, and Lloyd’s own cassette tapes of Depeche Mode and Fleetwood Mac. She contrasts the warmth, hope, and intellectual enrichment of this time of life with the sounds of her prison days, which are characterized by “songs of sorrow”; namely, when a prisoner dies due to neglect, and when she overhears one of numerous inmate protest songs.

Memory is acutely aware of the oppression of black people and influence of white power that is intrinsic to colonialism, and it plays a strong role in her formative experiences as a black child of a white family growing up in England. Her adoption is in itself an act of colonialization, seeking to sublimate her original identity in a sea of Western intellectualism. She remembers, too, how Lloyd failed to connect with her emotionally despite his liberal and gentle attitude, feuding with her when she fell in love for the first time at the age of seventeen. Reflecting on her own education, she employs a mixture of biblical and literary references in the text, gesturing toward an acknowledgment of her own intellectual inheritance with which she makes sense of the sometimes unintelligible world. She speaks of the tension between her Western and African inheritances, often wishing to flee and go back to Zimbabwe. She understands deeply how the affordances of different types of privilege interact and negate each other, often to the point of paradox; for example, though her African identity might be more accepted in Mozambique, fantastical misconceptions of the meaning of her skin condition would induce constant bullying.

Memory also writes about the difficult impasse she had to traverse between different classes of wealth. Sold for adoption at the age of nine, she moved abruptly from extreme poverty to wealth and had to negotiate its meaning on her own. Her understanding of her skin condition also changed when a dermatologist healed her blisters, allowing her to suddenly pass as normal. She asserts that books are what ultimately saved her from these confusions of identity, showing how several stories can be integrated into a subject as long as one is willing to keep reading and thinking.



At the end of the book, the cause of Lloyd’s death is still ambiguous. Memory remains in prison, with no end in sight for her legal case. The outcome of her murder conviction ironically turns out to be less significant once she has recapitulated her experience. Despite her bleak position, she is able to reflect on the restorative power of writing and language, which has allowed her to synthesize various conflicting traumas, failures, and successes into a cohesive story. Only by doing just that, Gappah suggests, can a divided and marginalized life form and gain agency over its own self.