Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma with short hair and wearing black square rimmed glasses, white button down with black leather vest, and black tie.
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is Kalanga (who occupy land in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa) and Ndebele (Zimbabwe and South Africa). Her novel Digging Stars (W. W. Norton, USA 2023) was a National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection, which “aims to deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology with a focus on work that highlights the diversity in scientific writing” and “serves as a catalyst to create discourse, understanding, and engagement with science for communities across the country.” Her novel House of Stone (Atlantic Books, UK 2018; W. W. Norton, USA 2019) won the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the 2019 Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, and was listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Balcones Fiction Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize.

Her novella-and-short story collection, Shadows (Kwela Books, South Africa 2013) won the 2014 Herman Bosman Prize for Literature and was listed for the Etisalat Prize. A recipient of honors including a Bellagio Center Residency and a Lannan Foundation Fiction Fellowship, Tshuma has taught fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Emerson College, where she was a Faculty Director of the James Baldwin Writers’ Colony summer program, which takes place in the Netherlands, London, and Paris. She teaches writing and community-led workshops globally and is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Reed College.

Excerpt from Digging Stars by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

He came late to pick me up at JFK airport, my father. In 2005, after the terror of 9/11, parents were pretty scared to let their children fly by themselves under the care of the airline – except Mama, of course! I had been on two connecting flights from Bulawayo, first at O. R. Tambo in Jo’burg, where I’d wandered off and the plane had almost left me, and then at Gatwick in London, where the British Airways stewardess in whose care I’d been put dumped me in a room full of candy, where I did what any sensible eleven-year-old would do and stuffed myself silly, crunching through M&Ms and Oreos and Cadbury chocolates and Belgian creams like a Pac-Man on steroids.

And then we were gliding over New York City, and I felt the thrill of being an astral thing. I tried to make out the Big Dipper or the Little Dipper in the early morning darkness as we descended into JFK, but the stars were outdone by the skyglow of man-made constellations winking up at us like cyborg kin from the cosmos below.

The next moment, I was on solid ground, my sneakers squeaking across dull parquet floors, blinking back tears under the blunt lights of the airport, my father nowhere to be seen. I must have felt the abysmal terror of being without him even then, unable to locate his face. It was a wondrous thing, that face, a solid, pecan vista on which I could trace my own button nose, with its fleshy alae, and plump lips that, when he smiled, revealed, just as my own did, a constellation of pearly teeth dipping into a galaxy of wine-dark gums.

I looked up at the dour-faced airport officer in whose care I’d been put, and then bent over and vomited a sludge of candy right onto his polished shoes.

He leapt back, his lips upended in dismay. “Why, you lil n- ”

And then, there he was, ambling down the airport corridor in black jeans and a tan leather jacket, the gold rims of his oval specs catching the light. I fluttered my eyes at him. I had not expected to feel so shy. He seemed impossibly tall, his gangly legs launching him in lofty strides. I remained standing beside the angry officer, next to a dark curio store with feather headdresses and wooden Indian dolls pressed against the glass, watching first his face and then his approaching feet.

“Hello, missy,” he said in English.

Hello, missy.

I smiled through my tears. We had always used English together, he and I.

He gave my cheek a gentle tug. And then he frowned. “What’s the matter?”

The officer, who had quietened down, began to speak real fast and aggressive again, gesticulating at me and then at the gooey mess at his feet. My father, too, began to speak, his voice rising to a dangerous pitch as he yelled, “She’s just a child, a child!”

I beamed, basking in his celestial warmth. He turned to walk away, and I followed him, slipping my hand in his. Together we were swept up by the sea of airport strangers, the surly officer rapidly fading into an insignificant spec.

Continue reading from Digging Stars in Brittle Paper.

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