Hove, Chenjerai 1956-
Chenjerai Hove 1956-
Zimbabwean poet, novelist, essayist, and children's writer.
INTRODUCTION
An accomplished poet and novelist, Hove is considered to be one of Zimbabwe's leading literary figures. His poetry, fiction, and essays explore not only the terrible effects that the struggle for Zimbabwean independence had on his people, but also his deep-seated opposition to the corruption and injustice of the government that assumed control after his homeland was liberated. In fact, Hove's bold political activism and his writings denouncing the violence, fraud, and cruelty of the Robert Mugabe administration led to his exile from Zimbabwe in the early twenty-first century.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Hove was born in 1956 in Mazvihwa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). His upbringing in a rural area of southern Zimbabwe informed his later preoccupation with the challenges of village life in southern Africa. As a teenager in the 1970s, he attended Kutama and Dete, two Catholic Marist Brothers schools. As a secondary school teacher, Hove witnessed the devastating consequences of the war for liberation in Zimbabwe. 1980 proved to be a significant year for the author in that his homeland finally succeeded in gaining independence from Rhodesia and he published his first poems inspired by his country's struggle for freedom. Hove went on to study at the University of South Africa, eventually receiving his degree in English and education from the University of Zimbabwe in 1984. In 1982, his first collection of poetry, Up in Arms, was published. In the early 1980s, Hove continued to work as a teacher and as a literary editor for several publishers, including Mambo Press. In 1986 Hove published his first novel, Masimba Avanhu? in his native language of Shona. Two years later, Hove elected to publish his second novel, Bones, in English. While this action caused a small sensation among Zimbabweans who felt that Hove should remain loyal to his culture, the work succeeded in reaching a larger international audience. Despite this controversy, Bones received critical acclaim for its compelling representation of the social and political conditions in Zimbabwe. The novel earned the Zimbabwe Publishers' Association First Prize for Literature in 1988 and the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1989. Hove was also awarded the 2001 German-Africa Prize for literary contribution to freedom of expression. During the mid-1990s, Hove became disenchanted with the corruption, injustice, and violence perpetrated by President Mugabe and the ruling Zimbabwe African Nation Union (ZANU) party. As Hove used his influence to escalate criticism of the government, his position in Zimbabwe became increasingly precarious. By the early 2000s, he was forced into exile in Europe.
MAJOR WORKS
The poems in Hove's first poetry collection, Up in Arms, celebrate Zimbabwean independence, declare the injustice of white ownership of African agricultural land, and valorize pre-colonial Shona culture. The poet reflects on many of these themes again in Red Hills of Home (1985), but he also includes poems that express his growing disenchantment with the ultimate results of Zimbabwean independence. Hove's opposition to the Zimbabwean nationalist party is particularly evident in the poems of his third collection, Rainbows in the Dust (1998). In these poems, Hove strongly condemns the corruption of Robert Mugabe's administration and its unjust treatment of the Zimbabwean people. Written in exile, Blind Moon (2003) expresses Hove's indignation at Mugabe's violent and unfair agricultural reform policies and the squandered promise of Zimbabwean independence.
Hove's fiction expands on the themes explored in his poetry. Bones recounts the experiences of Marita, a Zimbabwean peasant woman living on a white-owned commercial farm, who travels to the city to locate her son, a guerilla fighter who fought in the war for independence. When she reaches the city, Marita dies mysteriously. Her struggle to leave the farm and find her son affects everyone around her, particularly Janifa, Marita's friend. Bones poignantly illustrates the deleterious effects of violence, cruelty, and injustice on the powerless. Shadows (1991) chronicles the forbidden love of Johanna, the daughter of a black farmer, and a farmhand, Marko. In addition, the novel exposes the violent atrocities committed by armed dissidents—former guerillas in the war of independence—against innocent peasants and farmers in post-independece Zimbabwe. In fact, Hove's fictional rendering of such atrocities created a controversy that challenged the government's official denial that such events had ever transpired. Hove's Ancestors (1996) traces the repercussions of gender politics within a Zimbabwean family and the impact of history on the present age.
Hove has also written a number of essay collections that create a vivid portrait of Zimbabwean history, culture, and nationalism. Shebeen Tales (1994) is a collection of sketches that describe life in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, in the early 1990s. Guardians of the Soil (1996) pays tribute to the wisdom of Zimbabwean elders and reflects on Zimbabwean culture and tradition. Hove's most recent essay collection, Palaver Finish (2002), is a compendium of editorial columns previously published in the Zimbabwean Standard. In these essays, Hove presents a bold indictment of the Mugabe government, condemning it for creating a police state, censoring journalists and writers, and using the secret police to stifle dissent and to assassinate critics of the administration. Most critics consider Palaver Finish to be the essential commentary on the current state of Zimbabwean politics.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Critics have praised Hove as a perceptive writer with the courage to speak his mind on the devastating effects that the current social, political, and economic policies are having on the citizens of Zimbabwe. Further, commentators have acknowledged that Hove's passionate and cogent criticisms of his country's post-independence government have come at great personal sacrifice, and they have commended him for his strong principles and his compassion for the Zimbabwean people. Critics have also argued that Hove provides an authentic literary voice for the dispossessed and the victims of tyranny and oppression. Pauline Kaldas focuses on the theme of identity in Bones, elucidating how Hove's narrative advocates the fundamental importance of achieving one's own sense of self in order to overcome and overthrow oppressors who seek to rule through dehumanization and subjugation. Still other commentators have emphasized Hove's perceptive and sympathetic representation of the plight of Zimbabwean women in Bones. Pauline Dodgson compares this work with the contemporary novels of other Zimbabwean writers, including Tsitsi Dangarembga and Yvonne Vera, to demonstrate that Hove belongs to a progressive social advocacy group concerned with gender relations and women's rights in postcolonial Zimbabwe.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Up in Arms (poetry) 1982
Red Hills of Home (poetry) 1985
Masimba Avanhu? (novel) 1986
Bones (novel) 1988
Shadows (poetry) 1991
Shebeen Tales: Messages from Harare (sketches) 1994
Ancestors (novel) 1996
Guardians of the Soil: Meeting Zimbabwe's Elders (essays) 1996
Rainbows in the Dust (poetry) 1998
Palaver Finish (essays) 2002
Blind Moon (poetry) 2003
The Keys of Ramb (children's literature) 2004S
CRITICISM
Pauline Kaldas (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: Kaldas, Pauline. "Self-Definition as a Catalyst for Resistance in Hove's Bones." Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 13 (1993): 128-43.
[In the following essay, Kaldas discusses Bones as resistance literature, contending that the author promotes the assertion of one's identity as an integral component in determining to overthrow colonial oppressors.]
When asked during an interview whether or not he was actively involved in the struggle to liberate Zimbabwe, Chenjerai Hove1 responded, saying "… the struggle was not fought with guns only. There were many fronts to it. And if by ‘active’ you mean carrying guns, I think you narrow the meaning too much to give you a good overview of what the struggle really involved."2 Hove's novel Bones, which won the Noma Award in 1989, pulls us into the midst of Zimbabwe's struggle for freedom, opening up to us a new history from the perspective of the peasants who constituted one of those many fronts. As the novel unfolds, the assertion of identity emerges as a primary tool for resisting the dehumanizing oppression of apartheid.
Given the historical context as well as the apparent themes of this novel, it is possible to place it within the category of resistance literature which Barbara Harlow defines as emerging out of "the struggle for national liberation and independence, particularly in the twentieth century, on the part of colonized peoples in those areas of the world over which Western Europe and North America have sought socio-economic control and cultural dominion."3 Hove's work, both as poet and novelist, fits this definition. His writing expresses the difficulties of living under an apartheid system and gives voice to those who are struggling for liberation.
The novel is written in fifteen chapters; each chapter is given one of the character's names as a title and told from that character's viewpoint. That character's voice is intertwined with other voices in each chapter. The main character is Marita, a peasant woman who works in the fields of a white farmer named Manyepo. Despite the fact that none of the chapters are told from her point of view, she still emerges as the strongest character in the novel. Marita has only one child, a son who is very important to her partly because she had difficulty conceiving. When the novel begins, her son has been gone for four years. He disappeared and, like many other young men, is presumed to have become one of the guerrillas fighting for Zimbabwe's freedom. Marita becomes so worried about her son that she decides to go to the city to search for him. In the city, she dies and is buried under the label "the unknown woman" because no one comes to claim her body. The last third of the novel takes place after Marita's death. Marita's relationships with other characters is crucial since it is through their voices that we learn about her, and it is through her influence on them that the strength of her identity comes to dominate the novel. The strongest relationship Marita has is with Janifa, a young girl who also lives on the farm. This friendship develops because Marita's son wrote a love letter to Janifa when he was a schoolboy and Marita constantly asks Janifa to read the letter to her. There is also Marume, Marita's husband; Chisaga, Manyepo's cook who wants to sleep with Marita; Manyepo, the white farmer; "the unknown woman" who tries to claim Marita's body; and the unknown woman's husband who is responsible for the killing of several fighters who come to his village.
As a narrative of resistance, Bones is deeply imbedded within the history of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe (previously Rhodesia) was occupied in 1890 by British settlers and eventually came under white domination. Independence was finally won in 1980 after almost fifteen years of guerrilla fighting. At one point in the novel, the guerrillas arrive in Marita's village and say, "You have heard about us from the dirty mouths full of hatred for us. Now we want to tell the story from our own side."4 This is precisely what Hove accomplishes through his novel. He tells the story of the struggle from the side of the peasants, those who have been silenced and made anonymous by a system that has continuously refused to acknowledge their humanity. It is appropriate that this comment comes from the guerrillas since they were the victims of propaganda and rumors spread by the government during the liberation war. Most of the rumors focused on depicting the guerrillas as wild animals with tails living in the woods. The rumors were so widely believed that when the guerrillas spoke to the villagers, they actually had to show that they did not have tails.5 Hove's novel succeeds in the same way as the guerrillas by presenting another version of the same story, allowing those who have been maligned to speak for themselves.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o argues in his book, Decolonising the Mind, that it is essential for African writers to write in their own African languages instead of the colonizer's language. The choice of language, he states, is itself a tool of resistance and a means of affirming the integrity of one's culture. Although he acknowledges that writers such as Chinua Achebe who write in English are contributing to the affirmation of their cultures, he believes this contribution is tainted because of their choice of language.6 Thiong'o's argument appears unjustified when confronted with the language of a novel such as Bones. This novel was originally written in English, but it is not the English of the colonizer. The poetic use of the rhythm and phraseology of the Shona language intertwines with English to the point where the novel begins to sound bilingual. The use of Shona in this way brings forth the world view of the Shona culture which is inherent in their language. We see for example how the human is linked with nature and the elements: "his moustache … dancing feverishly like a little forest shaken by the wind" (12); "You are only a child with small breasts trying to come out like the small horns of a small bull" (13); "Did our people not say the tongue is a little flame which burns forests?" (33). The human, natural and elemental forces compliment each other, and all are embraced into the human. Thus, within the language, the "humanity" of nature is affirmed, insisting that all life be treated with respect. This is clearly brought out in the lesson Marita teaches Janifa:
Marita, you are the one who told me that the earth breathed, so I should not put dirt all over the place. The trees, the rocks, the soil, you said they once talked like people, they ran races and gave each other prizes. How I imagined the baobab running clumsily across the plains, with grass and the little trees laughing at the big belly of the baobab heaving up and down.
(18)
Marita's vision brings together the natural and human, revealing the interconnectedness of all things existing in the world. In her vision, nothing is excluded from this natural world.
Hove succeeds in transforming the colonizer's language in such a way that it ceases to be unfamiliar and imposed. With this "new" language, he communicates the story of those oppressed. Thus, Hove takes one of the tools of oppression and creates with it a tool of resistance.
The oral tradition underlies the structure of this novel as each character tells his/her story. The stories in the novel intertwine to form a history of the lives of the peasants and specifically Marita. Each story serves to further humanize the speaker as it brings forth their individual identity through their own voice and experience. A large part of each chapter is written as dialogue with the speaker either addressing another character or recollecting their speech. This technique introduces the characters to us through the eyes of other characters. We are not limited to the speaker's perspective nor are we dependent on a third person objective narrator. Thus, Hove's method of developing his characters is a humanizing process as it gives priority to the subjective perspective of other characters and further emphasizes the interrelatedness of all people.
Aside from the dialogue that takes place between characters within the chapters, it is possible to see a more subtle form of dialogue in this novel—between the oppressor and the oppressed. This exchange is characterized by the oppressor's attempts to dehumanize the other, primarily by diminishing or destroying their identity; in response, the oppressed insist on their human rights by affirming their identity. In the novel, identity is expressed through a person's name, their physical body, their spiritual being, and their family relationships. The oppressor's aim in erasing the identity of others is to remove one of the crucial factors which contributes to their humanity, thus providing a justification for denying them their rights. On the other side, Hove shows how the blacks' struggle to assert their identity becomes the crux of their fight for freedom.
One of the most important signifiers of identity is names. Their importance as a repository of identity and life experience becomes clear when we are told "wives give birth and listen to the voices of the new children crying on their breasts before they name them Tapiwa, Marita, Tatenda, Mudiwa. They will give a name that tells many stories, many paths that have been walked with bare feet" (104 - 105). Hove's use of naming can be viewed as a key to the reaffirmation of individual identity which is denied by the oppressors who lump the oppressed in one anonymous category. Throughout the novel, characters' names are emphasized through repetition, but the one most often repeated is Marita's name to the point where it becomes a kind of refrain as in the following passage:
Marita, it is not good for someone like you to take the place of a pig. This is the truth, Marita, when a sharp knife cuts through a living thing, Marita, I feel the pain too.
(17)
Many of the passages, especially in Janifa's chapters, begin by addressing Marita with her name. As we learn more about Marita and her life, the significance of her name enlarges because it carries more of her identity. The function of this repetition is similar to that of a refrain in music or poetry, where the main theme of the piece recurs to emphasize a main idea. Here, Marita's identity, indicated by her name, is the central focus of the novel as she comes to represent the strength of individual resistance in an almost superhuman way. The refrain is also a device for dividing the verses of a song. If we see each character's perspective as a "verse" in this highly lyrical novel, then Marita is what separates each of them since all of them see her in a different way; she is also the common factor among them since she influences and partakes in their individual lives. In the same way that each verse in a song adds meaning to a refrain, each character's perspective adds another dimension to Marita's identity.
While Marita is being interrogated and tortured by the soldiers because they believe her son is a terrorist, they ask, "What is the bitch's name?" (59). Asking about her name would seem to indicate that they are interested in her identity. However, the use of the word "bitch" robs Marita of her humanity and identity because it places her in a subhuman category. Therefore, it becomes impossible for her name to function as a signifier of identity. Marita's response to the soldiers is an attempt to regain that humanity. She answers, "Marita. I work here in the fields. I am not a bitch" (59). With her last sentence, she pulls herself out of the subhuman category in which she has been placed, thus reaffirming the power of her name.
Given the way in which Hove takes such care to emphasize the importance of Marita's name, the title of chapter ten, "The Unknown Woman," is unexpected and rings of irony. This title refers to Marita after her death in the city. Since no one has claimed her body, the officials have labeled her "the unknown woman." What Hove accomplishes by first revealing Marita to us through her experiences and relations with other people and then by showing her to us through the eyes of "government" exposes the truth of what such an oppressive system does as it takes over a nation of people each with their individual identity and makes them anonymous by removing their names/identities. Albert Memmi explains this type of dehumanization in his book The Colonizer and the Colonized when he says, "Another sign of the colonized's depersonalization is what one might call the mark of the plural. The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity."7 Labeling Marita "the unknown woman" is the ultimate attempt to remove Marita's individuality, and our resistance and anger at seeing this label applied to Marita is intended because it comes after her identity has been firmly established.
Bones can easily be seen as a kind of elegy for the fighters who died unknown in the struggle. One of Hove's purposes in writing the novel is to remove the anonymity imposed on these fighters and make them known. To accomplish this, Hove uses the metaphor of "bones" which comes to mean the spiritual and individual self, not just the physical body. There are a multitude of references to bones in the novel, such as "the bones of my people falling like feathers" (51) and "my bones will rise with such power," (53) turning bones into a symbol for the spiritual as well as the physical struggle of the people. They also represent the legacy of the past and the awaited rebirth in the future.
For Manyepo, the white farmer, "bones" have a different meaning. Chisaga, his cook, tells us how he chose his workers: "Then he inspected us like a police sergeant, feeling the strength of our muscles to see who was full of bones and who was full of water muscles …" (39). Here "bones" are equated with physical strength, something to be used/abused by the white farmer for his own welfare. Once these workers arrive at Manyepo's farm, they become a commodity, judged only on the basis of their ability to function as a labor force. Manyepo further espouses this view when he expresses his concern for Marita's missing son only in terms of his worry that he will not be there to replace Marita, his hardest worker. As Marita explains, "All he worries about is his work, nothing about me or my son. I have broken my back working for him, but all he is good at is pouring scorn on my husband because he thinks nobody will take my place when I get old" (30). Since Manyepo has limited Marita's value to her ability to work, her son is important only as a replacement after her death.
This process of dehumanizing others by evaluating them only in terms of physical strength is complemented by the myth that the colonized are lazy, which allows an oppressor like Manyepo to compensate his workers with low wages and "a tin of beans." Manyepo constantly yells at his workers for not finishing their daily quota of work and accuses them of being lazy children who need someone to watch over them. As Albert Memmi explains, this myth of laziness is "economically fruitful" since it supports the "colonizer's privileged position" and "the colonized's destitution."8
In the eyes of the oppressors, "bones" are limited to physical strength, which is something temporary that diminishes with age and disappears with death. However, in the novel, "bones" are viewed as the ultimate symbol of freedom. The subtitle of chapter seven is "1897 My Bones Fall," pointing to the first unsuccessful rebellion against the white colonizers; the subtitle of chapter eight is "My Bones Rise and Fall." Within these titles, bones become a metaphor for a person's spirit of struggle and desire for freedom which triumphs even after death. Hove's use of bones may have been inspired by the medium Nehanda, a leader in the 1896 rebellion who was finally captured and hanged. At the scaffold, she prophesied that "my bones will rise" to regain freedom.9 This vision of bones is expanded toward the end of the novel when Hove describes the success of the revolution: "The sun has risen so that it can shine on the bones scattered over the plains. Even the cry of the woman whose body nobody claims is there in the glow of the young sun so that you see her smile in her death" (111). Life is affirmed even after death, and bones become an image of resurrection. Such an image is appropriate given the ancestral worship of the Zimbabweans. Thus, the "bones" of those who struggled for freedom do not diminish with age but survive beyond death.
The oppressor's emphasis on the physical body is apparent in other ways. In this socio-political system, the right to one's body is denied to the blacks. Their physical selves are separated from their spiritual and psychological self and mutilated. The lack of rights Manyepo gives to his female workers serves to humiliate them through their physical bodies. Marume (Marita's husband) complains to Manyepo that the women's breasts should be covered while they work (23). He compares them to Manyepo's wife who does not have to go around with bare breasts. The breasts of the women who work are viewed as being the same. The notion that they belong to a specific woman is not acknowledged, so it does not matter that they are uncovered. This is again an example of how dehumanization occurs through the removal of individuality. Memmi states that "all oppression is directed at a human group as a whole and, a priori, all individual members of that group are anonymously victimized by it."10 For this reason, a woman's feelings of shame at having her breasts exposed are of no concern. However, the right of individuality is reserved for Manyepo's wife who can cover her breasts, thus gaining respect for her being, as well as a sense of superiority.
Both Marita and Janifa suffer as a result of having their physical body separated from their psychological and emotional self. At one point, Marita is interrogated and tortured by the soldiers who have "done things to you, things which people cannot do even to their rabid dogs which they do not want to come back" (60). Marita is stripped of her dignity and humanity when her body is treated as a mere piece of flesh, detached from mind, spirit and personality. When Janifa responds to this with sadness and shock, it emphasizes what the soldiers were unable to see: that Marita is an individual and this torture was being inflicted upon a specific body, not just any body. The same thing happens to Janifa when she is raped by Chisaga, Manyepo's cook. Chisaga's rape is an expression of his anger at Marita who left without keeping her promise to sleep with him after he stole money for her. He rapes Janifa because she is the one closest to Marita which is made clear because Marita "has left all the things of her womanhood with you. The pots, the baskets, everything that makes a woman feel like a woman" (84). The actions of Chisaga and the soldiers are denounced by Marita when she says, "It [your body] is your last property, you will die with it. So do not let people waste it like any rubbish they pick up in the image rubbish heap. I know this because my mouth has eaten medicines which even a dog would vomit. My ear has heard things even a witch would faint to hear …" (31).
Even this harsh form of dehumanization is turned into a source of strength. After she has been raped, Janifa thinks of Marita when she came back after being questioned and tortured. "Blood flowing all the time, hurting my inside as I think of the day they brought you, Marita, worn out with abuse, worn out like an old piece of cloth, torn inside, torn like a worthless thing that nobody cares about" (93). Janifa's experience of having her body used as if it were separate from her self binds her with Marita even more closely. Hove portrays the connection between the two women as based on struggle and suffering that is essential given their condition. Yet, they can derive power from the suffering inflicted upon them as Janifa says, "To eat all those bad medicines and remain with life in me is something that makes me strong" (98). We gain some insight into the value of suffering from what Hove says in his interview:
Suffering reduces us to ourselves, to real humanity, you become a real human being, not a pretentious one, you get to know what it is to be human. Because when you suffer, you confront yourself and look at what is worth living for and what is not. So you begin to understand life much more. And I think that is one thing that you get from a war situation like ours. It's more painful if it is suffering arising out of a colonial situation.11
Thus, suffering can be used by the oppressed as a means of strengthening themselves. This in turn increases their ability to fight the oppressor with the same weapons being used against them.
Before the white settlers occupied Zimbabwe, the majority of Zimbabweans were independent, self-sufficient farmers. This system was destroyed when the white colonizers took over the most fertile land, forcing the blacks to move to areas less suitable for farming. As a result, white farmers gained exclusive control over the country's agriculture, and blacks were forced to become a source of cheap labor for them.12 Manyepo is a good example of this kind of white farmer. Those looking for work leave behind their tribes and clans which contribute to their sense of identity. In his study of the Shona people, Michael Bourdillon explains that kinship and family relationships play a central part in the lives of the Shona. For example, marriage is viewed as a contract between families. When two people marry, their families become related and appropriate kinship ties are established. The ties of kinship are also affected by land and place of residence. If a village splits, the relationships between families usually disappear because the constant interaction between them is essential for maintaining the relationship. Similarly, unrelated neighbors are likely to establish kinship-like relationships because of their living proximity.13 When the white settlers took over the land, they not only destroyed the blacks' economic system but also their kinship relations.
The central familial relationship in the novel is that of Marita and her son. The power of this relationship is illustrated when Janifa explains to Marita why she cannot marry her son: "How can I marry a terrorist, do they not say a terrorist eats people without roasting them? Do they not say a terrorist takes the wives of other men, sleeps with them before the eyes of their very husbands, then asks the parents to roast their children for him? I cannot marry a terrorist, a killer who kills his own mother" (10). Janifa's image of the guerrillas is based on the stereotypes created by the apartheid regime to conceal the guerrillas' differences and distort their motives. Marita's response to Janifa immediately breaks through Janifa's list of stereotypes and reveals her son's individuality. She begins by saying, "But he is my son" (10) thus asserting her son's identity by first stating his place in the family. For Marita, identity is first and foremost defined in terms of family relationships. Through this, she re-establishes the kinship system.
Another point in which the metaphor of family is brought up in relation to guerrillas occurs when the unknown woman and her husband disagree on what to call the fighters who have come to their village. The woman calls them children, saying to her husband "Do you not know that even if you do not like them, they are someone's children?" (55). But her husband rejects this when he says, "How can you call armed gangsters, thieves, robbers, you call them the children?" (55). The husband was responsible for the killing of the fighters so he adopts a view of them that can justify his actions. Placing them outside of the family structure is a means of dehumanizing them because it removes an important aspect of their identity. The importance of dehumanization, Memmi explains, is that it relieves the colonizer from any obligations to the colonized because "one does not have a serious obligation toward an animal or an object."14 On the other hand, the man's wife humanizes the fighters by embracing them into a family structure, thus saying they deserve to be given their rights. Like Marita, she sees identity in terms of family relationships which again rebuilds the family structure destroyed by the colonizers.
The novel begins with Marita asking Janifa to read the letter that her son wrote to her. Through this repeated act, Marita and Janifa begin to talk to each other. Thus, this letter begins to symbolize the way in which these characters reveal identity. Marita says, "it's the only thing that can tell me a little bit about him" (10). Her request to have the letter read to her over and over again is an attempt to get beyond its words to see the identity of the son who wrote it. The letter serves as a means of defining the son's identity by allowing Marita to talk about him. Also, the conversations between Marita and Janifa help to show that talking is the best way for people to know one another. As the novel progresses, two opposing definitions of identity are exposed. One is based on "papers," and the other is based on "talk."
These definitions are portrayed in the confrontation between the unknown woman and the man who works in the hospital when the woman goes to ask for Marita's body. The man's definition is based on papers with factual information. He says, "The woman had no papers or anything to identify her" (68). On the other hand, the woman's definition is based on "talk" which signifies human relationships and knowledge based on human contact, not factual data. She explains that she and Marita took the same bus to the city and "talked a lot" and Marita "told her everything." Also, she points to two signifiers of identity, name and family relationships, when she says, "Her name is Marita, the one who had come to look for her son returning from the war. She is the one" (68). The last phrase with the use of the word "one" asserts Marita's individuality. The man responds, saying she "can not take the body on those grounds," because they "need a relative with proof, something to show" (68). For him, a relative must show tangible proof of his relationship to the deceased thus again pointing to the superiority of factual information on paper over the spoken word indicating human contact. The woman continues pleading until the man becomes angry: "How on earth do you expect to bury someone you have just met on a bus? Do you think burying someone is just like burying a cow or a donkey?" (68). The man accuses the woman of doing the very thing she wants to avoid. She answers, "I want to go and bury it because I have seen the woman when she was alive" (68-69). Ironically, it is the government who will bury Marita like an animal denying her a proper burial. In Shona culture, a person's burial is the responsibility of his/her relatives15—what the unknown woman introduces here is the idea of family without blood relationships. Thus, family in the novel comes to encompass something greater than blood relatives. Family is redefined to include those who "talk" to each other and who know one another through human contact. Marita too embraces this definition of family when she gives Janifa her pots, thus passing on to her what a mother normally passes on to her daughter. Family is widened in the novel to include those who are known to you outside blood relations.
The woman has fought to reassert Marita's identity by resisting the label placed on her and stating her name; by placing her within a family relationship with reference to her son and by insisting she is close enough to have earned the right to bury her body; and by trying to convince the man that talk is a valid form of identification. But none of this has worked so "she knows she has passed the stage of talking and quarrelling, but she will wait …" (76-77). Now she begins to fight with the only weapon she has, which is her own body. She sits in front of the morgue where Marita's body has been put. The police and soldiers are confounded when confronted with the woman's body. The police do not remove her because she threatens to strip naked. When the soldiers come to take Marita's body, the chief officer wants to shoot her but when she "bares her chest," he can only slap her. Despite its age and wrinkles, the woman's body is still powerful. The police and soldiers are confronted with a weapon that they thought had been destroyed.
Not all the characters choose to assert their identities. In Chisaga, we are given a character who prefers to hide behind the curtain of anonymity, which the white oppressors have placed on him, as a means of protection. Manyepo asks Chisaga many questions which give him the chance to reveal his individual identity: "Tell me, Chisaga, what does your name mean in the village where you come from? Is it because you are big that they give you this name? … Chisaga, what was your father's nickname? Did you see him, I mean were you born before he died?" (33). Chisaga does not answer any of Manyepo's questions. If he did, he would be revealing his identity, that is, personal information about himself which would make him unique in front of Manyepo. Given this "opportunity" to identify himself, why does Chisaga choose not to? He says:
Shame … I keep my mouth closed. Nothing beats a closed mouth, nothing. A closed mouth is a cave in which to hide. So I hide myself there so that Manyepo does not see too much in my mouth. Many people have killed themselves because they are too loud mouthed. A loud mouth is a big trap. It can even kill lions. It burns forests. Did our people not say the tongue is a little flame which burns forests? Yes, it is true. So I have kept quiet for many years.
(33)
Chisaga does not want Manyepo to "see too much in my mouth." This seems to contradict the desire of black Zimbabweans to have their identities acknowledged. But if they asserted their identity, they would contradict the philosophy of the oppressors who want or need to believe that all blacks are the same in order to justify their suppression. A black person who reveals his/her identity in essence says to the white oppressors "I am as human as you are, therefore, I deserve the same rights." Once they do that, they become a threat to the colonizers. Thus, Chisaga chooses survival over fighting. Chisaga's character explains his decision. Although he resents his inferior position, he is more accepting of the circumstances he finds himself in, and has partly adopted the perspective of the oppressors. He accepts that the land belongs to Manyepo and says, "We are like children up the tree. We cannot blame the tree for its crooked leaves. The tree is the way it is, so we have to climb if we want the fruits" (39).
Despite the many contrasts in the novel, Hove's intention is not to show us a good versus evil dichotomy. His is a complex view of the humanizing/dehumanizing process that negates a white versus black view. This negation is twice asserted in the novel. When Chisaga rapes Janifa, we see that the oppressor/oppressed relationship is not always color bound. Similarly, when Janifa expresses the stereotypes of the guerrillas, we are shown that blacks can also dehumanize each other.
The complexity appears in a different way when Marita is given a chance to reveal Manyepo's brutality. Several guerrilla fighters come to the farm and offer to kill Manyepo if he is evil and cruel to his workers. Instead of revealing his cruelty as expected, Marita saves his life by saying, "His badness is just like any other person…. He does not beat up workers for nothing. I said his badness is just like any other person's badness. It does not deserve to earn him death?" (64). Marita's behavior is perplexing especially when we learn from Janifa that "Marita, did I not see Manyepo kick you in the back as if you were a football? Did I not hear him curse at you, calling you all the bad things that the tongue can still mention and not rot? Marita your heart surprises me" (64). Despite all the pain Marita has experienced at Manyepo's hands, she still acknowledges his humanity/identity. When Janifa questions her, she answers, "Child, what do you think his mother will say when she hears that another woman sent her son to his death?" (64). By placing Manyepo as another woman's child, Marita asserts his identity through a family relationship. She goes further by acknowledging Manyepo's humanity: "One day we will also learn that the white man is like us, if you prick him with a thorn in his buttocks, he will cry for his mother like anybody else" (65). Manyepo is cruel, yet Marita chooses to protect his life. By lying, she refuses to become like the oppressors and to see others (even someone like Manyepo) as anonymous. The novel's vision of humanity is all encompassing, refusing to relegate anyone to a subhuman category.
Marita's identity emerges through a collective viewpoint as each character reveals his/her vision of Marita through their relationship with her. The structure of the novel affirms the interrelatedness of people without negating their individuality. In Janifa's chapters, for example, we hear Marita's, Chisaga's, and Manyepo's voices, thus asserting the point that one person's identity is intimately influenced by those close to them. At the same time, individual characters evolve because each one is influenced differently depending on their view and position in society. Out of this combination of the collective and the individual, Marita emerges as the encompassing strength of life, and her identity is the ultimate vehicle for resisting oppression and gaining freedom. Despite the fact that her view is indirect and suppressed since she does not have her own chapters, her view is the most forceful showing that despite oppression, the individual can triumph.
By the end of the novel, Marita's character emerges as the power of identity surviving beyond death and triumphing over oppression. She survives partly through the power of memory. Janifa grieves for Marita:
Now that you are dead, Marita, who will tell me stories of lizards courting the girl in the next village, and tortoises going hunting for elephant and buffalo? The whole forest was full of things talking to each other when you were alive, Marita. But all I have to do now is to stare at the sky with your wounded face in my heart.
(18-19)
The effect of Marita's death on Janifa affirms the strength of Marita's identity. Janifa is so overcome by Marita's death that she begins to behave strangely and is put in an asylum. Similarly, the unknown woman who tried to take Marita's body also dies and is labeled "the unknown woman" because, like Marita, no one comes to claim her body. But the power of memory is seen as outliving death when we hear Marita's memories after she has died: "Her thigh so close to the thigh of the other woman, feeling the pulse of the other woman in her own blood. The memory of the woman will always be there" (103). Memory affirms the power of the individual. The fact that death is overcome by memory is significant since memory is one of the most crucial things that the colonizer steals from the colonized. As Memmi aptly puts it: "The colonized seems condemned to lose his memory."16 The cultural and historical past of the colonized is removed as a means of destroying their self-esteem.
In his book, Memmi concludes that there is only one way for the colonized to free themselves: "the colonized's liberation must be carried out through a recovery of self and autonomous dignity…. After having been rejected for so long by the colonizer, the day has come when it is the colonized who must refuse the colonizer."17 By the end of the novel, a "recovery of self" has been achieved through an assertion of identity. Thus, no one can be unknown in life or death. The unknown woman "smiles because she knows somebody knows her, somebody can claim her body from the house where they keep corpses so that they do not grow worms" (111). Independence erases the possibility of anonymity in death as well as life.
The final vision of hope and triumph comes through Janifa who "refuse[s] the colonizer." By being placed in an insane asylum with chains on her feet, she comes to represent all oppressed Zimbabweans. She breaks the chains on her feet and frees herself from the asylum. She does not wait for her keepers to break the chains for her. Janifa
walk[s] so that these chains on my legs will have no purpose. Then the keepers of this place will come and say … We will remove the chains soon when we know you are well … But I will take the broken chains with my own hands and say … Do not worry yourselves, I have already removed them by myself. I have been removing them from my heart for many years, […] Then I will go without waiting for them to say go.
(112)
Janifa's breaking of the chains is symbolic of the black Zimbabweans who decided they could not wait until their oppressors freed them, realizing that ultimately it is the oppressed who are most capable of empowering themselves.
Notes
1. Chenjerai Hove was born in 1954 [sic] in Mazvihwa, Zimbabwe. He attended mission schools then went to college in Gweru where he specialized in English and Shona, studying to become a secondary school teacher. He taught at several schools then became an editor at Mambo Press. He has published several volumes of poetry which include Poems Inspired by the Struggle for Zimbabwe, Up in Arms, and Red Hills of Home. Bones is his first novel in English. It has been reviewed in several places: See Sean French, "Afri- can Mementoes," rev. of Bones, by Chenjerai Hove, Times Literary Supplement 14 Sept. 1990: 980; Rev. of Bones, by Chenjerai Hove, Publisher's Weekly 13 April 1990: 59; and "Zimbabwe's Literary Voice: Talking to the Soil," rev. of Bones, by Chenjerai Hove, The Economist 28 April 1990: 97-98.
2. Flora Wild, "Interview with Chenjerai Hove," in Patterns of Poetry in Zimbabwe (Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press, 1988) 36.
3. Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987) xvi.
4. Chenjerai Hove, Bones (Harare: Baobab Books, 1988) 63. Subsequent references to this work will appear in the text.
5. David Lan, Guns & Rain: Guerrillas & Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 125.
6. Ngugi wa Thiong'o's, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986).
7. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965) 85.
8. Memmi, 79.
9. Lan, 6.
10. Memmi, 73.
11. Wild, 37.
12. Lan, 122.
13. Michael Bourdillon, The Shona Peoples (Salisbury: Mambo Press, 1976) 52 - 82.
14. Memmi, 86.
15. Bourdillon, 251 - 254.
16. Memmi, 103.
17. Memmi, 128.
Pauline Dodgson (essay date 1999)
SOURCE: Dodgson, Pauline. "Coming in from the Margins: Gender in Contemporary Zimbabwean Writing." In Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon, edited by Deborah L. Madsen, pp. 88-103. London: Pluto Press, 1999.
[In the following essay, Dodgson compares Hove's Bones to Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and Yvonne Vera's Without a Name to explore how these novels offer a progressive new perspective on gender relations in postcolonial Zimbabwe.]
Eldred Jones has identified two significant developments in contemporary African writing. The first is ‘the increasing importance of women writers and the consequent focus on women's situation in society’ and the second is a literature of war that comes down on the side of the people against politicians and oppressors (Jones, 1996, pp. 1-2). Zimbabwean literature has now fallen in with these trends but what is interesting is how this has occurred.
Before independence in 1980, Zimbabwean writing in English was criticized for its lack of a common mission and for the individual stance that many writers took. Ranganai Zinyemba, using a quotation from the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera's novella The House of Hunger (1978), referred to exiled black Rhodesian writers as ‘the Jews of Africa’, writers who had lived migrant lives outside Africa and who had become preoccupied with their own encounter with Europe (Zinyemba, 1987). Even those who wrote from within Zimbabwe, such as Charles Mungoshi, the author of the critically acclaimed novel Waiting for the Rain, appeared to be concerned with identifying a malaise in society rather than producing a nationalist literature to support the liberation struggle.
In the first few years after Independence in 1980 it was assumed that there would be a cultural renaissance in Zimbabwe with writers at the forefront, describing a heroic war against latter-day colonialism and praising the efforts of the new government to bring about national unity and put right the injustices of the past. However, writers who had published before Independence, with the exception of Marechera, published little in the early 1980s and, although new writers did emerge, their early work was slight or formulaic. Barbara Makhalisa's didactic The Underdog and Other Stories, one of the few works written by a woman, was criticized for creating the stereotype of woman as victim (Gaidzanwa, 1985, pp. 80-81).
Marechera, the author of the pre-Independence postmodern fiction The House of Hunger and Black Sunlight (1980) was seen as a maverick writer, too influenced by Western culture to be authentically African. Although his multigenre work Mindblast or The Definitive Buddy was published in Zimbabwe in 1984, despite some anxiety on the part of his publisher College Press (Veit-Wild, 1992, p. 339), he was unable to get his manuscript The Depths of Diamonds published in Zimbabwe or Britain. College Press rejected it on the grounds that it was so erudite that it was ‘unreadable’ and that it contained ‘four-letter words and lurid descriptions of sexual intercourse’ (Caute, 1991, p. 108).
However, the influence of Marechera should not be underestimated. Flora Veit-Wild rightly points to how after his death at the age of 35 in 1987, he has become a cult figure, an inspiration for younger writers and a poète maudit in a country whose leaders frequently make public speeches condemning Western decadence (Veit-Wild, 1992, pp. 379-83). The outrageousness of Marechera's work and his refusal to adhere to any party line paved the way for other writers to adopt an oppositional and critical approach.
The publication of Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions and Chenjerai Hove's Bones in 1988 marked a departure in Zimbabwean literature. Nervous Conditions was Dangarembga's first novel. She had written a play, She No Longer Weeps, which had been published the previous year in Zimbabwe, but with Nervous Conditions Dangarembga reverted to the pre-Independence practice of Zimbabwean writers of publishing work with foreign publishers, in this case, the British-based Women's Press, allegedly because of failure to find a local publisher (Wilkinson, 1992, p. 197). Bones was Hove's first novel in English; he had previously published poetry in English and fiction in Shona.
What makes these works exceptional is that they both deal with issues of gender and challenge patriarchal institutions and practices—overtly in Nervous Conditions, through its critique of the power of the head of the extended family, the father of Nyasha and uncle of Tambu who is known by the kinship name of Babamukuru, and implicitly in Bones where Hove foregrounds women's resistance to traditional, colonial and nationalist oppression. Bones was welcomed in Southern Africa and Europe as a fresh beginning in Zimbabwean writing; Nervous Conditions received international acclaim but its reception in Zimbabwe, not surprisingly given its subject matter, was more mixed. However, it is Nervous Conditions which has become the one canonical Zimbabwean text and is now included in American and British women's studies and post-colonial courses, including the Open University's Third World Development course.
Comparison of Bones and Nervous Conditions reveals the contradictions in contemporary Zimbabwean writing but I do not want to make that comparison here. Rather I intend to analyse the male-authored Bones and a female-authored novel published six years later in 1994, Yvonne Vera's Without a Name. Vera, like Dangarembga, received part of her education outside Zimbabwe and studied modern literary theory at university in Toronto. Her book follows Nervous Conditions in engaging with modernity in its representation of a woman's desire for independence but it also uses a poetic language which is similar to the language of Bones. Bones and Without a Name recreate the suffering of rural women during the war of liberation but Without a Name also examines urban alienation and constantly shifting identities in a period of transition. My interpretations of these two novels are informed by my reading of Nervous Conditions which acts as a palimpsest for my text, putting pressure on my analysis of Bones and Without a Name.
Bones is, in many respects, a deliberately contradictory text. It is a war novel but, unlike most war novels, it is not centred upon the experiences of the guerrillas. It focuses on the farm workers whose history is an intrinsic part of the war but who are usually marginalized in narratives of the liberation struggle.
The central character Marita is a farm worker who goes in search of her son who has left home to become a guerrilla. It is with the representation of Marita that the contradictions begin. Marita is known for her story-telling ability. According to the Unknown Woman, ‘Marita, she tells stories as easily as she breathes’ (Hove, 1988, p. 80), yet Marita never directly tells her own story. We know the stories Marita told because those who have been influenced by her and cannot forget her tell us. Marita's words are mediated by the experiences of others, leaving us with fragments of her life; autobiography is displaced, not by biography, but by testimony that emerges from both individual and collective consciousness. Marita is, therefore, both absent and present in the text—absent in a material form (she is missing or dead in the novel's story time) and present in the memory and consciousness of others. The reader is, thus, denied what we might be tempted to see as the authenticity of her voice, the real presence behind the speaker which would erase any traces of other thoughts, other speech, other writing.
The absence of Marita allows Hove to use multiple viewpoints to tell multiple stories. Not only is the narrator likely to change from chapter to chapter but we also encounter shifting narration within each chapter. This can be seen in the second chapter, which begins with Janifa addressing the dead Marita. Then Janifa repeats the insulting words of the white farmer, Manyepo, and goes on to show how Marita answered Manyepo and how Marita's husband criticized her instead of supporting her. The next chapter is narrated by Marita's husband who is referred to simply as Murume (murume, Shona, man or husband). Murume addresses both Manyepo and Marita, developing, from a different narrative point of view, what we have already been told by Janifa.
In Bones, Hove constructs a house of fiction. In the manner of orature, story is built upon story and the final ending is delayed or denied. However, these multiple layers of fiction question fictionality itself as, in their testimony, each character strives to arrive at a version of the truth, however subjective, through the different stories they have been told. The Unknown Woman asks rhetorically, ‘[W]ho will tell me exactly what happened, the way things actually happened?’ But then she concludes for herself, ‘it does not matter too much because the little I should know, I know now’ (Hove, 1988, p. 66).
Official historical records with their narrow orthodoxy can be supplemented or even subverted by fiction. The white farm-owner who might have been praised for his industriousness in colonial accounts has his own words used as evidence against him in the novel where the workers' replies, whether actually made to him or expressed to themselves, are recorded. His constant references to the workers as liars or idlers are undermined by their renaming of him as Manyepo (manyepo, Shona, liar), the only name by which he is known in the text and which he wrongly thinks is a respectable name, and by their repeated insistence that he profits from their labour.
When the government worker in independent Zimbabwe says that only important people can bury Marita, we understand that this is meant to ensure that part of Marita's story, the story of how she died, is hidden from public scrutiny and from history, that she becomes one of the ‘disappeared’. However, this is challenged by the Unknown Woman when she, rightfully, claims that she should bury Marita because her story and Marita's are linked by their mutual oppression: ‘Marita showed me all the burdens I have inside me’ (Hove, 1988, p. 80).
In the rewriting of history as fiction, Hove moves away from linear time to what he has referred to as ‘time recorded in memory’ (Veit-Wild, 1993, p. 11). The seeming archaism of the language and the literal translation of Shona idiom into English, which has been discussed by Rino Zhuwarara (1996, pp. 42-43), is a consequence of this. Contemporary English, even contemporary Zimbabwean English, cannot adequately articulate past rural experience; the language used and the fusing of prose and poetry reveals the text's syncretism. Hove's use of time can be compared to the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott's rejection of history for myth or memory (Walcott, 1974, pp. 1-2).
Hove, like Walcott, goes beyond memory to reenactment. In Bones there is a re-enactment and rethinking of how the remote past is understood in the recent past and in the present. The symbolism—bones, vultures, locusts—which forms part of the mythology and belief systems of the first chimurenga, the uprisings of 1896-97, have to be re-enacted as a means of interpreting their significance. In their re-enactment of Marita's life and their own lives, Janifa and the Unknown Woman employ the language of the ancestral spirits. This language is both diachronic, time-specific in its origins in the first chimurenga, and synchronic, part of a timeless pattern of omens and signs as available to the women on the margins of the second chimurenga, the 1970s war of liberation, as it was to the guerrillas who found it inspirational. The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier's term lo real maravilloso, ‘the marvellous in the real’, seems appropriate here. Carpentier insisted that using the marvellous was not enough—the writer had to believe in the power of the supernatural (Williamson, 1987, p. 84). Janifa, the first and last story-teller in the novel, does have that belief:
Then they will see footsteps of the bones of the woman rising early in the morning to urge all the villagers, all the cattle, the birds, the insects and the hills to rise with the rising bones, to sing with the singing bones.
(Hove, 1988, p. 134)
Although the continuity between past and present is shown in Bones, the text also reveals an awareness of disruption, alienation, dis-ease and even rupture in pre-Independence and post-Independence Zimbabwe. This can most clearly be seen in the representation of the oppression and resistance of the women. From the beginning of the novel, Marita is seen in terms of difference. She is known for her outspokenness; it is Marita who tells Manyepo the truth when she criticizes his treatment of the farm workers. Her difference is also seen in her barrenness, which is condemned by the representatives of both colonialism and tradition. Manyepo advises her husband to find another woman who can bear him children because Manyepo wants more workers for the land. Whereas Marita's truthtelling is an act of conscious resistance, her barrenness provides her with a means of unconscious resistance. Her initial inability to have children means that she cannot reproduce existing social relations. The decision of the one child she does have to become a freedom fighter again breaks the chains of oppression.
However, both Marita's husband and Janifa's mother blame Marita for her infertility. Even after her death, her husband cannot forget the shame of having a wife who was childless for so many years: ‘Do you not remember the days all the people came to try to take you away to a medicine-man to see why you could not nourish the seed I planted in you?’ (Hove, 1988, p. 27), and Janifa remembers that her mother was afraid that Marita would pass on her infertility to her, ‘How can you talk with such a woman unless you want to inherit her barrenness?’ (Hove, 1988, p. 106).
The question of what Janifa does inherit from Marita is a crucial one. Liz Gunner points to the importance of cross-generational links between the women:
What the text stresses is the continuity of strength and the links between the women of two generations, Marita and Janifa, and beyond them the historical figure of the defiant and inspirational Nehanda … in Hove's text, made up as it is of voices locked in conversation, voices of the living and of the powerful dead in the form of the venerated Nehanda, the two women give strength to each other.
(Gunner, 1991, p. 83)
Strength is clearly an important inheritance but so is pain. Marita does not want to pass her sorrow on to Janifa:
The world is still large for you, too many unspoken words, too many unheard voices, so no need for me to fill your head with rags of stories. After all, you have your own dreams to carry you along…. No, not to spill my own wounds into the heart of a young girl who needs to breed the plants of her own life for herself and for her people.
(Hove, 1988, p. 9)
However, the ‘rags of stories’ are embedded in Janifa's memory and she cannot forget them; neither can she forget the stories she saw written on Marita's body:
Marita, you told me sad stories of the wounds of your heart. Many wounds which no one can see. Wounds cut with big knives and machetes. I listened because I saw them. Now I have no one to listen to me. I have only the blood which I saw smeared on your black thighs. Thighs roughened with hard work in Manyepo's fields. A face stern, with stories found in the many cracks of the face. Did you not say every crack on the face of a farm worker is an endless story?
(Hove, 1988, p. 112)
As in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), writing the body may finally be cathartic but what is actually written on the body tells stories of pain, mental and physical, rather than pleasure.
After she is raped by the man who also wanted to possess Marita, the cook Chisaga, Janifa suffers what appears to be a breakdown. She is isolated because she believes her own mother is complicit in her rape and because she does not have Marita to listen to her story. Janifa's alienation from her society is also a critique of that society. Like Marita, she does not fulfil her family's expectations by having children and, like Marita, she is subjected to the painful treatments of the herbalists. She repeatedly says that she wants to spit at her mother who does not deserve her respect; she argues against the traditional belief that eggs should be given to adults, not children, ‘Eggs are good, Marita. Good things are good things. Those who have them always want to make rules so that others cannot get to the good things’ (Hove, 1988, p. 117). Significantly, she also questions roora or bride price. Janifa's position is unequivocal:
Mother says I must get married so that cattle can come to her house while she still has good teeth to eat them. But does she know that when cattle come to our home, I will not have the chance to eat them since I go the other way? What does it help to bring cattle that I do not eat myself?
(Hove, 1988, p. 118)
According to Foucault, the speech of the mad is either excluded from discourse because it is believed that it is nonsense or it is said to have prophetic power, to contain divinely inspired hidden truths (Foucault, 1981, pp. 52-53). Janifa knows that her words have no currency within her society but she also knows that the truth she speaks comes from her own experience and Marita's. She has taken over Marita's role as truthteller and in this role she tells us that there has been no change for the farm workers since Independence.
She also does not need divine inspiration to know that relationships between men and women have not changed. The ostensible reason that she gives for rejecting Marita's son when he comes to marry her and take her away from the ‘house of ghosts’ (Hove, 1988, p. 131) is that she does not want Marita to be remembered as the woman whose son married a madwoman but, throughout the novel, relationships between husbands and wives have been shown to be antagonistic. Moreover, although the young man may have changed during the war, she has the memory of the brutal words he spoke to her when he believed she had thrown away his letter. These words, in their violence, bear some resemblance to Chisaga's threat that is uttered before the rape, ‘You make any noise and your body will be found in the dam after the dam has dried’ (Hove, 1988, p. 110).
It is instructive to compare the representation of Janifa's illness with that of Nyasha's illness in Nervous Conditions. Whereas Nyasha, the anorexic, is silenced by the narrator Tambu who is able to tell herself, ‘I was a much more sensible person than Nyasha because I knew what could or couldn't be done’ (Dangarembga, 1988, p. 203), Janifa speaks until the end of the story. Her rejection of her mother is only possible because she has returned to the Imaginary where she is united with Marita:
People here do not see the dreams which Marita left for me. They are good dreams which fall on me like the rains. All the time without seasons, dreams of rains, bones and footsteps falling from the height of a cliff, scattering to the earth while the boys in the field whistle and shout as if they have seen a vulture tearing away the flesh of a carcass. Bones in flower like flames of skeletons spread all over the place like a battlefield strewn with corpses of the freshly killed whose warm blood flows out of them like smoke from Manyepo's chimney.
(Hove, 1988, p. 128)
Nyasha's condition improves with psychiatric help and drugs but Janifa, locked in a primitive madhouse, intends to free herself:
I will take the broken chains with my own hands and say … Do not worry yourselves, I have already moved them by myself. I have been removing them from my heart for many years, now my legs and hands are free because the mountains and rivers I saw with my own eyes could not fail to remove all the chains of this place…. Then I will go without waiting for them to say go.
(Hove, 1988, p. 135)
As the use of imagery in Janifa's semiotic language suggests, she retains a historical consciousness that derives from collective memory. Unlike Nyasha in Nervous Conditions, she has not been contaminated by the Englishness which Tambu's mother says the ancestors cannot be expected to stomach (Hove, 1988, p. 203). Does this mean that Hove's representation of the younger generation of Zimbabwean women is monolithic and traditional whereas Dangarembga's is progressive and multifaceted? I would argue strongly against this interpretation. Janifa's madness shows that she exists in a society which far from being monolithic contains divisions that can endanger psychic and physical health.
Between 1988, the year of Bones and Nervous Conditions, and 1994, the year Without a Name was published, a spate of novels appeared which, in different ways and with varying degrees of cynicism and criticism, depicted the struggle against settler rule. Notable among them are three novels which deal with the experiences of soldiers in the guerrilla army: I. V. Mazorodze's Silent Journey from the East (1989), Shimmer Chinodya's Harvest of Thorns (1989) and Charles Samupindi's Pawns (1992). None of these works investigates issues of gender and, where they represent women, they do so in a fairly conventional manner.
Irene Staunton's collection of women's life stories in Mothers of the Revolution (1990) went some way towards redressing this imbalance but it is Yvonne Vera's work which powerfully inscribes women's experiences of desertion, rape, infanticide and incest. Since 1993, Vera has published three novels, a historical novel, Nehanda (1993) and two novels that represent the oppression of contemporary young Zimbabwean women, Without a Name (1994) and Under the Tongue (1996).
Like Bones, Without a Name depicts female suffering during the last years of the war. However, it represents the suffering of one woman, Mazvita, after she has been raped by a soldier, has left her rural lover, Nyenyedzi, been deserted by the man she lived with in Harari, Joel, and has killed her child. In story-time, Mazvita journeys from Harari to rural Mhondoro by bus with her dead child tied to her back. It is 1977, and the war is escalating. In analepsis, the details of Mazvita's past life are revealed in fragments. It may be possible to see Mazvita as one victim of the war representing other women who are also victims of the war but this is not an interpretation that the reader arrives at easily. If there is a collective history of female suffering and experience, and the novel's dedication ‘for my mother and her mother’ points to this as a possibility, then it departs radically from the nexus of Marita, Janifa and the Unknown Woman. Mazvita's experience is individual, as is her way of attempting to deal with pain. There is no network of support from family or women friends to prevent the tragedy.
Mazvita appears to seek security in anonymity; if she is to tell her story, then it has to be told to a stranger. After buying the apron in which she intends to wrap her dead child, Mazvita is ‘not yet certain whether to confess or escape’ (Vera, 1994, p. 10). She thinks momentarily about confessing to the woman who is selling the aprons:
Some kinds of truths long for the indifferent face of a stranger, such truths love that face from the neck up, from the forehead down. There is little to remember in a face with which no intimacy has been shared, to which there is no kinship. There is nothing to lose between strangers, absolutely no risk of being contaminated by another's emotion; there are no histories shared, no promises made, no hope conjured and affirmed. Only faces offered, in improbable disguises, promising freedom.
(Vera, 1994, pp. 10-11)
What is extraordinary about this is that it breaks the new orthodoxy in Zimbabwean and other post-colonial literatures, including womanist writing, which promotes the sharing of histories. A book such as Mothers of the Revolution follows Bones in implying that it is only through this sharing that different truths will be told about the past which will aid the process of reconciliation and healing (Staunton, 1990).
On her journey with the child, Mazvita is alone, and yet, this isolation is experienced as a bodily disintegration and splitting into different parts of the self. The text refers to this as a de-centring. Identity is no longer stable. Mazvita's wanderings dislocate her geographically. She tells Nyenyedzi that she cannot go back to her home in Mhondoro; ‘The war is bad in Mhondoro. It is hard to close your eyes there and sleep. It is hard to be living. I left because I wanted to reach the city; I cannot return so quickly’ (Vera, 1994, p. 23). She is also dislocated, both physically and psychologically, from and within her body which appears to have a separate existence from the self:
Her neck had been broken. She felt a violent piercing like shattered glass, on her tongue where she carried fragments of her being. There was a lump growing on the side of her neck. A sagging grew with the lump, so that her body leaned to the left, following the heavy lump. She could no longer swallow even her saliva which settled in one huge lump in her throat. Whatever she swallowed moved to one side of her body. She had lost her centre, the centre in which her thoughts had found anchor. She was amazed at how quickly the past vanished.
(Vera, 1994, p. 3)
It is the past, whether repressed or not, which has led to this predicament from which, as the narration keeps insisting, there is no recovery and yet Mazvita believes that she will be strengthened by remaining silent, not by bearing witness. After her rape:
The silence was not a forgetting, but a beginning. She would grow from the silence he had brought to her. Her longing for growth was deep, and came from the parts of her body he had claimed for himself, which he had claimed against all her resistance and her tears.
(Vera, 1994, p. 29)
It is tempting to see this as the silence endorsed by the French feminist Hélène Cixous and other feminist critics who have praised Dora, the subject of Freud's case history for refusing to continue treatment with Freud and, thus, challenging the power of the symbolic (Cixous, 1973). However, Mazvita believes that it is naming, that function of the symbolic, which binds a child to its mother; ‘The child grew in silence with no name. Mazvita could not name the silence’ (Vera, 1994, p. 75).
Moreover, journeying with the dead child, Mazvita attempts to bring about a rupture between the unity of mother and child in the Imaginary:
It was the constant nearness of her head to the child that made her frenzied and perplexed. There was not enough space between her and the child she bore on her back. If she could remove her head, and store it at a distance from the child she bore on her back, then she could begin. She would be two people.
(Vera, 1994, p. 19)
Vera, in a recent talk, has explained how her work is inspired by everyday physical gestures. In this case, the commonplace image of a mother carrying a child is converted into the unthinkable—the child is dead (Vera, 1997). It can be argued that this quite self-evidently is what brings about the rupture but Mazvita is shown throughout the text as a woman who sees motherhood as a burden. One example is when she remembers how the apron seller addressed her:
Amai. She remembered that. Amai. She was indeed a mother. It was heavy to be a mother. It made one recognisable in the streets, even when one no longer recognised oneself. Amai. It was painful. Amai. The seller's voice followed her through the crowds, but it no longer referred to her. Amai. It referred to any woman who passed by, who carried a baby on her back, who was a potential mother. Amai. It had never referred to her, that amai, at least not specifically.
(Vera, 1994, p. 40)
That the Shona word for mother, amai, is a form of address used to any woman makes Mazvita's horror at her pregnancy and denial of her motherhood ‘unnatural’, in her society. However, Without a Name always works with the notion that war has rendered both rural and urban society unnatural, and in unnatural times there is no solace to be found in nature or biology. When she is with her lover Nyenyedzi in Kadoma, she finds ‘soft dying mushrooms’ and always thinks of ‘the spotless white mushrooms she had not found’ (Vera, 1994, p. 8). In a reversal of the trope of the colonial rape of native land, Mazvita sees the land as being responsible for the soldier's violation of her; ‘she thought of him not from inside her, but from outside. He had never been inside her. She connected him only to the land. It was the land that had come towards her…. The land had allowed the man to grow from itself into her body (Vera, 1994, p. 31). Mazvita tells Nyenyedzi, ‘The land has forgotten us. Perhaps it dreams new dreams for itself’ (Vera, 1994, p. 33). Her view is that ‘the land had no fixed loyalties’ (Vera, 1994, p. 34).
Carole Boyce Davies argues that one of the approaches of African feminist critics is to explore ‘the idealization of women and motherhood in the Négritude vein—woman as supermother, symbol of Africa, earth as muse, how this supports or distorts the creation of a female mythos and how it conforms to the realities of women's lives’ (Boyce Davies, 1986, p. 15). A feminist critic analysing Without a Name would be forced to conclude that woman/mother/Africa is deconstructed in the text. Mazvita does not want to be symbolic or representative. Mazvita had left her home ‘because it suited her to move forward’ (Vera, 1994, p. 34). She leaves Nyenyedzi because ‘She did not care for certainties, each moment would uncover its secret, but she would be there, ahead of that moment, far ahead’ (Vera, 1994, p. 34). When she arrives in Harari, she believes that the city will fulfil her desires:
She had faith in untried realities because she trusted her own power for change, for adaptation. She welcomed each day with a strong sense of her desire, of her ability to begin, of her belonging. Mazvita had a profound belief in her own reality, in the transformation new geographies promised and allowed, that Harari's particular strangeness released and encouraged. Mazvita recognised Harari as the limitless place in which to dream, and to escape.
(Vera, 1994, p. 55)
What she finds in Harari is a society that does not know itself. The macabre experience she undergoes of carrying a dead child is mirrored in the reality of people's lives that they attempt to obscure through gruesome carnivals and lurid masquerades. Mazvita's bodily disintegration is matched by the peeling away of skin as people in a state of false consciousness literally attempt to buy white masks:
Newspaper headings covered the dark alley, promised no freedom to the agitated people. But there were ample signs of the freedom the people had already claimed for themselves—empty shells of Ambi, green and red. The world promised a lighter skin, greater freedom…. Freedom was any kind of opening through which one could squeeze. People fought to achieve gaps in their reality. The people danced in an enviable kind of self-mutilation…. The people had been efficient accomplices to the skinning of their faces, to the usual ritual of their disinheritance.
(Vera, 1994, pp. 26-27)
Vera's evocative description of the sexual promiscuity of city women departs from the stereotyping criticized by Gaidzanwa but it does reproduce images which associate women and sex with death and, although set in 1977, may, in a latent prolepsis, forewarn of the coming of AIDS:
The carnival was barefaced and unbelievable, full of mimicry and death. The war was articulated in masks of dream and escape. It found expression in terror and courtship, in an excited sensuality, in figures speechless and dead. Guns soured the sky with black smoke.
(Vera, 1994, p. 62)
Death appears to be omnipresent as reality, dream and fantasy all reveal a landscape of carnage. Journeys started may not be finished; ‘It was not known what would happen to the body as it journeyed. A journey was not to be trusted. Only the promise to arrive could be resurrected and protected’ (Vera, 1994, p. 77).
As in Bones, burial takes on ritual and symbolic significance. Caroline Rooney has described the three main women characters in Bones as Antigone figures: ‘defying patriarchal laws and representatives of the state, they persist in their unanswered demands or appeals, to the point of death or incarceration’ (Rooney, 1995, p. 121). Antigone, like the Unknown Woman, insisted on burying the dead. However, in Without a Name, burial is not a religious rite or an act of reconciliation or atonement. Instead burial takes on a more violent, confrontational meaning.
In one of the many retellings of the rape, Mazvita remembers that ‘she thought only of being buried, of dying slowly after he had killed her’ (Vera, 1994, p. 84). When she discovers after she has moved in with Joel that she is already pregnant by another man, ‘She buried the child. She was submerged in her secrets, and she breathed hard, like drowning. She had died silently with the thoughts she kept to herself’ (Vera, 1994, p. 73).
When Mazvita places the child in the apron, it is as if she is putting it in a shroud; ‘The baby lay encased within the embroidered stitching. The baby was sown up there. She could not do much about the wild stitching though her heart rose against it’ (Vera, 1994, p. 18). When Mazvita sings to the baby, ‘The tune was familiar, but coarse, it seemed ground from between two violent stones. It was a tune for grinding corn, not for awakening tenderness’ (Vera, 1994, p. 41). The song becomes a lament, a funeral oration which Mazvita believes is for herself as well as the child: ‘She sang with the last breath in her body for she was certain there would be no life for her after this. It was not possible that she would be buried and then live. She had died a final death’ (Vera, 1994, p. 42).
This song contrasts with the traditional mbira music which Mazvita hears on the bus and which acts as a semiotic language, replacing the child's chora sounds which she will now never hear. In language and imagery which is reminiscent of another transgressive novel, Kate Chopin's 1899 American text The Awakening, Vera allows Mazvita to experience a moment of jouissance:
It fell in drops, the sound, into her cupped hands. She found the mbira. It was beneficent. The sound came to her in subduing waves, in a growing pitch, in laps of clear water. Water. She felt the water slow and effortless and elegant. She breathed calmly, in the water. The mbira vibrated through the crowd, reached her with an intact rhythm, a profound tonality, a promise graceful and simple. She had awakened.
(Vera, 1994, p. 69)
But perhaps it is the reader who is awakened by the text to Mazvita's plight as a woman who strives for independence and the fulfilment of her desires in a war-torn society. Given the opprobrium that the Zimbabwean press in the mid-1980s heaped upon women responsible for ‘baby dumping’ (the killing or abandoning of a child shortly after birth), Vera's invitation to the reader to identify empathetically with Mazvita puts pressure on the dominant and the powerful to listen to the stories of those at the margins.
In comparison to Nervous Conditions, the ending of Without a Name, which returns Mazvita to her origin and her past (whether in reality or fantasy is unclear), may seem nostalgic, even regressive, but it offers the possibility of a return, which may or may not be realized, to a time before the war and death. In the final chapter, Mazvita believes she hears her mother call her and she is at last able to release the baby from her back.
Bones, Without a Name and Nervous Conditions provide a way forward for Zimbabwean writing which is different from that envisaged at Independence in 1980. They have come from the margins to claim a place for Zimbabwean writing in newly emerging canon formations of post-colonial and women's writing. These texts co-exist with others that are more crudely written and often autobiographical but which also, in varying ways, challenge the official version of history.
Works Cited
Boyce Davies, Carol, 1986. ‘Introduction: Feminist Consciousness And African Literary Criticism’, in Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves (eds), Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, Trenton: Africa World Press, pp. 1-23.
Caute, David, 1991. ‘Marechera in Black and White’, in Preben Kaarsholm (ed.), Cultural Struggle and Development in Southern Africa, London: James Currey, pp. 95-111.
Chinodya, Shimmer, 1989. Harvest of Thorns, Harare: Baobab Books.
Chopin, Kate, 1899. The Awakening, London: The Women's Press, 1978.
Cixous, Hélène, 1973. Portrait du soleil, Paris: Denoel.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 1987. She No Longer Weeps, Harare: The College Press.
Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 1988. Nervous Conditions, London: The Women's Press.
Foucault, Michel, 1981. ‘The Order of Discourse’, in Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, London: Routledge, pp. 48-78.
Gaidzanwa, Rudo, 1985. Images of Women in Zimbabwean Literature, Harare: The College Press.
Gunner, Liz, 1991. ‘Power, Popular Consciousness, and the Fictions of War: Hove's Bones and Chinodya's Harvest of Thorns’, African Languages and Cultures, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 77-85.
Hove, Chenjerai, 1988. Bones, Harare: Baobab Books.
Jones, Eldred, 1996. ‘New Trends and Generations’, in Eldred Jones (ed.), New Trends and Generations in African Literature, London: James Currey, pp. 1-3.
Makhalisa, Barbara, 1984. The Underdog and Other Stories, Gweru: Mambo Press.
Marechera, Dambudzo, 1978. The House of Hunger, London: Heinemann.
Marechera, Dambudzo, 1980. Black Sunlight, London: Heinemann.
Marechera, Dambudzo, 1984. Mindblast or The Definitive Buddy, Harare: The College Press.
Mazorodze, I. V., 1989. Silent Journey from the East, Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House.
Morrison, Toni, 1987. Beloved, New York: Plume Books.
Mungoshi, Charles, 1975. Waiting for the Rain, London: Heinemann.
Rooney, Caroline, 1995. ‘Re-Possessions: Inheritance and Independence in Chenjerai Hove's Bones and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions’, in Abdulrazak Gurnah (ed.), Essays on African Writing 2: Contemporary Literature, London: Heinemann, pp. 119-43.
Samupindi, Charles, 1992. Pawns, Harare: Baobab Books.
Staunton, Irene (ed.), 1990. Mothers of the Revolution, Harare: Baobab Books.
Veit-Wild, Flora, 1992. Dambudzo Marechera: A Source Book on His Life and Work, London: Hans Zell Publishers.
Veit-Wild, Flora, 1993. ‘"Dances with Bones": Hove's Romanticized Africa’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 5-12.
Vera, Yvonne, 1993. Nehanda, Harare: Baobab Books.
Vera, Yvonne, 1994. Without a Name, Harare: Baobab Books
Vera, Yvonne, 1996. Under the Tongue, Harare: Baobab Books.
Vera, Yvonne, 1997. ‘Imagining Zimbabwean Women's Lives’, unpublished paper given at Britain-Zimbabwe Research Day, Oxford, June 1997.
Walcott, Derek, 1974. ‘The Muse of History’, in Orde Coombs (ed.), Is Massa Day Dead? New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, pp. 1-27.
Wilkinson, Jane, 1992. Talking with African Writers: Interviews with African Poets, Playwrights and Novelists, London: James Currey.
Williamson, Edwin, 1987. ‘Coming to Terms with Modernity: Magical Realism and the Historical Process in the Novels of Alejo Carpentier’, in John King (ed.), Modern Latin American Fiction: A Survey, London: Faber, pp. 78-100.
Zhuwarara, R., 1996. ‘Gender and Liberation: Chenjerai Hove's Bones’, in Emmanuel Ngara (ed.), New Writing from Southern Africa: Authors who have become prominent since 1980, London: James Currey, pp. 29-44.
Zinyemba, Ranganai, 1987. ‘"The Jews of Africa": Aspects of Zimbabwean Fiction in English Before National Independence in 1980’, a paper delivered at the University of Zimbabwe, April 1987.
FURTHER READING
Criticism
Dodgson, Pauline. Review of Shebeen Tales: Messages from Harare, by Chenjerai Hove. Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 3 (September 1998): 591-92.
Argues that while Hove's essays in Shebeen Tales are insightful and provocative, several of the author's opinions are self-contradictory.
Engelke, Matthew. "Thinking about Nativism in Chenjerai Hove's Work." Research in African Literatures 29, no. 2 (summer 1998): 23-42.
Contends that Hove's writings challenge stereotypical characterizations in postcolonial literary criticism that romantically associates African nationalism with nativism.
Hove, Chenjerai, and Flora Wild. "Interview with Chenjerai Hove." In Patterns of Poetry in Zimbabwe, pp. 35-42. Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press, 1988.
Interview with Hove that includes a discussion of the recurring images and metaphors Hove utilizes in his poetry, his feelings about writing in English and in Shona, and his development as a poet.
Ndebelo, Njabulo S. Review of Bones, by Chenjerai Hove. Journal of Southern African Studies 16, no. 2 (June 1990): 376-78.
Maintains that Hove's evocative, yet dirge-like poetic style tends to romanticize rather than humanize the oppressed characters in Bones.
Ngara, Emmanuel. "Ideology, Craft, & Communication in Zimbabwean Freedom Poetry." In Ideology & Form in African Poetry, pp. 110-27. London: James Currey, 1990.
Evaluates Hove's use of theme and imagery in Up in Arms and Red Hills of Home to convey a sympathetic perspective on the rebel fighters and their families affected by the cruelty of war.
Additional coverage of Hove's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: Contemporary Poets, Ed. 7; and Literature Resource Center.