Representations of Poverty and Mental Health in Charles Mungoshi’s Fiction

Abstract

Abstract This article analyses the confluence between poverty and mental health as reflected in Charles Mungoshi’s fiction. Drawing on Crick Lund’s work, it evaluates the impact of low education, food insecurity, inadequate housing, low social class, low economic status, financial stress, low self-esteem, and depression in terms of the mental illness that afflicts many of Mungoshi’s characters. The factors that Lund highlights provide a working definition of poverty that is discussed in this study, through a close analysis of the major figures in Mungoshi’s novel Waiting for the Rain and his collections of short stories Coming of the Dry Season, Some Kinds of Wounds and Other Short Stories, and Walking Still. I also draw on some concepts analysed by Johannes Haushofer and Erns Fehr, and Augustine Nwoye’s definitions of categorical poverty and status-failure anxiety. Intellectual poverty is discussed in terms of certain cultural assumptions that determine the thoughts and actions of characters, as well as the poverty of leadership at the political level delineated by Mungoshi. The patriarchal nature of the societies depicted in the stories draws attention to the entrenched gender roles that prevail.