The Setting Sun and the Rolling World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1987

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Story 12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Story 12 Summary: “Coming of the Dry Season”

On a Wednesday, a letter from his hometown informs Moab Gwati, a young man living and working in the city, that his mother is on her deathbed. With no money to travel home until his Friday payday, Moab waits until Saturday to visit his mother.

Once Friday arrives, rather than prepare for a trip the next morning, Moab goes out and gets colossally drunk. He picks up a girl named Chipo and sleeps with her that night. He and Chipo spend the rest of the weekend drinking until he runs out of most of his money on Sunday morning. When Moab drops her off at the train station that afternoon, he gives her three shillings.

As Moab walks back to his apartment, he contemplates his mother. On one hand, he feels guilty for not going home as soon as he received his paycheck; on the other, he feels nothing is ever good enough for her. The smell of April leaves and the start of the dry season remind Moab of home, specifically his mother.

On Tuesday, Moab receives a telegram informing him that his mother died Saturday night. Later that day, he comes home to find Chipo naked in his bed. Although Moab never expected to see her again, Chipo insists they should marry. This too reminds Moab of his mother, and he suddenly despises Chipo, believing she came “back only to complicate his world” (117).

Furious, Chipo puts on her clothes and takes a large wad of cash from her purse. She leaves the three shillings Moab gave her and storms out. Moab cries, but not for his mother’s death.

Story 12 Analysis

Unlike the characters from the previous two stories, Moab is among the rare, fortunate young Zimbabwean men who successfully lands a job in the city. Although the precise nature of his work is unclear, the fact that he makes enough money to send some home to his mother suggests that the job pays better than most manual labor positions. Yet like Magufu in “The Brother,” Moab turns to alcohol and sex to cope with the soul-draining nature of city life.

The character Moab may resemble most, however, is not Magufu or other alcoholic city-dwellers like Hama’s father; it is Bishi from “White Stones and Red Earth.” Both characters are summoned home because of deaths in the family, and both characters struggle to cry over their lost loved one, having been physically and emotionally cut off from their home villages. In addition, both Moab and Bishi hold deep sense-associations between their homes and certain scents. As Moab smells the “harvest-time smoke of burning maize-leaves” (115), he shivers at the sudden memory of his mother.

Finally, “Coming of the Dry Season” depicts yet another fraught parent-child relationship, this time between a mother and son. Moab attributes his unhappiness to his mother, who seems to have played a central role in convincing her son to move to the city. This resentment generates enormous toxicity, as Moab negatively associates the kind and generous Chipo with his mother, despite the fact that all they seem to have in common is that they are both women with emotional needs. Consequently, Moab seems incapable of expressing either familial or romantic love for a woman.