Christopher Mlalazi has written plays for Zimbawean performing arts groups that include Amakhosi Theatre; Umkhathi Theatre; Sadalala Amajekete Theatre and the Khayalethu Performing Arts Project. His poems and short stories have been published in newspapers, magazine and websites that include Crossing Borders Magazine; Poetry International Web; the Sunday News and The Zimbabwean newspaper.
Others have been featured in anthologies that include Short Writings From Bulawayo: Volumes I, II and III (ama’books Publishers, 2003, 2004 and 2005); Writing Now (Weaver Press, 2005); and The Obituary Tango: Selection of Writing from the Caine Prize for African Writing 2005 (New Internationalist Publications, 2006; Jacana Media ,2006).
In a recent interview, Christopher Mlalazi spoke about his writing.
One of your most recent short stories, "Election Day", was published in the Edinburgh Review. What is the story about? How long did it take you to write it?
The story is about election rigging in an unnamed African country. This story was inspired by accusations that always follow presidential elections.
There is no given timeframe in which to write a short story, one can even write it in an hour. At the 2006 Caine Prize workshop in Kenya, we were required to write a 3,000 word short story in ten days flat.
But it took me almost a month to write "Election Day" because I had about three versions of it and was failing to decide which was the best. Then I did a theatre adaptation of the same story, which helped further develop it, and after that, I came back to the prose version and worked on it until I came up with the draft that was happily and instantly accepted by the Edinburgh Review.
The story is set in a single room. Maintaining excitement through 3,000 words in such a situation is really demanding: one has to dig deep into one’s resources, always planting hooks to keep the reader absorbed. At the end, when I looked back I loved what I had done.
I had really been concentrating on the extra-personal but I later discovered that my story had both inner and personal conflict. The protagonist in the story is a president during the last day of presidential elections. The opposition is clearly winning, and everyone belonging to the ruling party, even the First Lady, has panicked and they want to flee the country before it is too late, because they had been ruling unjustly.
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