Versions of Zimbabwe. New Approaches to Literature and Culture

Robert Muponde, Ranka Primorac, Robert Muponde, Ranka Primorac

• Verlag: Weaver Press
• Jahr: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781779223890
• Thema: Literatura
• Thema: Crítica literaria africana

The book is the result of a collaboration of scholars from southern Africa and overseas, whose work emphasises hitherto overshadowed subjects of literature, exposing new and untried approaches to Zimbabwean writing. The contributors focus on pluralities, inclusiveness and the breaking of boundaries, and elucidate how literary texts are betraying multiple versions and opinions of Zimbabwe, arguing that only a multiplicity of opinions on Zimbabwe can do the complexity of the society and history justice.

Part V.

Writing, history, nation

Chapter 13

Some thoughts on history, memory, and writing in Zimbabwe

Kizito Z. Muchemwa

I.

Zimbabwean fiction, in both the white and black traditions, embodies a convergence of history, memory and imaginative acts in search of individual and group identities. This convergence of history, memory, and writing often deconstructs and contests archival practices which seek to capture and freeze the past through officially sanctioned discourses. Official history is selective and supportive of the status quo. This chapter offers some thoughts on ways Zimbabwean fiction and auto/biography written in English set out to contest official narratives of the past in order to open new spaces for the re-creation of cultural memory, revisions of the past and re-inscriptions of identity.

Both memory and history deal with the past. Zimbabwean novels, stories and autobiographies written in English abound with characters trapped by history. Texts such as Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) or Tim McLoughlin’s Karima (1985) – both dealing with Zimbabwean wars – represent racial, gendered, and ethnic groups that have been left out of official narratives. On the other hand, in texts contributing to the Zimbabwean nationalist narrative (found in the black literary tradition) there is an insistence on memory as a sacred set of absolute meanings, owned by a privileged ethnic group. The production of this memory of exclusivity is found in the nationalistic epic narratives of Solomon Mutswairo, who is not so much a father of the Zimbabwean black novel in English (Vambe, 2001) as the literary originator of an unproblematized and ethnic nationalism. When so considered, memory becomes a set of instruments used to exclude and expel the undeserving from the ancestral house. Ancestral memory, initially appropriated to interrogate colonial misrepresentations of the black ‘other’, now reveals its inability to provide adequate sites for the creation of a multi-ethnic, post-colonial national identity. In such a context, autobiographical writing – especially when combined with journalism, as in the case of Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa: White Boy in Africa (1996) becomes an effective way of countering false mediations and incomplete representations found in official historical narratives. In Karima, Mukiwa, The Stone Virgins and other such texts, writers resist the slipping into oblivion of unacknowledged, unspoken, and unwritten traumas of history.

II.

History relies on documentary evidence but the process of producing and preserving documents is often owned and controlled by powerful groups. In Zimbabwe, historical events have gone unreported or under-reported. It is this creation of absence in history and memory that informs much of Zimbabwean literature. Imagined narratives establish hidden clues, stories and documents, allowing writing to adopt the excluded and rejected, to enlarge on that which is originally consigned to footnotes, and to open new vistas on recorded events and historical personages. Yvonne Vera in particular demonstrates a mistrust of academic history and openly admits to distorting it artistically (Ranger, 2002b). The uses to which history and memory are put have a bearing on constructions of identity. Texts considered here demonstrate how history and memory can be used to maintain racial, ethnic and gender privilege. This misuse is marked by either destroying or hiding sites of memory, denying the other the right to speak for itself, adopting strategies of false representation and illegitimate mediation, and ‘disappearing’ the other. This has been a characteristic of Zimbabwean colonial and post-colonial history especially during times of war.

Zimbabwean fiction consistently makes use of biographical and autobiographical modes. Not only do writers use fiction to interrogate facts found in historical narrative; they also seek to collapse boundaries of discipline and genre that separate history and fiction. Matthew Henry demonstrates the dynamic ways in which the American novelist E. L. Doctorow explores the interstices of history and fiction. Doctorow collapses and blurs boundaries between these two modes of narrative in order to achieve ‘historical consensus or imaginative re-interpretation’ (Henry,1997:133). Doctorow, in his own words, privileges fiction as ‘a kind of speculative history, perhaps a superhistory’ (ibid.). Zimbabwean literature veers between these two ways of treating recorded historical facts.

Although the black and white traditions in Zimbabwean literature rarely write to each other and often write across each other, their apparent ideological and stylistic isolation masks the sharing of common concerns. The texts considered here, although often quite different in style and imaginative conception, reflect a preoccupation with history and memory that deserves attention. Stanlake Samkange’s On Trial for My Country (1966), Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain (1978), Dambudzo Marechera’s The House of Hunger (1978), Tim Mcloughlin’s Karima (1985), Chenjerai Hove’s Bones (1988), John Eppel’s The Giraffe Man (1994), Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa (1996), and Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002) are shaped by history (both written and oral) and respond to it. For writers such as these, who work against the foundational grain of nativist aesthetics (to use a metaphor derived from Marechera’s The House of Hunger), history is an unavoidable prison-house from which to escape.

Such writers often use post-modernist techniques that convey a sense of escape from the entrapment of language, traditional cultural memory, and history. Marechera fractures language, not on the level of syntax but on the level of metaphor where his imagination dredges the violent and disgusting images that may assail the reader’s sense of decorum. For Marechera it is the decorous that is stultifying, that in its pretence of order violates the individual’s agency and power of self-representation and self-creation. The House of Hunger challenges linear perceptions of history, which close off possibilities of re-conceptualising causality. Memory, both private and communal, is about celebrating specific aspects of the past. By unifying different temporal zones, memory energises the past to inform the present and shape the future. Memory locates and constructs group and individual identities in a time continuum. A concern with ancestral memory arises out of the need to repair identities damaged by colonialism. Texts such as those discussed here contest primordial and essentialist models of identity. Zimbabwean black writers who come after Samkange and Mutswairo treat ancestral memory with ambivalence.

III.

Seeking to retrieve ancient traditions that are older than the imperialist imposition, these writers ironically reject the nativism and patriarchy they discover. In a world bereft of ancestral memory, Marechera writes about painful recent pasts by invoking images and symbols that articulate the fragmented character of these pasts. Marechera’s fiction deals with the immediate past, not recollected in tranquillity but remembered with excruciating disgust and horror. The focus on marginalized groups in novels by Hove and Vera reveals how both written colonial history and the black oral tradition are often involved in similarly stressing a monolithic past and memories that either reduce to subsidiary roles or consign to oblivion the pasts of women, children and those who are not indigenes of the country. Ways of remembering and forgetting the past are probed. This probing is singularly absent in the current official obsession with history that has seen an alarming rise in the production of patriotic packages of the past.

Secrecy guards the skeletons in the nation’s cupboard. 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. The word that is taboo carries the extreme experiences of rape and incest that patriarchal history and memory gloss over. Rape and incest – as Vera’s work so powerfully shows – violently destroy language and human victims who are left with no words to mediate physical and psychological horrors. In Under the Tongue, victimhood, representation, and mediation are themes that develop from the trope of the tongue. Traumatic experiences of violence, rape, and incest trigger claustrophobic introspection and silence.

IV.

In the black tradition, spirit possession is used as a strategy of recovery of the tongue and explains the fascination with ruins and graveyards. Spirit possession, although largely conceived in terms of passivity, does, in principle, allow for the coming to life of suppressed discourses and identities. The backward migration of the spirit allows it to rediscover that which has been lost and discarded, those aspects that are too horrific to integrate and accept within a modern consciousness. In On Trial for My Country, Waiting for the Rain, Bones, and Under the Tongue, the forgotten dead kinsmen or kinswomen seek justice. The spirits of the dead haunt individuals, families and communities. These are avenging spirits that demand remembrance, recognition, and re-incorporation into cultural memory. Bantu cosmogony suggests various outcomes in spirit possession: a momentary transformation of personality, a return to the past, a resurrection of the dead, and a metaphoric death of the living. No one meaning is allowed to be dominant as all four meanings are simultaneously present at any given time. These outcomes of spirit possession are metaphors of suppressed discourses. These discourses contain memory and history. To allow these discourses to be rehabilitated is to allow memory and history pushed to the periphery to be relocated to the centre.

In the early pages of On Trial for My Country, Stanlake Samkange refers to spirit possession to achieve a number of things: to give authority and authenticity to the black version of history, to show that the technology of writing is not the only way of capturing and maintaining cultural memory, to show that the exclusion from the technology of writing does not entail loss or absence of history and memory, and to demonstrate the antiquity and sacredness of history and memory. Hove’s poetic prose in Bones relies very heavily on oral mnemonics and motifs to demonstrate these purposes, although there is no direct instance of possession in this novel. The black characters are ordinary peasants excluded from Western formal education and the settler culture of writing, an exclusion that leads to reliance on traditional Shona discourse that resists the monologic fixity of the written world of coloniality. In foregrounding orality in Bones, Hove challenges the authority of the written word in the creation of texts, canons, history and memory. And yet, although closely associated with the classical Shona oral culture, Bones illustrates the point that monologism is also found in oral societies. The novel is about the patriarchal truncation and repression of cultural memory. The narrative voices of women show the extent to which cultural memory in traditional African culture is associated with silencing strategies that have robbed women of the power to speak for themselves. To escape the cruelties, deprivations and injustices of colonialism is to enter a world that is older than colonialism. Ironically this ancestral past represses women.

V.

Books by white Zimbabweans McLoughlin, Eppel and Godwin do not foreground issues of gender that are found in fiction written by black writers. Rather, they interrogate the place of whites in a changing historical environment. Before independence this probing of memory and history to prepare for the re-inscription of white identity in Zimbabwe was carried out in McLoughlin’s Karima, a novel about the war of liberation. Stylistically, Karima is an ambitious and experimental novel that seeks to address the problems of representation of the other in African literature. McLoughlin uses a dramatic technique, in which asymmetrically arranged scenes establish contrast and comparison of parallel worlds that tragically collide when they are forced to meet beyond the pretence and paternalism of master-servant relationships. Karima shows that different racial groups inhabiting the same country interpret events in different ways, and this accounts for the racialized sites of memory and history.

The settler government as depicted in Karima has provided the post-independence black government with ready models for the use of propaganda to stem the tide of history and to create and sustain a monolithic, racist, and privileged but unsustainable collective identity. In Karima radio is used to engender a trite, saccharine, masculinized and racialized patriotism. Programmes are so structured that no contrary voices are heard, thus create a stultifying and dangerous parochialism. Newspapers and television have also been subverted to serve narrow ethnic interests that masquerade as national ones. To counter white propaganda that has appropriated the public space available for the creation of racial memory, black characters use village meetings, modern orality, and songs of liberation.

While McLoughlin’s Karima focuses on the collapse of pasts and memories and stands at the edge of an as yet undefined national identity, John Eppel’s Giraffe Man and Peter Godwin’s Mukiwa examine spaces for the articulation of a non-racialized post-independence national identity. The autobiographical mode allows these writers to use details from personal lives that are linked to the colonial history of the country, in order to trivialize colonial memory. Eppel’s riotous comic imagination unmasks the pretentiousness of pioneer settlers. White colonial education, made to transmit the cultural memory of the white settler, is shown to be tragicomically inadequate in preparing the white child for the reality of the post-colonial nation.

In Godwin’s Mukiwa, on the other hand, it is the post-colonial government that stands guilty of evasion, distortion and misrepresentation in dealing with the tragic history of the civil war of the 1980s. Misrepresentation of a people’s history and memory is synonymous with distortion, evasion, and destruction of truth. The narrator’s return to the locations of specific historical crimes – the killing of civilians in Matabeleland – is also an imaginative return to a past that, although under siege, can be retrieved. Wanton physical destruction of sites of memory is a facet of ...