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Reviewer: Flora Veit-Wild

This extract is forms part of a larger review essay that encompasses a discussion of The End of Unheard Narratives: Contemporary Perspectives on Southern African Literatures by Bettina Weiss Female Identity in Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction by Katrin Berndt African Oral Story-Telling Tradition and the Zimbabwean Novel in English by Maurice Taonezvi Vambe

The whole essay is available on Project Muse: Scholarly Journals on Line.

This extract is reprinted on this website with permission of Flora Veit-Wild.

What does literary criticism mean in times of crisis? How does literary scholarship engage with developments in a country that was once hailed as a model of political and economic progress in Africa and is now often considered to be on its deathbed? In which ways do assessments of literary works reflect the heated political discourse about the Zimbabwean nation, and in which way does it enter the contested space between nation and narration?

Since 2000 the political arena in Zimbabwe has changed drastically. after the ZANU(PF) government of Robert Mugabe lost the referendum for a constitutional change that was intended to enforce the position of the president, it instigated a massive and violent take-over of commercially owned farmland, blaming white farmers and the British government for the drastic economic deterioration in the country. At the same time, a broad oppositional movement spread throughout the country with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) at its core, and the cities and Matabeleland at its strongholds. in the parliamentary elections of the same year, ZANU(PF) used what internal and international observers described as an equally massive and violent intimidation and ensured a slight majority over the MDC. Since then Zimbabwe has been accused of systematically stifling democratic forces in the country, while the rapid downward path of the economy has led the majority of the people near starvation. after the parliamentary elections of March 2005, operation 'Murambatsvina' ('Drive out trash') provoked an international outcry at what appeared to many as an arbitrary onslaught on the poorest of the poor; the destruction of houses in the settlements and townships around the cities left more than 700,000 people in Zimbabwe homeless.  

The publication of Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture in May 2005, which coincided with this impetuous act of urban 'cleansing', reflects in the most immediate way the involvement of editors and contributors with the political discourse about the narrative of the Zimbabwean nation. A compilation of mostly excellent essays by different hands, Versions reads like a monograph by a single author. the various critics’ voices are driven forward and held together through a common concern – their anxiety about what is happening to the Zimbabwean nation at the present time in history. The authors take as their point of departure a 'writing against blindness' – as the editors entitle their introduction – a blindness resulting from the discursive effects of what the ZANU(PF) government under Robert Mugabe has termed the 'Third Chimurenga' (war of liberation). against the monolithic, authoritarian (and male) version of 'patriotic' history, by which the government defines Zimbabwe’s past and present, the collection sheds light on the many versions and multiple voices that challenge this narrative. This critical metanarrative, implicit in all of the essays, unfolds around the core issues of violence, silence, memory, and belonging, as well as the ways writers have represented these themes. An essential part of 'debating of violence' is the operation known as 'Gukurahundi,' the massacres of tens of thousands of people in Matabeleland in the early 1980s, an event omitted in the official historiography of the country. From this 'genocide,' as a number of the authors call it, a line is drawn back to the silence covering the violence perpetrated against civilians by guerrillas during the Second Chimurenga, and forward to the present with its various forms of state violence.

During the past half century, Zimbabwe has produced some of the most prolific and finest writers from Africa; starting with veterans such as Solomon Mutswairo, Stanlake Samkange, and Lawrence Vambe in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by prominent voices emerging in the 1970s and particularly since the country’s independence in 1980, such as Dambudzo Marechera, Charles Mungoshi, Stanley Nyamfukudza, Chenjerai Hove, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Shimmer Chinodya, and Yvonne Vera. This is not to forget the significant body of literary works in Shona and Ndebele little known outside Zimbabwe as well as the texts of white writers such as Doris Lessing and the recently published Peter Godwin and Alexandra Fuller. Compared to this grand output of literature in three languages, there has been a marked dearth of literary criticism. The multitude of critical works that have accompanied the history of literary development in West Africa, for example, is – for various reasons – in no way equalled by studies devoted to Zimbabwean writers.

Brief preliminary introductions into Zimbabwean literature in English by George Kahari (1980) and Musaemura Zimunya (1982) were followed by my own work, Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers: A Social History of Zimbabwean Literature (1992), which was based on a questionnaire study published as Survey of Zimbabwean Writers: Education and Literary Careers (1992). though limited in its theoretical and analytical scope (see Chennells, 'Marxist and Pan-Africanist,' as well as Vambe in Versions), it set a framework on which the study of Zimbabwean literature relied for a long time. Rino Zhuwarara’s Introduction to Zimbabwean Literature in English and Vambe’s small compilation Orality and Cultural Identities in Zimbabwe followed in 2001. As regards to Shona literature, Kahari produced a voluminous critical body concentrating on the novel in Shona (four volumes, 1975–90) with categorizations and descriptions of style and plot, whereas Emmanuel Chiwome’s Social History of the Shona Novel (1996) looked into the factors shaping this literature. A detailed analysis of about fifty white settler novels was undertaken by Anthony Chennells in his PhD thesis of 1982. Apart from these studies of sections of Zimbabwean writers, there exist a few books on individual authors, e. g., on Marechera (Veit-Wild, Chennells and Veit-Wild, and Pattison), Dangarembga (Willey and Treiber), and Vera (Muponde and Maodzwa-Taruvinga).

The new studies of Zimbabwean literature under consideration in this essay not only fill in a glaring gap but also critically engage with the scholarship of their predecessors, as it is highlighted in Maurice Vambe’s contribution in Versions on 'the Poverty of Theory in the Study of Zimbabwean Literature.' Vambe challenges the sociological approach in the two influential 'social histories' of Zimabwean literature (Veit-Wild and Chiwome), which he reproaches for being too deterministic and thereby foreclosing pluralistic or ambivalent readings of literary works. Thus the recent publications make abundantly clear that the discursive and theoretical devices and analytical language that many of the critics have at their disposal have developed significantly. The new generation of Zimbabwean literary scholars is headed by graduates of the University of Zimbabwe (UZ), notably Robert Muponde and Maurice Vambe, who both have brought forward a remarkable output of critical works over the last few years. While their superb analytical expertise can certainly be attributed to the general development of literary theory, they also seem to have recuperated the best out of the combination of postnationalist and postcolonial/post-structuralist erudition of teachers at the English Department of UZ such as Rino Zhuwarara and Anthony Chennells.

Versions also reflects the changed political situation and power relations in Zimbabwe on the level of its categorization of literary texts. A crucial limitation of previous scholarship on Zimbabwean literature was the division of writers by race, by language, or by genre; that is, studies dealt with either black or white authors, with either English (of national importance) or vernacular (i.e., ethnic) texts. one of the major achievements of Versions is that it overcomes racial or ethnic divisions. Now that whites have become an ethnic minority and Shona and Ndebele works address questions of the Zimbabwean nation as a whole just as much as anglophone texts, the collection undertakes a critique of the various strands of Zimbabwean literature as parts of a collective national discourse. as this discourse is not restricted to specific genres, the book consequently, and in accordance with recent cultural theory, comprises analyses of a variety of genres: prose fiction (including crime fiction), autobiography/memoir, poetry, drama, and film. The discursive level of the deliberations is further enhanced through the inclusion of an essay by the historian Terence Ranger as well as Vambe’s already mentioned metacritique.

As the recent developments in Zimbabwe make poignantly clear, the manipulation of language is a central element and instrument in upholding power. 'operation Murambatsvina' ('operation' already being one of the euphemisms used in the context of such actions) was quickly renamed 'operation Garikai—restore order' by government rhetoric. Reading Hove’s collection of essays Palaver Finish (2002) in the context of Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity, Carolyn Rooney argues that 'for both Adorno and Hove, a certain manipulation of language is what precedes abuses of power in that language'; ' ‘corruption’—Hove declares—‘begins with the corruption of language’ ' (Versions 59 and 58). Analyzing Hove’s poetry from the mid-1980s to his latest collection, Blind Moon (2003), Rooney observes how an increasing scarceness of words, a minimalism, reflects a withholding and resistance against the sanctification of discourse through the ruling party. The refusal to speak subverts the power of those who try to monopolize all speech(es). The important political function attributed to writers and poets is equally affirmed by Preben Kaarsholm’s overview of the development of Zimbabwean writing since independence. Pointing at the way in which many literary texts have worked towards 'de-silencing, and thereby helping to remove the fears and mental distortions that continue to make people un-free' (Versions 14), Kaarsholm concludes that 'in their debating of violence Zimbabwean literary writers have fulfilled a function of social conscience, and have shown a passion of commitment unparalleled in neighbouring national literatures' (Versions 22).

Another discursive strand running through Versions regards the questions of gender and of age. 'Patriotic history' in its present form, it is argued, is history written by men—more specifically, by old men. Hence the 'other side' of this history is either told by women or seen through the eyes of children or younger men; this is a perspective developed by a number of writers, notably Vera, Hove, Dangarembga, Marechera, Chinodya, and Lessing, who have thematized rape, incest, or other forms of male violence towards women and children. Speaking out in public about their rape by male comrades in the guerrilla camps, female ex-combatants broke a long-guarded taboo and contributed to 'de-silencing' and deconstructing the male history of the Second Chimurenga, a theme taken up in Jane Bryce’s analysis of Ingrid Sinclair’s controversial film Flame (1996). War violence as seen through the eyes of children is the focal point in Annie Gagiano’s astute exploration of hitherto hardly noticed texts by Marechera, those published posthumously in the volume Scrapiron Blues (1994). In the surrealist play 'the alley' as well as in 'the Concentration Camp,' a compilation of prose, drama and poetry, Marechera digs deep into the nation’s collective trauma and uncovers 'those shameful and anguishing memories' (Versions 47); he penetrates, says Annie Gagiano, 'to the most rotten core of war—its abuse of children.' While in Marechera’s works children appear as silent victims or witnesses of the horror of war and violence, two war novels analyzed by Muponde project children as models of newly found identities. He explains how Son of the Soil (1976) by Wilson Katiyo and Child of War (1985) by Ben Chirasha (pseudonym of Chinodya) exemplify the 'nexus between childhood, history and resistance as versions of childhoods that are central to the construction of notions of belongingness in a nation-space' (Versions 129).

Quite different from such constructions of black childhood within the process of Zimbabwean nation-building is the way white childhood is negotiated. Ashleigh Harris and Anthony Chennells explore how the white Zimbabwean author, who now speaks from a position of 'the other,' of an ethnic minority, uses autobiographical fiction to question and to define identity. The ambivalent relationship between the claiming and the questioning of belonging is already reflected in the titles of Godwin’s Mukiwa—A White Boy in Africa (1996) and Fuller’s Don’t Go to the Dogs Tonight—An African Childhood (2002), which have become best-sellers among white Zimbabweans. In both narratives, argues Harris, nostalgic representations of white childhood serve to legitimize the white self and to inscribe it into the national discourse. in Mukiwa, however, 'personal trauma seems somehow eclipsed by national trauma,' when the narrator, who has witnessed the Matabeleland massacres and testified about them to the British press, is declared persona non grata by the Zimbabwean government. Hence, ironically, while having found a place at the side of his fellow-Zimbabweans, he is simultaneously expelled from his country. This is where Chennells detects a moment of satire in the postcolonial white Zimbabwean autobiography. While the early colonialist autobiographical narratives contributed to the larger imperial narrative, he argues that in Zimbabwe today 'minor and major histories have swapped places and probably will swap places again' (Versions 136). the transethnic perspective that Versions reflects through the inclusion of white-authored texts is enlarged by Mickias Musiyiwa and Tommy Matshakayile-Ndlovu’s essay dealing with competing ethnicities in Shona and Ndebele literature—remarkable already for the fact that both languages are treated in the same piece of criticism. While early Shona and Ndebele writings often depicted the relationship between the Shona and the Ndebele as hostile, younger writers turn against their elders—that is, turn against the history of the 'old men'—and attack them for corruption, political hypocrisy, tribalism, or regionalism.

Place as well as ethnicity, though at times exposed to ambiguities or transformations, can become the basis for restoring a sense of identity and belonging. in her insightful and informative analysis of the urban setting in Rodwell Musekiwa Machingauta’s Detective Ridgemore Riva (1994) and Paul Freedom’s thriller Rumours of Ophir (1998), Ranka Primorac explains how such a sense of identity can be conveyed through a genre that so far has attracted little critical attention, the detective novel. The urban space as a space of and for women is a theme running through Yvonne Vera’s works, as is underlined by Sarah Nuttall’s analysis of the 'material infrastructures of urban subjectivity' in Vera’s city writing (Versions 192). In contrast, Dan Wylie focuses on questions of space and belonging in rural settings in his 'ecological reading' of poetry about Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands.

The meta-narrative running through Versions comes to a close in its last section, entitled 'Writing, History, Nation.' Linking Vera’s Stone Virgins (2002) to Godwin’s Mukiwa, which share the setting and the stories of the horrors of 'Gukurahundi,' to texts by a number of other black and white writers, Kizito Muchemwa takes up many of the discursive threads introduced in the preceding essays. 'Secrecy guards the skeletons in the nation’s cupboard,' he says: the forces of silence are the taboos that prohibit public exposure of rape, incest, and murder in families. that which is hidden from public scrutiny cannot be spoken and cannot be written. rape and incest—as Vera’s work so powerfully shows—violently destroy language. (Versions 197) yet, Muchemwa concludes, in line with other authors of the collection, that as writing is a process of 'de-silencing,' it 'becomes a mnemonic device of preserving lives that are ‘vulnerable, exposed and hopeless’ ' (Versions 199): writing becomes resistance. Reading Vera’s first novel Nehanda (1993) as prefiguring her last, The Stone Virgins (2002), Lene Bull Christiansen argues that the recreation of the nationalist myth that has cohered around Mbuya Nehanda, sustains the spiritual leadership of Robert Mugabe and the current myth-making of the ruling party. Stone Virgins, however, which thematizes the atrocities of the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland, exposes as an illusion the myth of the ceasefire in unison and the Unity accord between ZANU and ZAPU of 1987. Christiansen concludes that 'in The Stone Virgins the spiritual narrative of the nation has become blurred, fragmented and broken and, as such, it does not correspond with any nationalist version of the nation’s temporality' (Versions 212). Hence Vera’s last novel creates a 'polyphonic narrative space' (Versions 215).

How precarious and endangered this space is, is made abundantly clear in Terence Ranger’s concluding essay about 'the struggle over the past in contemporary Zimbabwe.' 'Headmasters and College lecturers, if not yet university professors, have been instructed in patriotic history by war veterans,' Ranger recounts. Furthermore, journalism courses 'are to be restricted to entrants who have completed militia training. in November 2002 it was declared that all tertiary level students would be obliged to take a compulsory course in patriotism' (Versions 235).

While Ranger points at a few, scarce signs of intellectual dissent, particularly located at the State University of the Midlands under Vice-Chancellor Ngwabi Bhebe, a historian, he emphasizes that under the present circumstances 'it is virtually impossible for critics to develop a counter-narrative in any systematic way' (Versions 242). Despite this rather pessimistic outlook, Versions of Zimbabwe: New Approaches to Literature and Culture uncovers in an astoundingly comprehensive and concise way the many dissenting voices in the ranks of Zimbabwean literature, voices that contribute to alternative readings of national history and, as such, stand side by side with 'the opposition, civil society activists and (what remains of) the independent media [who] are courageously challenging the official version of Zimbabwe’s past, and of what it is to be Zimbabwean' (from the introduction to Versions xiv). Carefully edited like all books by Weaver Press, Versions of Zimbabwe ends with a list of all the works cited by the contributors, a compilation that constitutes a very comprehensive and up-to-date bibliography.


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