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EDITOR – When music begins to speak to you, beyond just making you move your legs and waist, then you must know that you have grown old.

When you find yourself being drawn towards a search for meaning in a lot of things, then you must know that you have grown old.

When you start complaining about how they no longer make music like they used to do in the 90s or 80s, then you must know you have grown old.

For me that moment occurred in October 2018. I found myself going back to New Edition’s Can you Stand the Rain; Jaheim’s Put that Woman First; Backstreet Boys’ Drowning and a lot of songs by Sade.

When young men of the hood welcomed me to pleasure spots by shouting, “Mudhara zvamauya zvanaka”, I never took it seriously. I thought it was their way of soliciting for alcohol favours from me.

But now I know. I think I have grown old.

I have grown so old that I have taken to writing poetry! I have grown so old that the WhatsApp iconography that young people use when chatting to each other is alien to me.

I have grown so old that on Christmas Day I was shocked to find out that under 18s have taken over drinking spots and old men like me must be at home watching over our vazukuru, or we should find new drinking spots where old men gather to reminisce about the past.

This dilemma is what Ivan Turgenev tackles in Fathers and Sons (1862).

This novel explores the battle between the young (nihilists), represented by Bazarov, and the old (conservatives/romantics) represented by Nikolai and Pavel.

I find the handling of generational gaps a tricky affair. I still remember a road trip that featured myself, Memory Chirere, Ignatius Mabasa and David Mungoshi.

I had a playlist, which vacillated between lovers’ rock and 80s and 90s Zimbabwe.

We are talking about Mbira Dzenharira, Zigzag Band, Thomas Mapfumo, Simon Chimbetu and Alick Macheso.

After the three-hour journey, Mabasa said: “You know what young man? Your playlist kinda defies this generational gap that exists between us! I mean, all of us kinda connected with it!” Unbeknown to Mabasa, I had already crossed the border and existed in what he viewed as their territory.

So we have Bazarov, who considers the intellectual and romantic sensibilities of the older generation as an impediment to science. He hates poetry.

He hates music. He hates anything that cannot be measured by science.

He walks around with a science’s tape measure and throws away as superstition anything that does not acquiesce itself with science.

For him, a descent chemist is 20 times more useful than any poet! Poets are you still around? Lol!
What’s fun about this novel is that the fetishisation of science that we see here in Zimbabwe, for instance, in STEM, means we are, in 2018, considering a trajectory of the Russia of 1870! It is a trajectory that has to do with reducing everything to abstract and measurable units. It is a trajectory of prancing around with rulers and scales!

Bazarov does not even believe in the Marxist gibberish that romanticises the efforts of the peasants and working class.

For him, if something cannot be measured, if the consciousness of the peasant and worker is just based on “faith” and conjecture, then it is useless and superstitious to consider it.

Occupying the extreme end of this spectrum are the fathers the most expressive of whom is Pavel. Pavel represents what Bazarov considers as hogwash: aristocratism, liberalism, progress, principles.

For him these are all useless catchwords that have no place in his world, a world in which people act because they consider their actions as useful, useful in the sense that they are actions done by rational beings to create a good environment for rational men to eat, breathe and work.

The rest is jujuphobia. This leaves Pavel and Nikolai lost and alienated. It is as if the young are bent on jettisoning them out of this world for being useless old men.

But even as Bazarov entices us and Turgenev with his words, his demise at the hands of a scientific experiment gone wrong seems like an attack on science by Turgenev himself.

The obsession with one aspect of life, at the expense of other aspects, this belief that you have discovered something when what you have discovered is but just a miniscule aspect of the whole, is a tragedy.

Thus the old and the young must find a way of living together and understanding each other.

In the words of David Mungoshi: “We too used to be young and impressionable; so when I look at these young people who think that they are different, I laugh. I laugh because we were once like them; one day they will be like us!”

Tanaka Chidora