Thirty-five years ago, before he won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Percival Everett wrote Zulus, a little-known post-apocalyptic tale published by a small Indie press. It was the fourth in Everett’s growing list of novels. It may arouse interest now, though, because Everett’s won the Pulitzer for James, a clever, funny, imaginative re-telling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the character Jim. Are there hints in Zulus of this witty, sardonic voice to come?
Published in 1990 by The Permanent Press in Sag Harbor, Zulus was said to be “a difficult book to describe” in regard to substance and style. Accessible and arcane, fantastical but Orwellian, the novel is set in a bleak, impoverished future after a thermonuclear war about 12 years earlier. It has a bizarre plot. Ironically, though, the book seems particularly relevant today, even if it features an oddball heroine, 300 pounds of rolling fat, Alice Achitophel [A-KIT-of-fell], a government clerk whose absurd mechanical job is to register people’s preferred religious beliefs. Until she is sexually assaulted one day by a bum, and knows instantly that she is pregnant. That’s trouble because in Everett’s surreal dystopian society, women are sterilized. Alice quickly becomes an object to be destroyed by the government, but also a potential “brood mare” to produce females for rebels hiding out in caves in the hills. Alone, unhappy, a huge blob of a human being, she had a loving father who killed himself in despair over the world.
The structure of the book is also unusual—alphabetical chapters from A to Z, reminiscent of the child’s bouncing ball game. Forget the title if you think of the ethnic people of South Africa. Everett slyly leads readers awry because, as he discloses, “Zulu” means Z in military lingo. The last chapter of the book is “Z is for Zulus,” just as the first words of the book are: “A is for Achitophel.”
It’s doubtful that many readers will recognize the name’s Biblical and literary antecedents, or many of Everett’s references that follow, including untranslated quotations in German and Latin from philosophers. But so it goes with letters introducing facts, both pessimistic and esoteric. “B is for blood, for example, and for the, “three Boers were slightly wounded on 16 December 1838 in the Boer War. . . leaving 3,000 Zulus dead. “ B is also for Buonaparte, who lost 300,000 troops in Spain. And for the Boston Massacre, a media event,” writes Everett.
Slowly, a theme emerges about the inevitability of war, the lack of affection, friendship, love, the tyranny of mob violence, the pervasiveness of rotten food, the chemical ruination of nature, the inevitable death of civilization.
Fantastic events occur. Midway, Alice’s huge body splits open, and a thinner self emerges, the original shell and brain viciously pounced on by the rebels. Along the way she falls in love with Kevin Peters, a Black loner who saves her life, and at the end, they agree on what to do about the “sick planet” they inhabit. What’s the point of going on if nothing changes, if all things are poisoned? It would be a depressing theme were it not for Everett’s magical realism, his humor, the humanity he gives to Alice. A forerunner of James? Actually, Zulus is the kind of book one imagines Everett might have written AFTER James, though not as good. The mature author who delivered in James a polished, hilarious, concentrated satire on race and morality knows that To Be is more challenging than Not To Be.
