Breaking Sahara

When Laura Gardner immigrated to Sweden from Zimbabwe, she renamed herself Sahara, to accord with what she took as the world's impression of her: a dry and rocky landscape. But this act of creative appropriation is lost on her younger sister Jessica, left behind in Zuwadale to deal with the daily realities of rampant unemployment, alcoholism and crime. Breaking Sahara alternates between two sisters' views of a life as seen across the fence of countries, oceans, and life choices. Seen from Zimbabwe, Sweden is a source of wealth restricted only by the reluctance of relatives to share it, and a cold, land of lonely people. But in Sweden, the daily diet of competition for status and jobs and the visceral dissonance felt by the immigrant educator over differences in style and substance between the old life and the new is a constant undercurrent of tension in Sahara's solo existence – until the appearance of a young, motorbike-riding Nordic native threatens to shatter her view of herself. To younger sister Jessica, Sahara's job is the source of the money that her family is always in need of, for paying off corrupt police officers, life-saving surgery or the latest fees to secure a child's place in school. To Sahara, the courtyard of her mother's house in a surburb of Harare, is a continually pulsating nerve triggering memories of a neighbourhood filled with the aroma of baking bread, the call of geckos and avocado trees heavy with head-sized fruit, but also a mother's drunken rants and a brother's petty criminality. In Breaking Sahara, the life-changing experience of leaving one's homeland to begin anew in a strange land is brought to vivid and heartbreaking life – from the point of view of both the one who leaves and those left behind.