LETTERS Pig Earth

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While imperialism frantically contrives schemes aiming as a neo-colonial solution, the Zimbabwean masses suffer an ever-increasing unemployment level and inflation rate and a further decline in their already meagre living standards.

This is accompanied by the denial to them of even minimal participation in decsions affecting their day-to-day lives and by an escalating human toll from the war.

No alleviation of these hardships can be expected within a capitalist Zimbabwe.

The GDP (in 1976 estimated at US $3560m) which expanded by an average of 6.9% from 1965 to 1974, has been declining every year from 1975 at a rate which has now accelerated to a negative growth rate of about 8% per annum.

The most dramatic collapses have occurred within the manufacturing, tourism and black agricultural sectors.

Per capita income fell by 27% in the years between 1974 and 1978.

Epidemics In the Tribal Trust Lands (the black rural areas) a stagSmith 18/8/79:

Dear Comrades, In his interesting and generous review of my last book Pig Earth, Terry Eagleton made one slip and, in a way, it is a revealing one.

He said that I have been living amongst the peasants, of whom I write, for two years.

In fact, as said several times in the book, it has been for four, now almost five, years.

The slip is revealing because it suggests that he may underestimate how long such a task takes. Or at least takes me:

It took me four years to begin to understand, not my own, by the peasants' "mater¡alist imagination" • It is a term which describes their mode of thinking very wel!.).

And it took me that long to try to learn to write in a narrative style that could be faithful to peasant experience.

The style of Pig Earth has little to do with that of G for example.

This question of trying to learn to write in a new way was not an aesthetic "stylisstic" one; it was a question of trying to achieve a certain truthfulness. Which takes time, a long time.

Eagleton is right when he says that the book lacks a political overview.

He is also probably right when he says that a deeply political work of fiction about peasants today would have to escape the confines of a "realist" narrative.

I hope one day to be able to write such a book. It may be the third volume of the trilogy of which Pig Earth is the first.

The fact that I have not yet achieved this. (and may never) has little to do, I think, with what Eagleton choses to call my "Stalinist formation"

It has to do with the extreme difficulty of the task and the time that it takes to learn.

The political theories of the left, Trotskyist as well as Stalinist, have mostly failed to take account of peasant reality.

What has to be worked through is experience beside peasants and a new political theory.

Nobody could do that in two (or five) years! A lifetime might not suffice.

Fraternally, John Berger.

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