faty
Get Complete Project Material File(s) Now!
Chenjerai Hove: Making Sense of Post-independence
This chapter analyzes some of the poems in Chenjerai Hove’s four collections of poetry: Up in Arms (1982), Red Hills of Home (1985), Rainbows in the Dust (1998) and Blind Moon (2003). If in Chapter Two, Zimunya re-inscribes the pre-colonial past and the cultural spaces it represents in order to construct alternative identities for Blacks than those that they were accorded in colonial Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, Hove’s oeuvre focuses on contested aspects of Zimbabwean history such as nationalism and patriotism, and their implications for both national and private identities. To show how Hove’s poetic narratives of history depict these ideologies, the theoretical approach to
this chapter is heavily dependent on historian Terence Ranger’s (2005:217) seminal classification of the active public historical versions in contemporary Zimbabwe into three categories: nationalist, patriotic, and academic histories. For the purpose of this chapter, only nationalist and patriotic histories are discussed because they are of immediate relevance to the aspects of Zimbabwean history that Hove raises in his poetry. While Ranger’s designation of the polarized discursive spaces in which public histories in Zimbabwe are told and interpreted is valuable, nationalists and patriots are not the only voices that compete to represent the history of the nation. As I have already shown in Chapter One, these different histories are unstable; they are fraught with inconsistencies that plague the concept ‘history’ in general, and in particular their unevenness stems from the contradictions that inhere in the very ideologies (nationalism and patriotism) that inform their ordering of the nation’s past.
Nationalist history, according to Ranger (2005:217) is history in the service of nationalism that ‘celebrated aspiration and modernization as well as resistance’ (220). As that definition implies, the concept of nationalism that underlies nationalist history’s ordering of the Zimbabwean past is an ambiguous one, underpinned by diverse and potentially contradictory phenomena – resistance may look to a past which modernization rejects by definition and one can aspire to recover the past in a totally different future. While it is not the aim of this chapter to discuss nationalism and the inconsistencies around it in depth, it is necessary to indicate briefly some of the issues that constitute the debate in order to understand how the nationalist narrative has constructed the Zimbabwean nation’s past. Anthony D. Smith (2001:9) observes that although nationalism has been defined in many ways, most of the definitions overlap and reveal a common theme that portrays nationalism as an ideology that places the nation at the centre of its concerns and aims to promote its well-being. According to Smith (2001:9), nationalism seeks to maintain the nation’s well-being through the attainment of three particular goals: national autonomy, national unity, and national
identity.
Dambudzo Marechera: An Anarchic Vision?
This chapter is informed by the controversy surrounding Dambudzo Marechera’s writing. Marechera is a writer who declined to share the literary perspectives that had become conventional for many African writers in the late 1970s and 1980s. As already noted, he rejected the label African writer and insisted on being called simply a writer. In his poetry, as in his prose Marechera destabilized what narrative conventions claimed to be the objective reality of African nations and produced unexpected narratives that refuse single meaning to Zimbabwe or indeed to any nation. Because of this, Marechera’s vision of his society and its history is often considered as anarchic although it would be more accurate to insist on its complexity.
Through an analysis of his collection of poetry Cemetery of Mind (1992), this chapter seeks to explore how Marechera imagines history and inscribes the Zimbabwean sociopolitical identity. The chapter ends by considering Marechera’s influence on younger Zimbabwean poets, particularly Phillip Zhuwao, whose collection Sunrise Poison (unpublished) explicitly acknowledges a debt to the older poet. The theoretical approach to this chapter, as already mentioned in Chapter One, reads Marechera’s poetry against the basic tenets of anarchism as a social and political ideology, to find out the extent to which his poetic vision subscribes to and reflects anarchism’s core values.
Chapter One: Introduction: Rethinking History and Identity in Zimbabwe
Chapter Two: Musaemura Zimunya: Recovering the Pre-colonial Past
Chapter Three: Chenjerai Hove: Making Sense of Post-independence
Chapter Four: Dambudzo Marechera: An Anarchic Vision?
Chapter Five: A Woman’s Poetic Voice
Chapter Six: John Eppel: Deconstructing Rhodesian Racial Identities
