Short stories offer portraits from Mugabe's Zimbabwe

NEW YORK (Reuters) - With her debut collection of short stories, Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah has been heralded as a major new literary voice, but she said it was a struggle to write about her homeland without being didactic.

The collection, "An Elegy for Easterly," includes 13 stories told by characters ranging from a minister's widow to a married couple contemplating divorce against the backdrop of President Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

"Zimbabweans are more than just victims of Robert Mugabe," Gappah, 38, said in an interview during a recent visit to New York. "We are also horrible to each other. We're not very nice to women. We don't treat our maids very well."

But she adds, "I'm not here to represent the poor, down-trodden victims of Robert Mugabe, far from it."

"I aim to tell stories... When you write with a political aim, your work can be absolutely terrible," she said.

Gappah, who practices international trade law in Geneva and writes fiction in her free time, admits that it took some practice before she could write about Zimbabwe, where she visits at least once a year and where her family lives.

"I tried to write the great Zimbabwean novel and I tried to bring in everything: the death of justice, the land invasions, the collapse of the rule of law, the poverty ... and I found that it was too much," said Gappah.

Britain's Guardian newspaper called the collection a "delight." The Financial Times called it "a moving and disturbing portrait of contemporary Zimbabwe."

Gappah credits her distance from her homeland with helping her to imagine life from multiple perspectives and to explore less sympathetic characters.

Born in 1971 when Zimbabwe was still known as Rhodesia, she was a child in 1980 when Mugabe, then a liberation hero and a champion of democracy, came to power.

Mugabe, now 85, has clung to power despite a worsening political and economic crisis that critics blame on his policies. Millions of Zimbabweans have fled to neighboring states to escape poverty and unemployment.

"I wanted to look at a society that has all the good and bad that you find in any other society, but that also has, in addition, to deal with this totalitarian regime that is taking away people's rights."

Gappah began writing seriously in 2006, drafting 22 stories that year alone. But she said she has no plans to end her legal career to write full-time.

Gappah said that she does not want the political situation in Zimbabwe to define her as a writer, but said she appreciates that some readers will be drawn to her simply because they hope to make sense of newspaper headlines about her homeland.

"I would be extremely disingenuous if I do not accept that the very fact that Zimbabwe has been so much in the news means that my book is going to have a particularly good reception because it's a country that people know about, it's a country that people talk about," said Gappah.

(Editing by Michelle Nichols and Patricia Reaney)